San Diego Preps to Be GIS Hub

It’s not yet like cluster in Colorado, but San Diego is mustering forces to be become a hotbed of geospatial.

The San Diego Software Industry Council is organizing a GIS interest group - it holds its first meeting at UC San Diego’s Computer Science and Engineering building at 6 p.m. Thursday, June 18 (tomorrow).

The executive director of council, Bob Slapin, is starting to talk the talk: “There is a massive amount of data lying around that is related to a spot on the map, (environmental, traffic, health). This data is often in different silos and in most cases making sense of it requires running around, finding it and mapping it somehow. The data is often structured and unstructured.”

Why the grouping around San Diego? Suggested sources:

- legacy expertise of the U.S. Navy in satellite-based global positioning technologies
- the development of location-based services for wireless devices at San Diego-based Qualcomm
- ESRI is about a 2-hour drive and hold its UC there
- local academic expertise also emerged in 2007, when researchers at San Diego State University’s Visualization Center tackled wildfires

- Xconomy