Spatial Data Management Group Meeting Notes For September 25, 2008

Treats: Kelly

Notes: Dave

Facilitator: Patti

Attendees: - Kelly, Dave, Terralyn, Keith, Patti, Theresa, Matt, Beth T., Mark W.

Speaker:

Craig Greenwald from ESRI: Mobile GIS at ESRI, particularly ArcPad and ArcGIS Mobile. He discussed the different mobile GIS software applications, their different strengths, and why one would use one rather than the other depending on one’s goals, users, and available programming skills.

Agenda:

Upcoming Meetings:

Willamette Valley GIS Users Meeting, at OSU Valley Library, Willamette Seminar Room (Room 3622), on Tuesday, October 28, 2008, from 1 to 4 p.m.: Two groups will be presenting GIS tools to support natural resources decision making. In addition, Alice from City of Corvallis GIS will be presenting their new CorvallisMaps application.

NW GIS User Conference Sun Valley Idaho (Oct 20-24): Kelly and Keith are going.

Managing Sensor Data in Near Real Time: Theresa will bring proceedings to next SDMG meeting.

NHD (National Hydrography Dataset) Workshop: Patti, Beth, and Mark all went. The presenters did a good job clarifying the difference between the regular NHD (geodatabase) and NHD-Plus (not geodatabase). They also demonstrated good tools, such as one that allows users to create routed stream sections by clicking on individual reaches.

ASPRS Meeting in Vancouver, WA, Sept 19th: No one went.

Training needs:

What's New in ArcGIS 9.3: Session won’t be held until late fall. Version 9.3 won’t be loaded on the Forestry lab computers until probably November, so there’s no hurry.

Software:

ArcGIS 9.3: Note that installing 9.3 (which includes Python v2.5) can mess up Python references if one chooses not to uninstall Python v2.4. ESRI is not supporting v2.4 now, and some notable changes have ben made.

ArcGIS Server: Theresa and Terralyn are moving projects off of ArcIMS and on to ArcGIS Server. They hope to put the “data/fordata” folder on ArcGIS Server soon. ArcGIS Server has metadata search capability, so this could be quite useful. They also hope to get ImageServer functioning so that it provides the data (spectral values), not just the images.

Portal Toolkit: They are planning to install this. SDE needs to be updated to 9.3 first.

Data:

GIS Day: Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

Theresa hasn’t heard from the OSU coordinator yet (Michelle Kinzel). Waiting for the school year to start.

Round table:

Dave: Has been testing four different commercial off-the-shelf LiDAR applications to see whether FRESC should buy one. Prices range between $3000 and $10,000. Two are ArcGIS extensions and two are stand-alone applications. Most are better for rapid visualization than for analysis and processing. Will demonstrate at next meeting.

Keith: Has been working on making an ArcGIS Server project. He succeeded in making a service and a directory, but it’s not quite working yet. Only letting him look at directories where the service is, not where the data resides.

Mark: Is fairly new at EPA, working on spatial prediction modeling of nutrient exceedance levels for phosphorous in streams. Also working on sampling frame design.

Patti: Said that folks at EPA are doing stream flow modeling in relation to climate change.

Kelly: Said that their group (ALI) recently hired someone to work on water and climate change. Also, Becky Flitcroft has been looking at estuaries and how climate change could affect juvenile salmon. She has had difficulty finding coastal data. Patti says that there are recent estuary delineations that she helped work on at EPA. Folks at the Newport lab and Seattle Marine Sciences Lab (PISCES data) are also working on this type of thing.