Attendees: Dave, Keith, Kelly, Matt, Terralyn, Theresa

Spatial Data Management Group Meeting Thursday July 28th @ 10:00, Peavy 224

Attendees: Dave, Keith, Kelly, Matt, Terralyn, Theresa Topic: no special topic: spend more time on round table Treats: Matt Notes: Dave Facilitator: Terralyn

General meeting:

Meetings: Terralyn will set up a “Meetings” page on the SDMG website where the list of meetings can be housed.

· ESRI Users Conference, July 11-15, 2011, San Diego, CA Website: http://www.esri.com/events/user- conference/index.html Notes: There was apparently a lot of discussion about the “cloud”, but none of us were there, so we can’t say for sure. We briefly discussed arcgis.com, where one can create a map, save it “there” and share it, or save it offline as a Javascript API.

· Dori was planning to attend Society for Conservation GIS Conference, July 16-19, 2011, Big Bear Lake, CA

· Willamette Vally Users group : Wednesday August 10th 1-4 Salem Library http://www.orurisa.org/Default.aspx?pageId=507168 (web stuff, and John Sharrard)

· 12th International Symposium on Spatial and Temporal Databases: August 24-26, 2011 Minneapolis, MN http://sstd2011.cs.umn.edu

· Environmental Information Management September 28-29, 2011, Santa Barbara https://eim.ecoinformatics.org/eim2011. Theresa is going with the National Synthesis group.

· Silvilaser 2011 – 11th International Conference on LiDAR Applications for Assessing Forest Ecosystems; October 16-20, 2011, University of Tasmania

· ESRI NW Users Group, October 17-21 in Boise, ID. http://www.nwgis.org/

· 34th Applied Geography Conference, October 19-21, 2011, in Redlands, CA: http://applied.geog.kent.edu

Data:  Andrews LiDAR point clouds have been sent to the OpenTopography facility at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. http://www.opentopography.org/ (interesting site). This is part of a larger LTER effort to send their Lidar data to OpenTopography, where it is housed and made publicly available. Data are available as Google Earth visualizations, standard DEMs, and point clouds; some simple user-selected processing tools are also available.  Terralyn was contacted by Carl White, GIS Analyst with Klamath Tribes, who found the SDMG drupal website. He noticed the announcement about NAIP imagery being available via the Oregon Explorer services. We do have the half-meter, color-infrared, quad-based 2009 NAIP imagery on T:\GIS. (Is this what Oregon Explorer has?) These images are not set up as an image library, but that might help improve access and speed. We (or maybe Oregon Explorer?) also have the 1-meter county mosaics, pre-corrected.  Keith loaded the 2010 LANDFIRE datasets for Oregon, Washington, and California in to T:\GIS at usa\landfire. This was 30 GB, so he deleted a similar amount of older data. He also has the disks for the entire U.S., so if anyone wants to use these, contact Keith.

Training: Theresa is thinking of taking the Javascript API class again. The OSU GIS community gets two classes per year through the ESRI Development Center, and we have only used one so far.

Software/Hardware:  ArcGIS 10 is going into the computer labs for the fall.  Keith stumped ESRI tech support on raster saving issues on the network. Since they can’t replicate the COF network, they can’t really test the problem. Things work okay on his hard drive and some of the network drives, but not on others. It works in new directories, but once the directories have been used for awhile, the problem sometimes will arise. Writing to file system rasters (ESRI Grid) is the problem; writing to a file geodatabase raster is fine.  More “Cloud Computing” discussion: o USFS has its own cloud-like “Data Center” that centralizes data, software apps, etc., and Forests are supposed to tie in to that. It’s a virtual server with terminal services, like remote desktop. Each software application that’s opened can be coming from a different remote server/computer. This can create some difficulties in using different ArcGIS applications, such as when ArcCatalog and ArcMap are opened separately. Files cannot necessarily be easily dragged and dropped from one to the other, as usual, since the applications might be coming from separate computers. o Pros/Cons of the “cloud”: storage is fairly cheap, but the fees to transfer data are expensive. o OSU is working on its own “cloud”, or distributed storage.

Round table: Theresa – The new HJ Andrews full-color map/brochure has been released. The new website is also up now – andrewsforest.oregonstate.edu.

Terralyn – She is experiencing a shift in duties. Since hardly anyone is using Unix computers anymore, she is now focusing half of her time on the College of Forestry website, as the liaison between users and the “ultra-techies”: Chris S. and Matt V. This led to a larger discussion about Forestry Computing Resources (FCR) personnel. Individual staff of FCR can be funded by projects for part of their time if available and projects can pay. Keith said that Ultra (name?) wants someone’s time for database/Drupal integration. Terralyn suggested they might be able to work with Matt V. It also led to a larger discussion of the OSU web site management/branding/congruence guidelines. Some felt that the guidelines were fairly constraining, but Terralyn explained the reasoning behind them, and that besides the requirement of using the “top hat” at the top of the pages, a fair amount of flexibility is possible. Keith asked about how to deal with a project where OSU is only one of multiple collaborators, since it doesn’t seem fair to “brand” a multi-organization project as an “OSU” project. In that case, it is possible to apply for a separate domain name and pay for it and the hosting fee, which is somewhere in the $150-200 range per year.

Next Meeting: August 25 Treats: Terralyn Notes: tbd Facilitator: Kelly Upcoming topics: Dori review the SCGIS conference? Theresa demo the HJA website? Matt do something with Python?