California CIO's Office Gets a Geocoding Grant

California GIO (and NSGIC Board Member) Michael Byrne has announced that his state's Emergency Management Agency has awarded the Office of the State Chief Information Officer a $1 million dollar grant to develop an enterprise geocoding service.

Mr. Bryne announced the grant award on California's The Tech Blog, calling it "another milestone in geospatial information for California." He notes that the grant will not only bring all state emergency response comand centers to a common operating picture for the state, but will also help save money for the state:

By setting up a comprehensive enterprise service, we ensure all state agencies which maintain address data will be able to use this service. Having these agencies use this single comprehensive service means for the first time there will be a common understanding of mapping addresses in the state. We will ensure that addresses in every state agency are mapped with the same standards and methods providing a common approach and bridging the cap of our state silos.

Do It Yourself Mapping

Got data and need a map? You don’t necessarily need expensive software to produce that map. GPS Visualizer is a free, easy-to-use online utility that creates maps and profiles from GPS data (tracks and waypoints), street addresses, or simple coordinates. Use it to see where you've been, plan where you're going, or visualize geographic data (business locations, scientific observations, events, customers, real estate, geotagged photos, etc.).


We just learned about this tool; see http://gpsvisualizer.com/. It already has made our life easier. A researcher was beginning to ask for some free consulting time to map store locations across Minnesota when she discovered the tool and told us about it. She has her map and we have that time back. I have copied most of the text about GPS Visualizer from their website.


GPS Visualizer can read data files from many different sources, including but not limited to: GPX (a standard format from many devices and programs, including Garmin's eTrex and GPSMAP series), OziExplorer, Geocaching.com (.loc), IGC sailplane logs, Garmin Forerunner (.xml/.hst/.tcx), Timex Trainer (v1.3+), Cetus GPS, PathAway, cotoGPS, CompeGPS, TomTom (.pgl), IGN Rando (.rdn), Emtac Trine, Suunto X9/X9i (.sdf), NetStumbler/WiFiFoFum, GPSManager, MS Excel, and of course tab-delimited or comma-separated text.


It can output maps in Google Maps, JPEG/PNG/SVG, or Google Earth KML. Other output formats include elevation profile, GPX file, and plain text table.