California Opens A GIO Position

Last week, California opened an executive position in the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) for a Geospatial Information Officer. This is big news for California, and comes nine months after the California GIS Council adopted a Strategic Plan (see http://cgia.org/CA%20StrategicPlan%20P2.pdf ) calling for a GIO.

The GIO will be responsible for ensuring that the State of California receives the benefits associate with Geospatial data, specifically,

• increased data access and sharing;
  
• reduced GIS duplication and costs;
  
• developments of GIS standards;
  
• Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) centers of expertise; public outreach; and
  
• increased collaboration.

We are enthusiastic about this development and look forward to good things to come from now having

1. an executive sponsor,
2. close ties with our Chief Information Officer, and
3. a Paid full-time coordinator.

The link for the job announcement and details for the application process is here.

LA Times Adds a Geospatial View to its Collection of Homicide Data

The Los Angeles Times this year has been using a blog to track all of the homicides in Los Angles County this year. The Homicide Report has a simple mission:

The report seeks to reverse an age-old paradox of big-city crime reporting, which dictates that only the most unusual and statistically marginal homicide cases receive press coverage, while those cases at the very eye of the storm -- those which best expose the true statistical dimensions of the problem of deadly violence -- remain hidden. (From an early "what is" post)

This week, an interactive map and database interface has been added, apparently coded by a professor at USC. It includes a filtering function, search, listings, and a geospatial display created using Google Maps.

It's not clear based on my brief poking around the site, what the back-end consists of, though it appears to be some form of simple server-side database query that exports XML or GeoRSS. The user interface allows "export" to GeoRSS or KML; the URLs that are returned are formated "getSavedQueryResults" commands.

The new web map interface strikes a nice balance between simple information presentation and a robust data query interface.