Spatial Data Management Group Meeting Notes January 13, 2005

Treats: Keith (they were yummy)

Notes: John Wells

Speaker: Ken Vance-Borland

Ken spoke on the use color in creating barrier free graphics. The focus of his talk was on how color is perceived by color perception challenged people and what a presenter can do to counter the difficulty. The following web addresses might of interest to those wishing to know more.
vischeck
Green Light Lazers
How to make figures and presentations that are friendly to color blind people
Used to test robustness of individual color schemes.

Meeting:

Theresa announced the OSU Certificate of Geographic Information Science and encouraged people to take a look at it.

Data Storage: Terralyn and Theresa met with the library group on data storage. This group is looking at the possibility of putting all spatial data on the campus onto one server. Terralyn and Theresa expressed some concerns about this idea. They felt the larger group is in the early stages and at present trying to get a handle on potential costs involved in such a project. The data storage committee met and made a couple of recommendations to the group:

1. The cost of supporting /data/fordata on the Unix system be transfered to the general fees (spread across all users). Terralyn will bring to FCC.

2. Theresa and John are going to look into marketing the data in /data/fordata so that we can try and get funding for a data librarian.

Upcoming Meetings

The Python Group meeting is in FSL 200 at 10AM on January 19.

GIS In Action March 28-29 in Portland.

Forest Service/BLM Meeting April 18-22 in Phoenix

Society of Conservation GIS (SCGIS) Meeting will be held near the end of January in Corvallis

the Eighth Annual SCGIS Conference, to be held from July 31 - August 2, 2005 at Monterey, California (USA) and the

Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) User Conference at San Diego, California (USA) from July 25-29th, 2005.

Round Table:

A discussion about publicizing the SDMG resulted in a decision to put an ad on the kiosk at the help desk as well as explore other avenues. (don't remember who was going to do this?)
The idea of using gaming theory in visualization was expressed. I believe Tim Holt is going to be our next speaker and this is his area of interest. The game Half Life II was mentioned.
Matt Gregory mentioned Michael Guzy has established an instance of ArcGis Server and an application, although rudimentary, that uses it. This promises to be a supplement to SDE and Arc IMS.
Terralyn mentioned the need to answer the recent survey sent out by an on campus group.
Theresa brought up that the Forest Service is slowing down (no new software/computers/etc) system for a month in the near future (until early March). Users might want to get what they need prior to shutdown.
Ken mentioned the idea of a coop learning group. Matt volunteered to look into establishing one. It was suggested that this could be part of the python group.
Ken also mentioned sensitivity and uncertainty analysis and a program entitled @Risk. Another program is SIMLAB. Ken volunteered to talk to us about this at a future meeting
Kelly shared that X, Y data loaded from a spread sheet disappeared when the resultant map was zoomed in.

Next meeting:

February 17, room 313 in Richardson (assuming available) at 10AM.
March 10, also at 10 in room 313.