Podcast: Delivering Maps to the FBI

This past week two geospatial practitioners were cited for their good work by the FBI. What did they do? At the request of the Bureau, they went online and found some Digital Raster Graphics, scanned quad maps, printed them and gave them to agents working in their area. Is this how agents and others in the federal government, or even citizens, should get their geographic data? What does this scenario reveal about the FBI? The state of our geospatial infrastructure? The value of the geospatial workforce?


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Amazon Doing Invite Only Cloud Training in DC

Techflash has the news and suggests this is Amazon’s push beyond selling startups on the cloud. The two-day course is for “a variety IT services firms that do business with the federal government.” I wonder if any with a geospatial bent were involved?

via @timoreilly

Barrington COG Thanks Library for GIS Books

I’ve always wanted to write a headline like that and today I can because the Barrington (IL) Area Council of Government has publicly thanked the local library for adding GIS books to its collection. Among the offerings are books are a GIS dictionary, a book on mashups, cartography and map design.

via twitter (The library is on twitter, is yours?)

Quote of the Week

“We have a satellite network system. We have voice-over (Internet protocol) phones. We have conferencing capability. We have GIS (geographic information system) mapping servers on board for the state.”

Phil Royce, lead radio technician with the Alachua County Sheriff’s Office describing two emergency response trucks that are part of a state Emergency Deployable Interoperable Communications Equipment network to serve North Central Florida in the Gainsville Sun.

Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship at UVA

Bethany Nowviskie is Director of Digital Research & Scholarship at the University of Virginia Library and Associate Director of the Scholarly Communication Institute.

She reports on her blog that the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has funded the school’s Scholars’ Lab “to host three tracks of an Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities, on the theme of “Enabling Geospatial Scholarship.”” The institute will enable projects that support institutions to provide access to geospatial technology for the humanities. In the end, the goal is a clearinghouse is to: “offer technical bootstrapping for libraries and museums new to sophisticated GIS support via Web services frameworks, but also to provide differing scholarly perspectives on GIS for the humanities, from within the coherent narrative of a multi-institutional effort (which we hope this Institute will foster) to build modern infrastructure, support innovative digital projects, and open up dialogue about the causes and conditions of the digital humanities community’s uncharacteristic inhibition toward GIS.” From what I gather the apps will be open source.

You’ll recognize some names of geospatial folks on the advisory board.

This sounds very cool.

via Twitter