new jersey geographer

After far, far too long, I’m updating this blog. I originally intended to use this blog to highlight interesting geography and GIS articles with a short commentary. I’ve decided to change direction – the updates you find here will be (hopefully) substantial updates and original content.  I hope to return to somewhat frequent posting, at least once a week.

So what about those links I should’ve been postin’? Well, geography and GIS links are now “microblogged” using Twitter and Facebook. My new employer, Rowan University, is working to develop a Geographic Research Lab. I’ve created a page for the Lab on Rowan’s web site, Facebook, and Twitter. If you’re interested in GIS/Geography news, check us out.

In the near future, I hope to have an update here about my experience uploading a very large GIS data set to OpenStreetMap. We’ll see how that goes, considering my wife’s due date is next week.

Just two days after I wrote about OpenStreetMap, PC Pro, a UK computing magazine, posted a blog about the brilliance of OpenStreetMap.  This entry is a much better introduction to OSM than what I previously wrote.

This blog has been lacking in content lately. Kate and I have been working on purchasing a house in Glassboro. We’re making settlement at the end of the month. Once we move in and get adjusted, they’ll be more time for the blog and all my other side projects.

Currently on Rowan’s homepage is an article on the Geography Department‘s work on bring GIS to the greater university community. The article focuses on our recent web mapping work; specifically the Land Use Change viewer and NJ State Atlas.  I’m quoted several times in the article, so I’m excited about that.

Direct link to the full article: http://www.rowan.edu/today/news/index/FS/118

ESRI’s ArcGIS 9.3 has now been released and should be arriving soon if you’ve kept your tithing maintenance up to date.

Post your hopes and expectations of 9.3 in the comments below.

LibLAS, an open-source (BSD) licensed software library for reading and writing ASPRS‘s LAS format.

From their website:

libLAS provides excellent coverage of the ASPRS LAS 1.0 and 1.1 specifications, and it provides support for copying variable length records from one file to another. As of 1.0.0-beta-1, support for creating your own variable length records is limited to the C and C++ APIs. libLAS concentrates on reading and writing point data for processing pipelines from C++, C, and Python.

The beta version of 1.0 supports creating any of the vector formats supported by OGR. This makes it all the easier for open source users to handle LiDAR data.