Spatial Data Management Group Meeting, Thursday, March 31, 2011 @10:00 a.m. in Richardson 313

Attendees: Dave, Dori D., Keith, Kelly, Ron, Terralyn, Theresa

Topic: Theresa shared what she learned in the two-day online ArcGIS JavaScript API class

Treats: Terralyn

Notes: Dave

Facilitator: Kelly

Meetings:

  • GIS In Action: March 29/30, 2011 Portland State University: no one attended
  • US-IALE (landscape ecology); April 3-7, 2011, Portland, OR – Matt, Heather, and Patti attending and/or presenting
  • The National Map Users Conference and USGS GIS Workshop; May 10-13, 2011, Denver, CO
  • Com.Geo 2011 – 2nd International Conference on Computing for Geospatial Research and Application; May 23-25, 2011, Washington, DC
  • 2011 State-and-Transition Landscape Modeling Conference, June 14-16, 2011, Portland, OR – Focuses on VDDT and TELSA modeling software, Dave will be attending
  • ESRI Users Conference, July 11-15, 2011, San Diego, CA
    Website:
  • Society for Conservation GIS Conference, July 16-19, 2011, Big Bear Lake, CA
  • Silvilaser 2011 – 11th International Conference on LiDAR Applications for Assessing Forest Ecosystems; October 16-20, 2011, University of Tasmania
  • 12th International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases: August 24-26, 2011 Minneapolis, MN
  • LTER Ecoinformatics (Information Managers conference); September 2011, location?

Discussion with Dori Dick about upcoming presentations in Geosciences. Three candidates for the new cartography/visualization professor position were presenting seminars in April, and an IGERT student was doing a presentation on his visualization work.

Data: The 2009 color DOQ’s are here (T:\gis\DOQ), Terralyn will make them read-only.New watershed boundary dataset for OR/WA is available from the PNW hydrography Frameworkftp://hydro.psmfc.org(WBD_download folder): WBD_OR.zip, WBD_WA.zip, WBD_ORWA.zip. Kelly will check them out. A statewide 10-meter DEM (file geodatabase) is also available at T:\gis\oregon\dem. It’s 10 GB but it refreshes rather quickly for such a large file.

Training: JavaScript

Software: ArcGIS Server 10 on development server. It’s back on Mercator. Only Theresa is in the Admin group at this point. Virtual disks now are only made with UNC names (not D:, for example). The transition to Arc10 is based on need and usage; as groups start using version 10, Terralyn can move it to the main server. There are no more instances of ArcIMS on local servers.

Round Table:

Dave: Installed Arc10, working okay for now. Learning about ArcSDE personal, installed an instance to see how it works. Working on NHD lately and finding a number of tools to help work with it. Went to the Texas Water Science Center (USGS) for three days to learn from their Data and Spatial Studies group. Very impressive group of GIS, web services, and data management folks.

Keith: Working in Arc10, some ArcPy, wrote/adapted a raster to NumPy array that allowed him to replicate some of the old ArcInfo docell functionality. Ron said that Python links to R, so with NumPy one can move things into R. Keith said that some people are doing their work by bringing grids straight into R. Keith also mentioned that Mosaic to New Raster wasn’t working for him; the order in which grids are added is off.

Kelly: Had some issues working with Excel files in ArcGIS. One field wasn’t coming into GIS well (came in as Null). Suggestions: Use ‘Copy Table to Table’ or adjust the formatting in Excel.

Ron: Has been converting Python scripts to v10 ArcPy. Now can do raster math right in Python code. For his web work, ADF is going away, and the pages are built on .NET and ASP.NET, so he’s wanting to shift over to JavaScript. The map page is separate. The data part can probably stay as ASP.NET.

Theresa: Plotter update – the 3rd floor plotter is accessible to both USFS and OSU; it’s the only one working presently. Hopefully the 2nd floor plotter (an older version of the 3rd floor plotter) will get fixed soon; someone is coming to service it.

Next Meeting: April 28

Treats: Theresa

Topic: Terralyn on Druple

Notes: Dave

Facilitator: Matt?

Upcoming topics: May – Sheri Schneider, USGS Oregon state liaison