Wednesday, May 7. 2008

Quote of the Week

"All the GIS stuff out there is generally designed for GIS projessionals."

- Stamen Designs co-founder Eric Rodenbeck in an article in The Inquirer (UK) on his company called "Map fetishist goes round the world and back" The company's interactive map typically have sliders and other interface tools to make reviewing large and complex datasets easy. See for example, Oakland Crimespotting.

NC Voters Not on Rolls; GIS to Blame?

A blogger posted the question: Why were so many voters who thought they were on the rolls in Granville County given provisional ballots because they were not on precinct list in North Carolina? The answer, suggested in a comment points to 911 and geocoding.

From talking with Don Wright, attorney at the State Board of Elections, it appears that Granville County has a problem in some precincts where people's names have not been included on the printout of the poll book. This is because the county's 911 system hasn't correlated hundreds of addresses to a GIS coordinate, and the GIS coordinate is what the state elections database system uses to assign voters to the correct precinct. So active voters, particularly with a Hwy 96 or Hwy 56 addresses, did not getting [sic] a precinct assigned to them in the voter registration database. When the county goes to print the pollbooks, precinct by precinct, these voters names don't get printed on any precinct's books.
I've looked at database now and there are roughly 600 voters in this situation.

Some cry conspiracy. I'm impressed folks figured this out so quickly.

GeoGraffiti - annotate locations with voice messages

Mashable introduces the startup GeoGraffiti which offers a now free tool to post a "voice mail" and associate it with a location (ZIP Code or lat/lon). It's accessible via the Web (Google Map) of phone. Bottom line from the "review": not sure what it's good for, but that's what we thought of Twitter.

If we could get the accuracy for the messages and use a GPS... I could see using it as a tool to create a "treasure hunt" sort of game or even audio instructions for a bike ride or run.

Podcast: Using NAVTEQ & DigitalGlobe Data with Oracle Spatial

In podcast we invite you to learn how NAVTEQ’s vector map data and DigitalGlobe’s worldwide image data have been specially formatted for the Oracle Database, and how it can be used to enhance customers' business intelligence and enterprise applications. We will hear from Steve Lytle, a Senior Account Manager NAVTEQ and Jim Beckley, Director of Business Development for DigitalGlobe, as well as Jim Steiner, Oracle’s Senior Director for Server Technology. This podcast also provides an in-depth review of Oracle 11g’s advanced geospatial features including support for 3D types and functions as well as Java programming with 3D and OGC web services such as WFST, WMS and the web catalog services.

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