West Virginia's New Elevation Data Set

West Virginia now offers its new 3-meter DEMs for download as part of the National Elevation Dataset. Details are available from the West Virginia State GIS Technical Center.

Using Laptop WiFi for Location Purposes

From the Boston Globe: Software turns laptops into navigators.

This could have community mapping implications.

Another take on a similar approach: ESRI's ArcWeb Explorer and "Locate Me."

Federal RFI on Geospatial Line of Business Due in April

From GCN: GSA to release RFIs for new Lines of Business.

According to the article, the RFIs will go out in April, with industry days planned for meetings and discussions.

As pointed to on Adena Schutzberg's All Points Blog.

Microsoft Appears to Have Acquired a Remote-Sensing Company

The deal is pending regulatory approval, but it looks like Microsoft is buying a remote-sensing company called Vexcel.

Vexcel's website lists Advanced Radar Technologies, Mapping and Photogrammetric Solutions, Close-Range Photogrammetry, and Satellite Ground Systems as its products.

A Call for Open Data Access in the UK

Roger Hart's GeoCarta blog has an entry today on a call by the Guardian Newspaper for Great Britain's mapping agency, the Ordnance Survey, to make England's geospatial data freely available.

The entry, British Newspaper Bashes Ordinance Survey, quotes the newspaper at some length. It boils down to a very familiar argument: data is collected at taxpayer expense and should be freely available.

To that end, the Guardian has launched a new Campaign: Free Our Data.

The aim is simple: to persuade the government to abandon copyright on essential national data, making it freely available to anyone, while keeping the crucial task of collecting that data in the hands of taxpayer-funded agencies.

The Guardian goes on to point out a result of the US Government's more open model: the rise of many new businesses and new kinds of business (Google Maps and Earth, MSN's mapping offerings, MapQuest, etc.). Of course, all this commercial activity means more tax revenue. For the government.

Mr. Hart closes his post with a reminder that, while data is more freely available in the US, not all governments here are as open as they could be.

It may also be the case that these articles would support our lager goal of increasing and organizing a nationwide approach to funding the collecting and maintaining key data sets.

Federal GIS Coordinators?

From All Points Blog, a note about an OMB memo last week requiring "major federal agencies to designate a senior official to oversee geospatial activities."

Adena's posting (OMB: Major Fed Agencies Must Name Senior Geo Official) includes a link, apparently broken , to a story in Government Computer News, which broke the story. The fixed link is here.

Adena has a suggestion for NSGIC:

These individuals could be key in getting many of the federal programs to "work for them." I say this considering how NSGIC (essentially a group of individuals doing this sort of work for their states) offers advice to its members and to the federal government. I'll even go so far as to suggest NSGIC invite these individuals to see how it works.

On Adding Comments and New Postings

Some of the members of this blog are very new to blogging and have asked for a short primer on adding comments and posts.

You can either create a new posting on the blog, or add a comment to an existing posting.

Commenting
To add a comment, just scroll to the bottom of the post. There you will see "# COMMENTS". The variable "#", of course, will refer to the number of comments already left. If there are none, this is "0 COMMENTS," if there is one comment it will be "1 COMMENT."

If you are viewing the post as part of the main NSGIC Blog page, or a monthly archive page, this text is a link to the commenting form. If you are viewing the post as a stand-alone page (as is probably the case just now), you will also see the text "POST A COMMENT" which is a link to the commenting page.

Follow one of these links to the comment-editing page. You may need to add your sign-in information, if we are set for comments only from members of this blog (your Blogger sign-in). Eventually, I think we will make this open to comments from all, though we will encourage people to sign in. There will also be a "WORD Verification" set, to avoid spam.

Posting New Content
If you are a member of the NSGIC Blog Team of Contributors, you can add new posts! To add a new post, go to http://www2.blogger.com/home and sign in. You should then see the blog listed as "The NSGIC Blog" with some sort of button that lets you add a "New Post." Ignore the blog simply called "NSGIC" if you see it, that's the old address. We're keeping that around for a short time as a "redirect" page.

On the posting page, you'll have a spot for a Post Title, and a link. I don't usually use the link field, but rather put the link in the text of the post.

Your post's text goes into the large text box. This has a variety of WYSIWYG tools that are all fairly self-evident. You can either "Edit HTML" in which case you will see all the html tags, or "Compose" in which case you won't.

You can "Preview", "Save as Draft", or "Publish." Don't worry about messing anything up. I can go in and edit stuff if need be.

I think it is important that we all try to add useful posts and comments to the Blog. It's like a listserv -- only as useful as what it is used for.

An Article on Pennsylvania's Geospatial Analysis of Threats and Incident Reports

(Our own) Jim Knudson of the Pennsylvania Office for Information Technology has co-authored an article with Jonathan Bishop and Ali Detar, of GeoDecisions, for the February 21 edition of The Patriot News.

The article, GATIR: Securing Pennsylvania's Homeland, is linked from a summary posted on the Pennsylvania OIT web site.

From the summary:

The secure, Internet-accessible GATIR application provides geospatial technologies (GT) and geospatial information systems (GIS) capabilities that work in conjunction with the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency's (PEMA) Pennsylvania Emergency Incident Response System (PEIRS). PIERS, an award-winning incident management system, is used by PEMA and county emergency management agencies to records and manage Commonwealth incidents and to coordinate effective responses.

An Article on The National Grid Proposal

From Federal Computer World, an article on the idea of a National Grid, along with other aspects on the need to do a better job of sharing geospatial data: Another post-Katrina problem: What happened to the street?

Wisconsin Mapping Bulletin Highlights Imagery for the Nation

National imagery plan garnering interest
by Ted Koch

Aerial and satellite imagery, in the form of digital orthoimagery, is the foundation for most public and private sector use of GIS. A digital orthoimage is rich in content, and with its inherent scale accuracy, provides an indispensable map base for a wealth of other information. The value of digital orthos is no secret to the state’s land information community as witnessed by the fact that last year nearly 50 Wisconsin counties and almost 90 municipalities acquired digital ortho imagery.

Read more....