Day: September 1, 2009

Webinar: Ethics in GIS

/ Matt Artz

urisaWas That an Ethical Decision I Just Made?  Ethics in GIS

It is believed that most GIS practitioners go through their work day without ever realizing when they are making an ethical decision, or when their behavior crosses the line between ethical and unethical. The intent of this session is to provide GIS practitioners with an understanding of the content of the GIS Code of Ethics and Rules of Conduct and to relate those principles and rules to the everyday work environment so that practitioners are better able to recognize ethical situations when they occur.

Presented by Geney Terry, GISP, El Dorado County, Placerville, CA

When: Thursday, December 3, 2009; 3 p.m. Eastern/2 p.m. Central/1 p.m. Mountain/12 noon Pacific

Cost:$25 for URISA members / $30 Non-members

To register for this webinar, please fill out this Registration Form and fax to 847-824-6300 or email the form to vmcbride@urisa.org

Designing a Spatial Planning Support System for Rapid Building Damage Survey After an Earthquake: The Case of Bogota D.C., Colombia

/ Matt Artz

urisaSecond Place, 2009 URISA Student Paper Competition

Diana María Contreras Mojica, Salzburg University

“Damage assessment determines the safe condition of houses and buildings that were affected in a disaster. These elements must be inspected to determine if they can be occupied by people. The objective of the present research is to design a model for the planning of a rapid building damage survey after an earthquake and manage the spatial information collected. The model is built on by three sub-models aiming to estimate the number of trained people required, their spatial allocation and the right information flow. The combination of cadastral data and organizational issues will be the input, to estimate the number of trained people required. To allocate the trained people, five methods were applied: average number of parcels or blocks, euclidean allocation, multiple-ring-buffer, network analysis (service area), and route allocation. All the data required to respond in an emergency must be collected, updated and shared in order to have informed decisions. The results show wide ranges of values that can be utilized in the preparedness or in the response phase; the allocation methods can be used according to the data that every city has, but the highest level of accuracy comes from the route allocation method. The data must be available, updated and accessible to all the entities involved in the emergency response task, due to these reasons the research recommends the implementation of a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) to manage the information and to predefine the meeting points to compile the collected information by using methods as mean center.”


GIS Helps Government Chart a Forward Course

/ Matt Artz

header“Government agencies are using geographic information system (GIS) solutions in combination with other applications to consolidate information and help reduce stovepiping. Those solutions have proven to be highly effective at visualizing information to make data-driven decisions. Awareness of GIS capabilities in general has been heightened by the proliferation of consumer-oriented mapping applications, such as Google Maps, which are often used in mashups to present real estate listings or other information that has a geographic component. The use of GIS technology in government ranges from natural resource management to homeland security.

“The GIS program in Oregon has been nearly a decade in the making. From a clearinghouse of information accumulated for many small GIS projects, the program has grown into a coordinated enterprise effort that benefits government agencies throughout the state. One of the most recent initiatives is a system for tracking the stimulus funds (see KMWorld, July/August 2009). That effort was greatly facilitated by the existing GIS infrastructure, which includes databases for managing geospatial information, a user interface, analytical tools and one or more delivery platforms including desktop, laptop or mobile devices.”

Spatial and Temporal Analysis of H1N1 (“Swine Flu”) in the United States

/ Matt Artz

…manuscript prepared for Eurosurveillance Journal…

Applying Health Informatics Approaches to Support Public Health Risk Communication – Spatial and Temporal Analysis of H1N1 Human Infection Distribution in the U.S.

Chiehwen Ed Hsu, PhD, MPH, Ella T. Nkhoma, PhD, Noriaki Aoki, MD, PhD, Ning Shang, Dejian Lai, PhD

“(w)e propose a potential informatics-facilitated public health surveillance system for H1N1 risk communication. This system incorporates spatial and temporal analysis to evaluate the nature of emergency relevance of reported human cases of novel H1N1 Influenza human infection and its severity. Human cases reported in the U.S. were analyzed as of June 12, 2009, on the day when the WHO declared Level 6 pandemic flu of the H1N1 virus. It seeks to determine emergency nature of the case by excessive human cases by spatial and temporal distribution in the U.S. We evaluated the distribution trend of historical and current excess cases, and their associated geographic location and time period of occurrence by excess level. We also measured temporal variation pattern of case distribution to understand potential temporal trend of emergency relevance.”

