CENTER FOR GEOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS NEWSLETTER
October 2007
**
HIGHLIGHTS
- GIS Training Workshops Underway
- Lecture on Darfur Groundwater Study with Remote Sensing Updated Time
- Visualizing Time and Space - Presentation by Dr. Andreas Kunz
- Business School now has ArcGIS Business Analyst Software
- Volunteered Geographic Information Workshop
- 2008 ESRI User Conference Call for Presentations
- Paper on Volunteered Geography
- Geographic Attention “Hotmap” Article
- MIT’s Real Time Rome Project
- NASA to Digitize Space Imagery
- More…
**
CGA NEWS
GIS Training Workshops Underway
Two full sessions of our non-credit workshop “GIS Basics with ArcGIS” have been taught, and more will be scheduled if desired. Upcoming workshops include: “Getting the Most out of Google Earth”, “Wrangling Data into Maps”, and “Making Sense out of Spatial Data”. Click below for workshop descriptions, dates, and registration.
http://gis.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k235&pageid=icb.page71692
Lecture on Darfur Groundwater Study with Remote Sensing Updated Time
The Committee on African Studies presents a lecture titled “Groundwater Basins in Darfur and Surrounding Desert” by Farouk El-Baz. The updated time for this presentation is: Tuesday, October 16th at 5:30 - 7:15 in Case Room S020, on the CGIS concourse level at 1730 Cambridge St.
Visualizing Time and Space – Presentation by Dr. Andreas Kunz
Co-sponsored by the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies and the CGA, Dr. Andreas Kunz will present “Visualizing Time and Space: HGIS Germany as an Online-Resource for German and European History”. The presentation will be on Monday, October 22, 4:15 p.m. – 6:00 p.m., in the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies Garden Room, at 27 Kirkland Street in Cambridge. Directions to the Center:
http://www.ces.fas.harvard.edu/about/directions.html
***
HARVARD GIS COMMUNITY NEWS
Business School now has ArcGIS Business Analyst Software
The CGA has recently coordinated with the Harvard Business School to install ArcGIS business analyst software in the Baker Library. The software is on the RR1 machine, located right next to the reference desk. The business analyst package is designed to give the novice GIS user the ability to perform sophisticated business analysis using a rich dataset that includes demographic, store location, store type, and sales information.
**
CONFERENCES
Volunteered Geographic Information Workshop
Volunteered geographic information (VGI) occupies a substantial and growing presence on the web - some examples include geotagged Wikipedia entries, OpenStreetMap, and Flickr. To date there has been little investigation into this collaborative phenomenon, so the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, Vespucci Initiative, and Los Alamos National Laboratory are collaborating to put together a two day workshop. The workshop will be held in Santa Barbara, CA, December 13-14, 2007, and will focus on such topics as: How does VGI get validated, and assigned metadata? Can VGI be framed within the larger domain of sensor networks? What limitations are imposed on VGI by access to modern communications? CGA staff member Ben Lewis will be attending.
http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/projects/vgi/
2008 ESRI Users Conference Call for Presentations
The ESRI users conference is the largest conference in the world devoted to GIS, and will be held August 4 – 8 of 2008. Registration deadline for the conference is in June of 2008, but the deadline for presentation submission is quickly approaching: November 2, 2007.
http://www.esri.com/events/uc/index.html
GITA 2007 Oil and Gas Conference Experiences Record-Breaking Attendance
This industry specific conference recently held September 24 - 26 continues to grow, recently experiencing a 2nd consecutive increase in attendance.
http://spatialnews.geocomm.com/dailynews/2007/oct/09/news3.html
**
NEWS ON GIS RESEARCH AND SERVICES
Paper on Volunteered Geography
What drives people to voluntarily add geographic information to public websites? The paper “Citizens as Sensors: The World of Volunteered Geography” written by Michael F. Goodchild reviews the realm of volunteered geographic information.
http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/projects/vgi/docs/Goodchild_VGI2007.pdf
Geographic Attention “Hotmap” Article
“Hotmap: Looking at Geographic Attention” by Danyel Fisher explores how people use online maps, and what geographic areas and features are of interest / use. Quantifying and analyzing results are presented in the form of heatmaps; maps that assign colors based on values at each point on the map.
http://research.microsoft.com/~danyelf/publications/fisher_infovis_hotmap.pdf
MIT’s Real Time Rome Project
Real Time Rome is a project at Massachusetts Institute of Technology that uses data from cell phones, buses, and taxis in Rome to better understand urban dynamics in real time.
http://senseable.mit.edu/realtimerome/
NASA to Digitize Space Imagery
NASA is planning to archive and catalog space imagery, photographs, historic film and video, and make it all publicly available online.
http://www.archive.org/iathreads/post-view.php?id=144937
MetaCarta Announces Local Alerts Services
Alerts regarding news, events, stories, classified ads, and more for a specific locality can be sent directly to a user with a new service offered by MetaCarta.
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release.do?id=772850
Google Maps Mashup
Google Map mash-up showing US worker deaths in 2007 by the Committee on Education and Labor, US House of Representatives.
http://edlabor.house.gov/issues/workerdeaths.shtml
How much is location technology worth?
Large telemarketing and information technology firms have recently been buying up GIS companies for high prices. Read the latest at:
http://www.directionsmag.com/article.php?article_id=2566&trv=1
Google My World
It looks like Google will be coming out with a 3D social network, which may be tied to their existing Maps, Earth, and SketchUp applications.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070924-google-testing-my-world-for-launch-later-this-year.html
*
Editor of this issue: Jeff Blossom
The CGA Newsletter is published monthly. View previously published issues.
For the latest information, please visit our website http://gis.harvard.edu
To unsubscribe, send an email to majordomo@mail.hmdc.harvard.edu
with the following command in the BODY of your email message:
unsubscribe newsletter_at_lists_cga_harvard_edu
**
no links
no file attachments