GIS Day - November 20th

Los Angeles County is hosting its 6th annual GIS Day event.

The event will be open from 9:00am to 3:00pm at

Grand Park (Olive Court)
200 N Grand Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90012
This year’s event is titled “GIS – Tying LA County Together”.  The event is designed for County residents, government employees, and students.

Find more details on the official GIS Day site. 

GIS Day - November 18

This week has been a particularly good GIS week for me. I have managed to get quite a bit accomplished at my day job implementing GIS web applications and developing new resources.

One exciting bit of news was an announcement for this years Los Angeles County Annual GIS Day event which has been booked for the Civic Center Mall in downtown Los Angeles for November 18, 2009. Please mark your calendar and save the date if you are interested in GIS activies, especially as they relate to the greater Los Angeles area. There may even be ESRI representatives there.

I'll post more details as they become available.

KML for maps

I participated in a great GIS Day event yesterday, but it left me pretty exhausted by the time I got home, so no blog entry.

Today, we can talk about KML. KML is a set of data is a specific XML format that represents geographic locations. So, what can you do with it? You can take information from a database, get it geocoded and output it to a KML file. You can then send the file to Google Earth or any other mapping service that understands KML, and all those locations will display on the map. You can map all your group members, customers, offices, work sites or even the location of all your vacation photos. You don't need to buy mapping software or set up your own server. Your data is dynamic, so your map is dynamic. Add a new work order and it shows up on your map.

Los Angeles County GIS Day

For those who are near Los Angeles County, they are hosting a GIS Day event at the Hall of Administration down town. Address is 500 W. Temple St, Los Angeles, CA. While this event is primarily for employees to share their GIS expertise, the public is welcome to come check it out.

ClustrMaps

With GIS Day coming up, how can you add GIS to your Blog?

I found ClustrMaps today. It functions as a hit counter, but with a GIS twist. It puts a map on your site (or Blog) showing the location of your recent visitors. You and your visitors will find it fascinating to see where everyone is visiting from.

Installation is easy. Sign up for an account on ClustrMaps. On your Blogger site, add an "HTML/Javascript" gadget. Copy the code from ClustrMaps into "content" window of the Blogger gadget and save. When you look at your Blog you will now see a map with dots showing the locations of your recent visitors.

You can also log in to your ClustrMaps account and get hit statistics, so it serves as a hitcounter too. The service is free with the option to upgrade for a small fee of $1.99. If you have a popular site with over 2,500 hits daily, you will need to upgrade in order to track all the visitors correctly.

GIS Day - November 19

GIS Day this year is November 19, 2008.

GIS stands for Geographic Information Systems. What most people think of is maps. GIS features include a lot more than just maps.

• Step by step driving directions is a common GIS feature that is not often thought of as being a GIS function. Maps are helpful, but most mapping sites include the step by step directions to help people get where they want to go.


• Spacial anlysis is looking at data based on physical location. When it comes to business, you might want to know what areas receive lots of sales, while others are under served. Survey data may need to consider the socio-economic status of those being polled.
  
• Proximity is another common GIS task. This helps people locate resources (stores, government buildings, airports) that are near their location.
  
• Geolocation is identifying where something is located. Afterwhich, it can be placed on a map or you can then determine proximity.

GIS features on your web site can add an interactive aspect that is not only informative, but can be quite fun too. There are several web based GIS service providers available on the Internet. Many of them provide simple copy and paste of HTML code to add a map to your site. They also provide API's so that you can develop custom applications on your web site as well. Services are often free for limited use. It is also possible to purchase and set up in-house GIS services, which may be especially important if you have proprietary or confidential data to protect.

Think about ways that you can add a GIS feature to your web site.