Los Angeles County Enterprise GIS

A cucumber map of Europe

By markgreninger, on May 13th, 2013

This is a fun read: http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/606-a-cucumber-map-of-europe

Long live the Greater Cucumber Co-Prosperity Sphere!

EGIS Committee Meeting Agenda – May 14th 2013

By markgreninger, on May 10th, 2013

This month’s eGIS Committee is one week earlier than normal due to scheduling conflicts at DPW.

Agenda is attached here: May 2013_0514.eGIS meeting notice and Agenda

Updates

Updates from the GIS Data Committee
Updates from the Mobile Committee
CAMS Data Update
GIS Positions update

The eGIS Group will provide information about the virtualization of the eGIS Repository as well as the future migration to ArcGIS 10.1, and Douglas Morales will showcase some work he did with Data Driven Pages and Python Scripting.

Map Design Resources from Great Britain’s Ordnance Survey

By markgreninger, on May 10th, 2013

Thanks to Mike Carson from SoCalGIS for passing along:

This is a helpful resource for folks looking to improve their maps. They have online resources for:

Colours (or colors as we like to spell it).
Fonts
Symbols
Map inspiration

Check it out here.

Post and Find Paid Internships

By markgreninger, on May 9th, 2013

Christina Boggs from The State of California has created a simple location to post and find paid internships. I think this is great!

Obama Administration releases Open Data Policy

By markgreninger, on May 9th, 2013

Earlier today, President Obama signed an Executive Order making open and machine readable data the new default for Government information. The White House simultaneously released the accompanying Open Data Policy.

Federal Government Open Data Policy

Press Release

Open Source GIS 101, Part 4: uDig

By John Hickok, GISP, on May 9th, 2013

uDig (User-friendly Desktop Internet GIS)

True to it’s name, one of this user friendly desktop GIS application’s strengths is its support of geospatial web service layers (WMS, WFS, WCS, KML).

This relatively new software is produced by a community led by Canadian-based consulting company Refractions Research. With the project’s recent acceptance by LocationTech, the open source licensing was updated. Under this new dual license (EPL and BSD), uDIG is still a free download.

One of the reasons uDIG is generating interest in the Open Source GIS community is that it shares its use of GeoTools with Geoserver.

My experience? uDig is one of those simple programs that opens a little faster than ArcMap. Once open, you can drag and drop a shape file into your uDig map for viewing with Open Street Map as a background. Did I mention it’s free?

In two weeks, Part 5: OpenJUMP…

Mathematician of Maps

By vijay, on May 7th, 2013

http://www.economist.com/news/obituary/21577031-kenneth-appel-mathematician-maps-died-april-19th-aged-80-kenneth-appel?frsc=dg%7Ca

Open Sheriff data goes viral

By markgreninger, on May 1st, 2013

ESRI has published a how-to guide on building web maps showing Sheriff Crime data with ArcGIS Online: read the post here

The reason this post hit me was not so much for the fact that it uses LA County data, which is great, or the fact that our Sheriff department shares this data (which is even better – kudos to Wendy Harn!!!) – but that it shows the value of making our data open, updated, and easy to find! This increases access to developers, who can make the data more visible to citizens, improving their understanding about what goes on around them, and potentially improving their lives.

What sparked this “epiphany” was this little banner on the top:

As of April 30th (8 days after the post):

52 people had shared this on Facebook (this goes into their timeline)
120 people had shared this on Twitter
200 people had shared this via Tumblr.
372 total shares.

Well – 372 folks doesn’t seem like much, until you realize that means that this has been shared with ALL of their friends and followers – so we may be talking about thousands of other people. Each one of them can backtrack to both the ESRI post, as well as the LA County GIS Data Portal. So they may end up using the instructions to create their own maps and applications, learning both about GIS, crime, and analysis, but maybe finding other data that they have interest in, and can work with.

Maybe one of them will build an application like crimemapping.com that does some neat analysis (supported by the Sheriff and other police departments), combined with other data that we have, to do some neat work.

San Francisco Public Art

By markgreninger, on April 30th, 2013

Congratulations to Nancy Milholland on her application: San Francisco Public Art

Nancy is a student at USC, and this application has made it into the top 5 of the Robert Raskin Mapping Mashup Competition

Members of the LA Regional GIS Forum are getting together to begin building something like this across the jurisdictions in the County. I am looking forward to the results!

Open Source GIS 101, Part 3: gvSIG

By John Hickok, GISP, on April 29th, 2013

gvSIG (Generalitat Valenciana, Sistema d’Informació Geogràfica)

In 2004, one of Spain’s regional government agencies, seeing the benefits of community-driven support and development, began a migration to free and open source software to suit their operational needs.

With local and EU government funding, gvSIG saw a lot of professional development from 2004-2008. Since 2009, development has declined.

I admit having a bias for using Quantum GIS (it will be covered later), gvSIG is said to have some innovative qualities worth investigating.

Though I’ll admit having a bias for using Quantum GIS (to be covered later), being aware of a wide variety of software projects is an important part of expanding one’s software toolkit. gvSIG is said to have some innovative qualities worth investigating.

In two weeks, Part 4: uDIG…