Treats: Terralyn Notes: Matt Facilitator: Keith

Spatial Data Management Group Meeting Thursday, August 30, 2012 Richardson 313 Attendance: Ken Crouse, Kelly Christiansen, Heather Roberts, Terralyn Vandetta, Matt Gregory, Keith Olsen, Ray Drapek, Max Taylor, Nick Hallahan, Kuuipo Walsh, Ron Beloin, Peter Eldred

Main Topic

Ron Beloin gave a presentation on how he has been using Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) to transform and render metadata for LTER datasets. Ron has been working with the LTER group to ingest Ecological Metadata Language (EML) documents, transform them with XSL to capture the relevant nodes, and merge this information with existing metadata into spatial datasets. He gave a number of examples on best practices for using XSL including a ‘tread lightly’ philosophy of using XSL templates. He also provided examples of using XSL to write to different output formats such as Python dictionaries. This process is encapsulated within an ArcGIS tool that can perform this operation as a batch.

Meetings

 ESRI Users Conference, July 8-12, San Diego, CA: Candice-Michelle Weems (Geosciences) will be attending the conference. We hope to have her at an upcoming SDMG meeting to give us highlights.

 Local OpenStreetMap meeting, June 20, Corvallis, OR: Matt reported that there were three people at last month’s meeting and the main topic was about importing building footprint data for Corvallis. Brian Wilson (Alsea Geospatial) has received permission from Benton County to import all building footprint data into OSM, but wants to be careful about how that happens. Likely it will be some mix of automated imports and local ground checking. There was also some talk about the ethics of OSM and trying to find folks that might be able to speak on that topic.

 GIS Social, Corvallis, OR: Ken and Kuuipo attended, mostly municipal and state employees attend this function. Beth (the leader) is interested in passing the leadership along to someone else for organizing the dinners.

 URISA Geospatial workshop, May 30, Newport, OR: Max attended this workshop and said it was quite good. He has a great write-up of the conference at: http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/geo599spatialstatistics/2013/06/10/usira-spatial-statistics- conference-report-and-my-geo599-sob-story/.

 Matt will be attending an Edward Tufte seminar on July 23 in Portland. Cost is $200 for faculty/students and includes all four of Tufte’s books. Software

 Kuuipo mentioned that OSU has been approached by Google to receive some free licenses of Google Earth Pro as well as Google Maps Engine. She is contemplating on what machines to put the licenses and offered a couple to Forestry.

 There was a bit of talk on whether ArcGIS 10.1 included Workstation or not. It does not look like it does, however Mark Klopsch has copied over the 10.0 install of Workstation into the 10.1 folders for Forestry users.

 Kelly reported on a training session given by Jonathan Burnett (Forestry) on integrating ArcGIS and Fusion for easier visualization of LAS files. He will see if Jonathan is interested in giving a demo to the SDMG group.

 Terralyn noted that very few users are still using Imagine and more users are using ENVI/IDL. She proposes shifting the funding model such that CoF supports the site-license purchase of ENVI/IDL and individual users can purchase Imagine if needed. There seemed to be general agreement with this decision.

 Esri has put out a new map service of current forest fires: http://tmappsevents.esri.com/website/wildfire-responsive/index.html

 NAIP 2011 imagery is being served through Oregon Explorer website

 Max reported that he has loads of biophysical data for the whole US (climate, soils, etc.) if folks would like to share.

Training

 Dr. Bernie Jenny will be teaching an Algorithms for Geovisualization course in Fall 2013. The course will focus on how GIS data is modeled and algorithms for manipulation of these data. The course will use Java as the main development language and use QGIS for visualizing spatial data. For more information, see: http://cartography.oregonstate.edu/resources/Geo-599- Geovisualization-Flyer.pdf

Round Table

 Ray Drapek – He has loads of output from their global vegetation model (MC1) which he has placed on an FTP site for anyone who is interested. The data cover all of the US and Canada and are at 5 arc minute resolution. He is continuing to work on metadata and a general technical report.

 Keith Olsen – He attended the R workshop put on by Ariel Muldoon and said it was very good. The workshop focused on data manipulation in R and Ariel has notes and examples. Contact Keith for details. He also shared some frustration with bringing Access data directly into ArcGIS geodatabase tables and finally ended up translating to CSV.

 Nick Hallahan – Looking for recommendations on “best” backend database to use for GIS analysis. He is leaning toward using PostgreSQL/PostGIS as that is well supported for many desktop GIS programs (ArcGIS/QGIS). Ron also mentioned that he has done many similar types of analysis using SQL Server/SDE.

 Matt Gregory – Continuing to battle latest round of GNN modeling and started playing around with Landsat 8 imagery.

 Ken Crouse – Went through Mapping with Google short course and thought that it was OK, although geared toward users rather than developers.

Next Meeting

 July 18 at 10:00 in Richardson 313

 Topic: Matt presents the work going on at MapBox or Candice-Michelle Weems reports back on Esri UC

 Treats: Theresa

 Notes: Nick

 Facilitator: Ray