Interactive Online Micro-spatial Population Analysis based on GIS Estimated Building Population

/ Matt Artz

urisaFirst Place, 2009 URISA Student Paper Competition

Ko Ko Lwin, University of Tsukuba

“Spatial distribution patterns of population is fully depend on landscape structures and never be a homogeneous, especially where the city has a mix of high and low-rise buildings or patched with unpopulated large spaces such as paddy fields or parks or playgrounds or governmental institutions. This will introduce some errors in population data analysis at micro-scale level. In order to eliminate these errors, we need to estimate population at building level. Spatial analysis functions using building population data is absolutely rare or absent in GIS arena because building population information is not available for public use due to privacy concerns. The goal of this paper is to introduce an online interactive micro-spatial population analysis based on building population, which was estimated by LIDAR derived Digital Volume Model (DVM) and number of floors attribute information with census tracts.”

URISA 2009: September 29 to October 2, Anaheim, California

/ Matt Artz

Print“The Urban and Regional Information Systems Association (URISA) is a non-profit professional and educational association that promotes the effective and ethical use of spatial information and information technologies for the understanding and management of urban and regional systems. It is a multidisciplinary association where professionals from all parts of the spatial data community can come together and share concerns and ideas.

“URISA’s Annual Conference and Exhibition features management and policy discussions of IT/GIS issues affecting urban and regional governments. Pre-conference workshops, important keynote and plenary addresses, technical and policy presentations, and networking events are also held at the conference.”

ESRI (UK) / Bing Maps Mashup Challenge

/ Matt Artz

esriuk_logoThe collaboration and sharing of data presents endless opportunities for building GIS applications.

ESRI (UK) and Bing Maps are challenging the UK’s Web developers to build a GIS-based mashup that demonstrates how GIS can be used to improve business processes, unlock information and/or connect people with geographical data. The winner will be announced during this year’s AGI Community Conference and a prize of an Xbox will be awarded based on the creativity, applicability and originality of the application.

Enter the Mashup Challenge and discover how easy it is to integrate multiple services into an application, bring together basemaps, operational data, and analytical services to create both simple and complex applications that provide information and solve common tasks.

Share your work, knowledge and creativity with the wider developer community for your chance to win an X-Box.

About the Challenge

Applicants must submit a demo of a web application they have independently developed that combines data from more than one source into a single web application.

Web applications must be developed using any of the ArcGIS Server 9.3 or 9.3.1 online software development kits and must include Bing Maps data.

ESRI President Jack Dangermond to Speak at Gov 2.0 Summit

/ Matt Artz

JackDangermondESRI160GIS Leader Will Discuss How GeoWeb Advances Government and Supports Change

On Wednesday, September 9, 2009, ESRI president Jack Dangermond will speak at the inaugural Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, D.C. Dangermond, a pioneer in geographic information system (GIS) software development, will discuss GeoEnabling Gov 2.0. Additionally, ESRI is a platinum sponsor of the event.

“Geographic knowledge, including maps and GIS, is becoming pervasive,” says Dangermond. “As Web technology continues to evolve, it will increasingly combine social media, real-time data, and traditional geospatial data to create mashups and new services. The growing GeoWeb gives government opportunities to be creative in delivering comprehensive information internally and to the public.”

O’Reilly Media, Inc., and TechWeb are coproducing the Gov 2.0 Summit and Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase. The events will bring government leaders and innovators of Web 2.0 together to explore how technology can enable transparency, participation, collaboration, and efficiency at all levels of government.

Visit www.esri.com/gov20 for more information. To participate in the conversation about the event, follow the official Twitter hashtag #gov20s.

State by State Climate Projections from the Nature Conservancy

/ Matt Artz

clim…from Accuweather.com…

“The Nature Conservancy recently released a new analysis of U.S. climate projections through 2100.

“The Nature Conservancy also worked with the University of Washington and the University of Southern Mississippi to develop a new on-line tool that combines the latest scientific data and climate models with GIS, statistical analysis and web-based mapping services to come up with the Climate Wizard.”