June 2013

HIGHLIGHTS

·         CGA Seminar in Chinese

·         CGA Spring Conference Materials Online

·         WorldMap Article by American Association of Landscape Architects

·         Digital Globe Provides Access to Imagery

·         Travel Fellowships

·         Esri Health Conference

·         Google Mapping MOOC

·         Geocoding Unstructured Text

·         MongoDB and GeoJSON

·         LIDAR in Postgres

·         Antarctica De-iced

·         Geographic Accuracy of Twitter

·         Pronunciation Maps

CGA NEWS

CGA Seminar Series

The first in a series of GIS seminars taught in Chinese has been scheduled for June 27^th 2-4pm in the CGIS North Building, Rm K450.  A range of spatial topics will be covered.  For a detailed schedule please see http://www.gis.harvard.edu.

CGA Spring Conference Materials Online

Presentations in slide and video format are now online for the annual CGA Spring Conference “Creating the Policy and Legal Framework for a Location-Enabled Society”: http://gis.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k235&pageid=icb.page585583

WorldMap Article by AALA

An interview has been published with Professor Suzanne Blier and overview of the WorldMap platform by the American Association of Landscape Architects: http://www.asla.org/ContentDetail.aspx?id=39290

HARVARD GIS COMMUNITY NEWS

DigitalGlobe Provides Harvard Community Unprecedented Access to Satellite Imagery

DigitalGlobe, a leading commercial provider of high-resolution satellite imagery, has provided members of the Harvard community free access to some of its over 4 billion square kilometer imagery archive.  Harvard users are encouraged to explore this unique and otherwise unavailable way of seeing the world at Harvard’s iLab.  This imagery access will be available into the fall semester.  Anyone with an active Harvard ID can obtain a username and password to use to log onto the Mydigitalglobe platform at the iLab, which allows the user to search a specific geographic area using a bounding rectangle and retrieve both current and archived DigitalGlobe imagery. Please contact Meghan Mahoney at the iLab (meghan_mahoney@harvard.edu) for more information and for requesting access.

Travel Fellowships

Travel fellowship are available for students and young professionals presenting papers at the 2nd Symposium on Advances in Geospatial Technologies for Health in Arlington, Virginia, August 24-30.

·         Travel Fellowship flyer: http://www2.isprs.org/tl_files/isprs/wg82/symposium/Travel%20Fellowship.pdf

·         Application Form: http://www2.isprs.org/tl_files/isprs/wg82/symposium/Travel_Fellowship_Application_Form.docx

·         Symposium page: http://www2.isprs.org/commissions/comm8/wg2/symposium.html

CONFERENCES, CALLS, EVENTS & EMPLOYMENT

Esri Health GIS Conference

The conference is October 14-16, in Cambridge at the Cambridge Hyatt Regency.  There is an early bird discount for registrations before July 12: http://www.esri.com/events/health.  

Google Mapping MOOC

“Mapping with Google will be offered from June 10 - June 24. It is a self-paced, online course where you will watch videos (or read text lessons) and apply the skills you learn.” https://mapping.withgoogle.com/preview

Contest for Free Imagery

Submit a proposal and possibly obtain up 25 square kilometers of free imagery.

http://greenermaps.com/academic-competition/

University of Minnesota Creates U-Spatial

The U of M has created a center to support spatial research across the university. 

http://www1.umn.edu/news/features/2013/UR_CONTENT_446898.html

NEWS ON GIS RESEARCH AND SERVICES

Clavin for Geocoding Unstructured Text

Uses openNLP, the Stanford NLP Tools, Geonames.org

http://clavin.bericotechnologies.com/

OpenLayers Map Client Version 3 Available as Alpha

Enhancements include: WebGL for 3D and Cesium for globe capabilities.

http://openlayers.org/ 

Esri Drops Bid to Have REST API Recognized as Open Standard but Process Is Still Alive

http://apb.directionsmag.com/entry/ogc-rest-geoservices-media-round-up/333174

MongoDB Adds Support for GeoJSON

http://docs.mongodb.org/manual/core/2dsphere/

LIDAR Data With Postgres and Visualization using WebGL

http://s3.cleverelephant.ca/foss4gna2013-pointcloud.pdf

http://lanyrd.com/2013/foss4gna-2013/schqtm/

OpenStreetMap Report

Check out OSM’s yearly data report on work done in the last year: http://www.mapbox.com/osm-data-report/.  The report itself is worth looking at for the novel ways it presents interactive maps in a page.

Online App Calculates Rooftop Solar Potential

A group at the MIT Building Technology Sustainable Design Lab has developed an approach for calculating solar energy potential for rooftops based on LIDAR and other data sources.  The technology has been licensed to Mapdwell LLC.

http://goo.gl/SWRi1

http://en.mapdwell.com/solarsystem/cambridge

Antarctica De-Iced

A group at NASA has developed an elevation model visualization depicting the landforms under Antarctica.

Pronounciation Maps

http://www.businessinsider.com/22-maps-that-show-the-deepest-linguistic-conflicts-in-america-2013-6

Twitter Study

Article on a study by Kalev Leetaru on the accuracy of geographic information on Twitter http://irevolution.net/2013/06/09/mapping-global-twitter-heartbeat/.

Social Media and Data Access

As this article points out, social media data is not free even if available via open APIs.

Editor of this issue is Ben Lewis.

The CGA Newsletter is published monthly.