Wisconsin Flood of 2008

The weekend of June 7, 2008, will be long remembered in Wisconsin history. The southern third of Wisconsin (along with the rest of Midwest) received three days of hazardous weather and heavy rain. Some of the stories have made national news. Many other stories have gone untold.

As many of us know GIS is and will continue to be involved. There is no doubt that GIS is being used at this moment for printing orthos, planning evacuation areas, assisting sand bagging efforts, traffic routing, estimating losses, and soon economic and infrastructure reconstruction efforts.

If you have GIS flood story to tell, please comment to this posting.

ArcGIS 9.3 links

Here's some of the more interesting links about the 9.3 release:

• Summary of new stuff
• Nit-picking of the new stuff (read the comments)
  
• The GDB Versions viewer
• New image service
• ArcGIS Server Javascript API
• ArcGIS Server and KML at where 2.0 and link2
  

Want to build you resume?

Be a presenter at EWUG ’08. EWUG is seeking presentations for the October 29th & 30th Conference. The conference will be in Appleton at the Paper Valley Hotel.

This year we will try to group presentations into four tracks: Desktop GIS, Server GIS, Projects and Vendor Demonstrations.

• Desktop GIS – Presentations on the use of ESRI Desktop GIS software. How to’s and Tips & Tricks style presentations are encouraged.
• Server GIS – Same as above, except that ArcGIS Server, ArcGIS Image Server, and ArcIMS will be covered. Implementation and configuration experiences are encouraged.
• Projects – Projects where GIS played a significant role. Projects of interest to planners (which includes a lot of subjects) are encouraged, as EWUG will be submitting AICP Certification Maintenance credits.
• Vendor Demonstrations – Vendors and exhibitors, here’s the chance to show your stuff. These will be 20 minute presentation slots prior to the vendor reception. The idea here is to showcase your product and services.

If you would like to present, please send the following to dhaines@ewug.org

• Presentation Title
• Track (Desktop GIS, Server GIS, Project or Vendor Demonstration)
• Brief presentation description
• Names, title and affiliations of presenter(s)

Each presentation will receive one free conference registration. Presentation will be 30 to 40 minutes, the vendor demonstrations will be limited to 20 minutes. LCD projectors will be available. Please bring your own laptop.

The deadline for presentation submissions is July 30th.

Are you not from Wisconsin? That’s ok, we welcome your presentation!

If your not familiar with the conference, we've been doing this since 1999. Our attendance averages around 230 per year. Our attendees come from the whole range of the GIS spectrum, Federal/State/Local government, Academia, and the private-sector.

The Costs of Software

There's some interesting goings-on with the master purchasing agreement that the Wis. GIO addresses on the Mapping Bulletin. I don't know what the hang-up is, but the result is the price of software just went up for governmental agencies. Hopefully the issues will be resolved quickly.

New Website Design

The EWUG website underwent a design change. No new content was added, just a refreshed look.

The old website was design served us well for the past four years.

If anyone is interested in creating a blogger.com compatible stylesheet that matches the website design, let me know. Otherwise that's next on my to-do-list.

The Census in Shapefiles

As mentioned a while back, the Census Bureau switched from the TIGER format to ESRI Shapefiles. Sure, you could get the TIGER data (2000 version) from ESRI, but it was difficult to find. Now the most current version is directly available from the Census in Shapefile format.

What I find most interesting is how far reaching this is. The TIGER/Line data format, was developed for the 1990 Census. Consider that the Shapefile is replacing a data format used for nearly 20 years in the (arguably) most important GIS dataset in existence (the linework and data has built entire industries, and is the dataset is Constitutionally mandated) . For this alone, the Shapefile will be around for a long, long, long time.

Its already been almost ten years since the Shapefile specification has been made public. Its likely that it will be in use in common use for another ten years.

Almost As Good

Didn't make it to the Developer's Summit? Don't feel too bad, its (relatively) cool there.

You can at least check out (some of) the PowerPoints from the technical presentations. This is a lot better than trying to get the CDROM from the guy in your office that went six months ago.

What's the Future of ArcIMS?

Many people may be wondering what's the future of ArcIMS?

While it probably won't go away anytime soon, its probably a safe to bet that it has reached the end of development. The not so subtle hint from ESRI was spoken at this year's Developer's Summit: There are no ArcIMS sessions other than how to migrate from ArcIMS to ArcGIS Server. It shouldn't come as too much of a surprise, nearly a year ago, ArcIMS was declared a dead product by a blogger.

Why does this matter to Wisconsin? Of Wisconsin's 72 counties, 61 have ArcIMS-based web mapping sites, 5 are on other platforms, and only 1 is ArcGIS Server.

ArcGIS 9.3

ESRI has summarized the new functionality coming out in 9.3 concerning Desktop, Server and the Geodatabase.

Also, you can submit your questions about 9.3. The most common questions will likely be hit upon first at the Dev Summit, or perhaps even a Question&Answers page like the UC.

via APB

Update: The Developer Summit Q&A has been posted already. via Mandown