Top Feature Articles from 2005

Autodesk's Free DWF Viewer Matures at Version 6.5 Now available with faster sharing of design data... have you upgraded your viewer yet?? View DWF data with the free DWF Viewer, publish DWF with the DWF writer, round-trip markups, annotations, and other changes with Autodesk DWF Composer.

ESRI Developer Network (EDN); Accessible & Affordable GIS Application Development
EDN (pronounced "EE DEE ENN" not "eden") is a relatively new subscription-based program from ESRI. The program is designed to give software developers the resources, tools, and a community to enable them to build & test their GIS solutions and be more productive in doing so. We take a closer look at EDN, offer up some answers to a few questions that you might have, and provide a detailed Q&A we had with ESRI staff.

The 2006 Global LBS Challenge Kicks Off at CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment  - Recently at the CTIA Wireless IT & entertainment conference in San Francisco, CA. Navteq and sponsors kicked off the 2005/2006 Global LBS Challenge. What makes this year’s event special is the “doubling” of the challenge to include a North American and European challenge. To entice developers, Navteq is putting up more than $800,000 in cash and prizes with the grand prize winner taking home $50k cash and $100k in data licenses.

Telcontar Welcomes Attendees of their first developer conference to a whole new ball game - To kick off a short trip to San Francisco to attend the annual CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment conference, we took in the first Telcontar Developer Conference. The goal of the event – gather together companies and developers of location-based services and introduce them to the product offerings and solutions made available from Telcontar’s location platform.

Hurricane Katrina & Rita Maps, Imagery, weblogs, and more for the GIS user  - The GIS & Geospatial user community has responded in a big way to the recovery and clean-up efforts of Hurricanes Rita and Katrina. In an effort to help keep you informed, we've compiled some areas of interest to the GISuser and will update this page as needed. You'll find useful pointers to satellite imagery and gis data, details of our expanded map/photoblog, and a complete archive of relevant news items and other important announcements.

GIS and GISCorps Respond to Hurricane Katrina in Mississippi  - Talbot J. Brooks, Director, Center for Interdisciplinary Geospatial Information Technologies, Delta State University worked within MEMA, FEMA, and the rest of the alphabet soup to start GIS at the Jackson Emergency Operations Center. According to Brooks, the GISCorps call for help came at his request. He has graciously shared his story of Hurricane Katrina, the role GIS played in the response, and the 27 August - 6 September time period.... in his words... he was "there". Read on for a look at the response, some Q & A's, and example maps and images from the URISA GIScorps in Mississippi.

Hackers Tap Into the Functionality and Simplicity of Google Maps - Google Map hacks.. chances are you've come accross one recently. Developers are tapping into a wealth of online mapping and webservices, integrating the data with other databases, and creating very simple, yet effective web services driven by the Google Map API.

Geospatial Industry Snapshot - The President's High Growth Job Training Initiative identifies exapanding industries and works to find ways to create a pool or workers with the technical and advanced skills for the jobs that employers need to fill. Geospatial Technologies were one of 12 sectors identified as a growing technology.

Geospatial One-Stop Matures with GOS-2 - The Geospatial One-Stop http://www.geodata.gov/  (GOS) is an e-government initiative designed to make it easier, faster, and cheaper for users (government & public) to access geospatial information. In a nutshell, with GOS, users can discover and access geospatial resources and meta-data. At version 2, GOS is more intuitive and should be a much richer data resource as well... read on for more about GOS2.

AlertNet - delivering news, maps, and imagery about recent emergencies and humanitarian efforts Reuters has spatially enabled a humanitarian news website. Using geocoded news feeds, visitors can access information about recent disasters and humanitarian efforts.. complemented of course by interactive maps and imagery. The web mapping service is powered by ESRI while data providers include Europa Technologies and the European Space Agency.

Dec 26, 2004 Tsunami Image Gallery

Other Popular Items at GISuser.com

Pretty much every day, GISuser Managing Editor & founder, Glenn Letham, publishes as spotlight feature of interest. These are cool, educational, and interesting items of interest to GIS professionals.

To kick-off 2005 we featured the USDA Geospatial Gateway... a fabulous resource... to date this is still one of my favorite spotlight features and likely the best GIS data resource around. When I first used this fabulous resource the first thing that came to my mind was that anyone out there who's being paying big $$ to download free DRGs, DEMs, DOQQs, TIGER files, Q3 flood data, and anything else in the public domain for that matter is going to freak out ...

Some of Glenn's favorites from the past year include:

• USGS Uses Technology to assess Hurricane Damage
• GeoProject USA Photographs 4,554,000 Geographic Intersection Points in the U.S
• Mapping Hurricane Ivan’s Impacts Gulf of Mexico Shoreline
• Useful sites for hurricane information, images, and data
• ShakeMap — A Tool for Earthquake Response
• NOAA Satellite Services Division Serving up data
• Mapping Pests at PSU
• Fighting Wildfires With GeoMac
• Model Curricula in GIS from UCGIS
• The Atlas of Canada's OGC Web Map Service (WMS)
• CMap - Community Mapping Program; Motivating Communities & Young Minds Through Mapping
• USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science Center (EROS) Tracks Lewis and Clark Route
• NASA Launches New Hurricane Web Page
• Interactive, Web-based Atlas; Canadian Atlas Online
  
  
  Looking at the server logs and site stats, the following items show up as the most visited articles/news items to date:

	ShakeMap — A Tool for Earthquake Response
	Hackers Tap Into the Functionality and Simplicity of Google Maps
	Maps and cartograms of 2004 US presidential election results
	The GISuser's Guide to locating and downloading Free USGS data
	GIS Community Resources
	GISuser Weblog - Google + Keyhole = Google Earth
	State GIS Clearinghouse Directory - Update, July 2004
	GISuser Test Drive; Geomatica FreeView 9.1
	GISuser Guide to downloading Free 7.5 minute DEMs
	Hurricane Katrina & Rita Maps, Imagery, weblogs, and more for the GIS user
	So, you want to implement an RSS feed. Now what?
	ChicagoCrime - An Inovative use of Google Map API
	Using High Resolution Imagery and Internet Mapping to Patrol the U.S. Borders
	Understanding MapServer Enterprise – a closer look at the latest open source web mapping solution
	Nanaimo BC puts the city on the map using Google Earth & Google Map APIs

From the WebMapping Gallery, the following maps were the most popular to date:

• Gulf of Mexico - Historical Hurricane Tracks
• City of Los Angeles, Department of City Planning - ZIMAS
• South East Asia and Indian Ocean Tsunami Response Map Viewer
• Tsunami Epicenter Map - NOAA
• Geoflash - Canada from Shape File

From the GISuser Downloads Repository, the following are the most popular GIS tools downloaded to date:

• CoordTrans
• Geographic Calculator 6.0
• GeoMedia Viewer
• ArcExplorer
• Corpscon