GIS Dev Cafe

As we are all aware the presidential election is less than a month away. Accompanying this year’s election season are all the wonderful online maps that have been created to give depth to the progress of the campaigns and to visualize poll and election data. This is the first part of a multipart series exploring the myriad of presidential election online maps.
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What did GIS on the internet look like in 2001? Thanks to Google we can now search like it was 2001 (Does not work like “Search like it was 1999″, but I digress)! Google has recently put their 2001 search index online and have linked archived pages from the Internet Archive giving a glimpse of search vis a vis 2001. Out of curiosity, I plugged in GIS related searches just to see how much things have changed in the online GIS community and its related topics…
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Don’t know if anybody else has posted this, but ESRI was featured in a Channel9 video a few weeks back. Most of this video focuses on GIS technologies for the general public, but there are some interesting things for spatial developers. Of interest to developers is the discussion of SqlServer 2008 and ArcGIS 9.3 potential implementation. A little long and at times basic, this video is still an enjoyable watch and has some take away value, if anything it is interesting hearing ESRI talk about themselves and their development methodologies. Continue Reading »

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As a developer of GIS, and more broadly Microsoft .Net software, I have come to realize there is a level of information overload within the industry. There exists more data, information, tools and programming language concepts than can realistically be absorbed. Often, I rely on Google Search to find the information and implementations I need. Without getting too bogged down in the nitty and gritty of programming methodology, the point is that programmers, heck all users, today have an overabundance of options to discover new data and information. The online search tool then plays a necessary role in assisting and aiding in discovering this flow of information quickly. But when performing a search the user has to wade through tons of results often consisting of numerous unrelated links, before finding the information they were looking for. So how exactly can users find information faster with more reliable results? One answer is Google Custom Search. This post will explain how this tool is useful for searching for specific GIS and geographic related information, with a focus on a new search tool I have added to this site, GeoSearch and GeoBlogSearch.
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In the past weeks there has been a good deal of discussion on the GIS community and communication. There has been numerous comments and blog postings all pertaining to this topic (including one I missed a couple of weeks ago from slashgeo). When I started this series of postings, I was just curious how other GIS professionals perceived the notion of a GIS community. In this post I would like to highlight what I consider to be the “take away” points from this discussion and offer my final thoughts.
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Earlier this week I asked the question “Where is the GIS Community”. After much discussion of this topic on various blogs and comment sections, I am not sure I can still answer the question in exactly the same way as before. I still feel a lack of something, which I dubbed community. I have come to realize that maybe the community is there, but what is really missing is communication, the necessary exchange of ideas that holds a community together or even brings them together as a group. I am not saying we all need to get in a big circle and hold hands while singing kumbaya around a giant bonfire. Instead we need to talk more to each other and less at each other, we need to exchange ideas not just sit and listen on the sidelines, there needs to be active participation as this is not lecture hour at university. Let me explain…
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