Bio Geomancer

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This site has some interesting software approaches for geo-coding public observations in nature. The BioGeomancer Project is a worldwide collaboration of natural history and geospatial data experts. The primary goal of the project is to maximize the quality and quantity of biodiversity data that can be mapped in support of scientific research, planning, conservation, and management. The project promotes discussion, manages geospatial data and data standards, and develops software tools in support of this mission.

Yikes! More trouble with GIS data access ahead

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From the BAAMA news: You may be aware that our state legislature is considering a bill to amend the California Public Records Act.  The bill (AB 1978) was introduced on February 14, 2008 by State Assembly Member Jose Solorio, and may have implications on public access to geospatial information in the future. We believe this topic is of primary interest to all GIS practitioners. We invite you to review Assembly Member Solorio's proposed bill and discuss its implications within your organization. You can find the text of AB 1978 here. A critique of AB 1978 may be found here. Based upon your review of AB 1978, you may wish to share your opinion of the bill with your local Assembly Member or state Senator. The bill is scheduled for committee review 30 days after introduction, which would be March 15.

Berkeley/Penn Urban and Environmental Modeler’s Datakit

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Looking for GIS data for the U.S.? The Berkeley/Penn Urban and Environmental Modeler's Datakit has just been released. The site contains more than 150 downloadable ArcMap-ready shapefiles and raster datasets for the 48 contiguous United States.

The data were produced at the Institute of Urban and Regional Development (IURD) at the University of California, Berkeley and the Penn Institute of Urban Research (Penn IUR) at the University of Pennsylvania, in cooperation with Penn's Cartographic Modeling Lab (CML).

The data is free, and all interested urban and environmental planners, analysts, modelers and enthusiasts are encouraged to utilize the site to further narrow traditional disciplinary gaps between urban and environmental planning researchers/practitioners. It claims to be the first site to bring together spatially comprehensive and comparable urban and environmental GIS data.

Users who uncover problems (other than the fact that "Modeler" is mis-spelled on the title banner) or might wish to add their own national data to the website should e-mail John Landis at jlan@design.upenn.edu.

 

10 Challenges in Data Mining Research

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From Qinghua: the 10 challenging problems in data mining research that resulted from an IEEE Conference. The 10 challenging problems are listed below (where the order of the listing does not reflect their level of importance):
  • Developing a Unifying Theory of Data Mining
  • Scaling Up for High Dimensional Data and High Speed Data Streams
  • Mining Sequence Data and Time Series Data
  • Mining Complex Knowledge from Complex Data
  • Data Mining in a Network Setting
  • Distributed Data Mining and Mining Multi-agent Data
  • Data Mining for Biological and Environmental Problems
  • Data-Mining-Process Related Problems
  • Security, Privacy and Data Integrity
  • Dealing with Non-static, Unbalanced and Cost-sensitive Data

Satellite Photos Show Cleansing of Syrian Site

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Satellite imagery of a facility in Syria collected on August 5, 2007, left, and October 24.
By WILLIAM J. BROAD and MARK MAZZETTI
Published: October 26, 2007
The New York Times

New commercial satellite photos show that a Syrian site believed to have been attacked by Israel last month no longer bears any obvious traces of what some analysts said appeared to have been a partly built nuclear reactor. Read More (NYTimes). ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I found it interesting how traditionally "filtered" news relating to wars/conflict found more accountability to the public after the integration of global communication systems into society. We saw it during the second Iraq War with "embedded" journalists, freelance journalism, and first hand accounts from soldiers utilizing digital cameras, cell phones, and blogs to relay uncensored information that once was filtered by those in power. With the availability of high spatial and temporal resolution satellite imagery it seems the public has one more weapon to keep tabs on our government and others. Cheers, Josh

Scientists Fear Curbs on Access to Satellite Data

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Science 14 September 2007: Vol. 317. no. 5844, p. 1481 DOI: 10.1126/science.317.5844.148

News of the Week

U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY: Scientists Fear Curbs on Access to Satellite Data

Yudhijit BhattacharjeeFor more than 3 decades, U.S. science agencies have used images taken by the nation's spy satellites to study everything from erupting volcanoes to the migration of marine mammals. Now, a new plan to expand the use of the satellites for homeland security and law enforcement has left some officials worried that science will suffer. Last month's announcement by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that it was setting up a new National Applications Office (NAO) this fall to widen the use of spy-satellite imagery has sparked protests from civil liberties advocates. They worry that federal, state, and local authorities will seek high-resolution, real-time images to monitor activities of U.S. citizens in the same way that the satellites help track terrorist activities overseas. But officials at federal science agencies are concerned for a different reason: They suspect that the new arrangement could mean fewer chances to investigate scientific questions or cause delays that undermine the value of the information. read more...

