And Now, the Rest of the CAP Grants...

The Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) has announced the final awards in the Cooperative Agreements Program (CAP) grant series for 2009. The FGDC had earlier announced grant awards in most of the 2009 CAP grants categories.

Today's announcement was for grants in Categories 2 and 4, which both focus on improving the use and function of local, state and federal data-sharing tools.

Category 2: Behind the Portal - Use of GOS Map and Data Services

• The Carbon Project was awarded a grant for An Enterprise GIS Desktop Dashboard for the GOS Portal.
• The Center for Intelligent Spatial Computing (CISC) at George Mason University was awarded a grant to Utilize GOS Map and Data Services for Cross-Agency Earth Science and Geospatial Cyberinfrastructure Communities.
• Innovate! Inc. was awarded a grant to develop a suite of reusable components to enable The Coeur d'Alene Tribe, The North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources, and US Environmental Protection Agency to integrate Geospatial OneStop search capabilities into their websites and other tools.
• MobiMaps LLC was awarded a grant to integrate access to Geospatial OneStop catalog and data services into NASA WorldWind.

Category 4: Enabling Use of Government Tabular Data in a Geographic Context

• Fortius One was awarded a grant to extend the GeoCommons platform to create geospatial data sets automatically from tabular data.

Today's announcement brings to a close the "announcement" portion of the 2009 grant series. Work is already started on many of the grants already announced.

Many of us working on state GIS strategic plans will watch the grant projects announced today with great interest. Tools developed under these grants could be greatly useful in state and local geospatial data coordination.

Remotely Sensing Coastal GeoTools?

I'm sure there are NSGIC folks in Myrtle Beach, SC, attending Coastal GeoTools 2009 this week, but not all of us who have an interest have been able to make it. Some were snowed-in by this weekend's nor'easter and some were left high and dry by the fiscal drought.

But there is good news for the coastally-curious. At least one attendee is live-tweeting the event. Oregon State University professor Dawn Wright has been shooting out notes from sessions at the conference via twitter. Of course, if you follow this link after about March 5, be aware that she'll be tweeting about something relatively else.

There appear to be other twitter-connected people at Coastal GeoTools. A twitter search finds a few people there and a few others looking for someone who is who will post updates. It is interesting to note a small effort to get those who are posting to use a common "hash-tag" to facilitate the conversation; #ncgt is suggested.

This suggests that we should -- as a community and before we get to conferences -- agree on common tags and other such metadata for use in twitter, or whatever new-fangled communications tools come along, to make our social-media use even more useful.