Farm Bill and Privacy

In a recent post on his blog, Spatial Law, Kevin Pomfret announces a detail from the recent Farm Bill's conference report that seems to prohibit the Department of Agriculture from disclosing spatial information that it collects, in direct contravention of a recent court case around this issue. He specifically mentions Section 1619(b)(2)(B) of the conference report. Having only recently learned a little about these political devices while at the 2008 Mid-Year meeting in Annapolis, I wonder if NSGIC might want to look into this further. After all our work to encourage the acquisition of standardized, nationwide imagery on a consistent and predictable schedule, it would be a tragedy to have a conference report (sound a little like a signing statement?) undo those efforts without a fight.

I hope I am not making too much of this.

Agenda Posted for NGAC Meeting

A draft agenda is now posted for the next meeting of the National Geospatial Advisory Committee (NGAC). The meeting is set for June 3 and 4, at the American Institute of Architects Building in Washington, DC.

The agenda includes work on organization issues related to the creation of the NGAC and discussions of the Geospatial Line of Business, Imagery for the Nation, and a National Geospatial Strategy. The meeting is open to the public and there are opportunities for public comment.

I'll Meet You At... How'd The Dow Do This Morning?

The web-comic xkcd has touched my geo-nerd heart today with a single-panel comic that explains an approach to geocaching based on the daily opening of the Dow Jones Industrials. There's a more expansive explanatory wiki entry that may build into a geo-comic-caching-nerd-core-social movement (or something).

Basically, it is an algorithm that takes the date and Dow and mashes them into new and more or less random post-decimal portions of lat-long coordinates. Users select the pre-decimal part using a map interface. The result is a random point where geo-hashers can agree to meet.

The official xkcd meetups happen every Saturday afternoon at 4:00 PM. If the coordinates for your area are in the ocean, a military base, or somewhere otherwise unreachable, that meetup is of course postponed. Unless, of course, you own a boat, are a soldier at said military base, or are James Bond.

I think it's a charming idea and one that should appear on more than one GIS/geo-related blog this week.

"Old Guard" Meets "New Guard"?

There has been a flurry of reaction around the web of GIS-related bloggers about the joint appearance by ESRI's Jack Dangermond and Google's John Hanke at Where 2.0, the geo-web conference. The pair announced increased interconnectivity between ArcGIS and Google's Maps and Earth that should make sharing data with more folks on-line easier and more effective.

Sean Gorman, of FortiusOne, spoke just before Mr. Hanke and called it a pleasant surprise but added a note of caution:

Its great to see the big guys on the GeoWeb and GIS respectively working together to bring more data to the masses. While there was a nice canned demo showing ArcGIS 9.3 interacting with Google Earth, it will be interesting to see how it works in the wild and how it scales. My one concern is that is seemed from the demo that the model is still based around the public being passive viewers of GIS professionals work.

Adena Schutzberg, in her All Points Blog, has a detailed, plain-English review of the idea:

This is a huge step forward for geography (neo, paleo, and all the rest). It does indeed bring the hidden data and emerging Web services from the huge ESRI community out into the light of day.

Theron Hatch, at The GeoJobe Blog, builds on Adena's analysis with some thoughts about where we go next:

It seems that costs should come down for budget conscious agencies looking to maximize the ingestion of free data available throughout the Where 2.0 map world, while at the same time managing only those internal datasets that are either required by law, security-focused, or otherwise need to be handled locally. This leaves a plethora of free data that someone else can manage and make available. This news means combining these disparate datasets is now easier and more seamless than ever. “Why can’t we all just get along” just flew out the window.

Finally, Sue, posting yesterday on Very Spatial, suggested the "old meet new" idea:

...for those of us GIS old timers, it was kinda symbolic to see the old and new guard coming together.

Things are getting interesting. Yet again.

If the Internet is a Tool for Communication, We Need to Stay Sharp and Hone our Skills at Using This Tool

Today (May 1) is RSS Awareness Day. Who knew?

I did, and I knew because a blog post about it popped up this morning in my RSS feed reader. A part of my job as GIS Coordinator for Delaware (and GIS practitioner for State Planning, and Census Data Person, and aware state employee) is to pay attention to what is going on in these various areas of practice. So I regularly scan headlines, and read content, from blogs, news organizations, and professional organizations. And I do so via their RSS feeds.

And we can and should use RSS feeds to share our information with our various audiences. In Delaware we use RSS to share headlines and items of interest with our constituents. Here on the NSGIC Blog you'll see both State GIS News, aggregated from our members' RSS feeds, and Links by NSGIC Folks, which uses RSS to collect things some of us have found and tagged as "of GIS interest."

Are you using RSS as completely as you could? If you are publishing RSS as a State GIS Coordinator, please let us know via the comments section below and we will add you to the State GIS News feed. Are there other ways we should be using this tool?

Please, share...