geoLibro.org

Spatial Sustain notes that NASA has awarded South Dakota State University’s Geographic Information Science Center of Excellence (an ESL student named it, then?) with a five-year, $3.29M grant to shore up gaps in Landsat coverage and availability. GIScCE? Could you please not just make this “available” online (i.e. downloadable or connectable via ArcIMS), but rather make it available in really useful, open ways like (WMS, naturally) WCS? That’d be great.

Eesh. GeoChalkBoard recently posted about FindGIS.com. I hate to be a full-on bastard about this, but is this “new” site not reminiscent of Homer’s first website from the Computer Wore Menace Shoes episode?

At least it’s offering syndicated content, and one could argue the more access points to geospatial data the better, but…yikes. I’ll bet it looks great in IE, though.

The NSF announced today that the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) will continue to operate, now under the auspices of NCAR in Boulder. This is good news for, well, everybody. Although it’s true that DLESE is cluttered with junk in some places (I’m looking at you, link-out to the general USGS site search), and although it’s true that it does look a little Web .5, it’s really a rich resource for all kinds of earth science lessons, concepts, even data. They offer several feeds and I find it sort of hard to not go look at each new resource that comes in.


“Alaska’s Cold Desert? Damn straight I’d like to learn about how well arctic wolves are coping up there.”


“National Snow and Ice Data Center? I like snow, maybe I’ll go check out why it doesn’t seem like it snows anymore.” Etcetera.

It looks like the hint Senator David Ford let out at IU’s GIS Day keynote is true: Google Earth has been updated with very high-resolution imagery that looks to be courtesy of the Indiana State government. And all of those rural areas whose states haven’t provided Google Earth with high-res coverage are just going to have to groove on that.

(I’m practicing to be a headline writer for The Post.) Once again I’m proved ignorant. DataFerrett, the Census data extraction app, is available for the Mac. I have no idea how long this has been true, but I most certainly hadn’t seen it before (I’m not clear on the versioning, but the Mac page says they’re testing 1.3.2 right now. The launcher .app is at .1). It’s a Java app, so don’t expect it to look great, but it does work. And quite frankly? Even if it didn’t work it’s encouraging to see the attention. They’ve even included a .mov of DataFerrett at work on a Mac (see Poster Frame, below); I guess to prove they’re not joking.

No word on a Linux version, and Linux doesn’t even make it into the FAQ, but still…

Get DataFerrett for Mac here.

Uh, the GIS in West Lafayette is better than in South Texas already, and I’m not even in Indiana yet. Jane Frankenberger, (Associate Professor of Agricultural and Biological Engineering) and Larry Theller, (GIS Specialist at Purdue’s Center for Advanced Applications in GIS) wrote today to the PurdueGIS ListServ about an excellent set of digital orthophotos (aerial photos) taken in 2005, in color, at a rather remarkable resolution. Agencies in South Texas also have datasets like this but they’re all a little tight-fisted about them. Border Patrol, county appraisal districts, local police, and pretty much everybody else tends to not want to grant open access to datasets like this, neither to the public nor each other.

Purdue Libraries may try to do something with these photos in the future, but for now you can download them from IU’s gis data page, view them from within an ArcIMS-run public site, or load them into ArcMap via the ArcIMS service also at Indiana University.

sample DOQ
(that happens to show the house we’re trying to buy in West Lafayette and also happens to not even be at full resolution)