Cool weather links

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Come on, you know you love checking the weather.. admit it. here is a nice, late night, intimate dinner conversation starter. Awesome interactive maps that change as you move your cursor over various links (e.g. wind direction, temperature, etc.) If you love graphs (and who doesn't!?) this site will rock your boat, because honestly, who needs those cutsie little pictures with dark cloudies and the sun, or the so not scientific location descriptors (e.g."Berkeley, CA")?? (not me!) if it's going to be cloudy, i wan't to know "HOW CLOUDY?". and please, it's "37.86N -122.26W," not "Berkeley." (see attached picture for more details) ;)

the YouTube of data and graphs, Swivel

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Swivel offers free, public and private, data hosting. You can create nice graphs with your data but also search for other people's data. For now this is not entirely geospatial, but when the api is opened up or they update the service, a geospatial component could be added. For now I would seriously question the reliability and accuracy of any data posted there. Below is an example of a graph made with Swivel.

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GISC: Towards Uncharted Ground: Accessing and Preserving Geospatial Data into the Future

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"Towards Uncharted Ground Accessing and Preserving Geospatial Data into the Future" Date: Friday, September 29 Time: 9 am to 12 pm Location: 112 Wurster Hall, UC Berkeley campus Geographic information systems have become pervasive across academia, government, and industry. Much GIS data have long-term or permanent value, but little has been done to assure their longevity. Compared to traditional cartography, geographic data can encode more complex spatial information and are much more accessible. But data are also far more mutable and subject to loss. This meeting brings together a panel of experts for an informal discussion of the problem of managing the persistence of geographic information. * John Radke, UC Berkeley Geographic Information Science Center * Richard Marciano, San Diego Supercomputer Center * Dyung Le, National Archives and Records Administration * Steve Morris, North Carolina State University * Barry Napier, US Forest Service * Ray McDowell, State of California Spatial Information Library * John Wiezcorek, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology Presented by: National Archives and Records Administration, Pacific Region Geographic Information Science Center, University of California For more information go to: http://www.gisc.berkeley.edu Or contact david.piff@nara.gov (650) 238-3468 or ccary@berkeley.edu Free and open to the public.

Public geodata under threat in Europe

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Via BoingBoing (of all places), recent moves by the European Commission to orchestrated sharing of government-collected geodata between member nations are become increasingly embroiled with licensing and copyright issues that may limit or completely illiminate public access to the data, data collected using public funds. Now I confess I know next to nothing about this situation (I don't even really know the difference between the EC and the EU), but I understand that public geodata is already a scarce commodity in Europe, so this is probably bad news for Europeans or anyone doing research in Europe.

MapRoom - a multi-user spatial data management tool

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Hey all. So Brent and I have continued thinking about this whole spatial data management system we've all been discussing. Here are two mock-ups of what we think such a site might look lile. These are, of course, super rough right now, lacking some features and design considerations our first draft will have, but we'd love to get people's comments and thoughts from the get go. Main Page First page you see, with a simple search bar and a Google map to limit your search spatially. You'll be searching on tags and metadata we derive from the files initially, maybe other sources of metadata later. The Categories tab will be an alternate, categorical view of the data, based on hierarchical categories like data type, source, theme, etc.

maproom_mock_main.png

Dataset View This is the view of a single piece of data, or file. Shows all the metadata, tags organized by popularity (or most searched on?), and big bright download button. Oh and imagine an "Add a tag" text box there beneath the tags. WMS/WFS/WCS functionality is sort of something we might like later on down the road, but not immediately.

maproom_mock_dataset.png

The upload view will look very similar. Either you're remote user and you upload a file or you're an admin and you tell the application that you've put some data you'd like to add in a designated holding directory. The app will read the file, try to figure out as much of the metadata as possible, and then the uploader will have to fill in the required fields that the app can't figure out. It'll look a lot like the dataset view, except those fields will be editable.

NextMap is in the house

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We've got the first quad of NextMap Radar imagery up in the GIIF. It is a new high resolution (1-4m) Radar product for Digital surface models and Digital Terrain Models. This will be most interesting to you all involved in Blodgett Forest; we could only get 2 quads to start, so we chose the quads covering the Blodgett Property. But it should be of interest to anyone wanting better res DEMs of California that are cheaper than LiDAR. Accuracy pending of course! See Eric and Abe's site.