GIS in Peace and Conflict Research
Posted on 8 February 2010 | No responses
Within the next couple of days, gisintersect will publish its first special issue article on GIS in Peace and Conflict Research. Stay tuned!
Global Roads Data
Posted on 7 February 2010 | No responses
Globally consistent spatial road data sets are indeed scarce. Many of the available data sets has data with highly variable consistency.
A new project hosted at CIESIN is due to release a new globally consistent road data set named gRoads.
For road density mapping, this will provide a good alternative. However, the data is not meant to cover street data, but roads between settlements.
The project is due to release in early 2010, which is hopefully about now.
More information here.
Historical state boundaries – cShapes
Posted on 6 February 2010 | No responses
Nils Weidmann at Princeton University and Kristian Skrede Gleditsch at the University of Essex has constructed this historical border dataset. The cShapes package includes all state border changes from 1946 and onward. It provides an excellent dataset to visualize border changes, in addition to construct historical data. The dataset is available both as an R package, and shapefile format.
See Nils Weidmann’s webpage for more information
Free maps and baselayers
Posted on 6 February 2010 | No responses
ArcGIS online resources center provides some very interesting basemaps for free. If you only need some background maps to visualize your information on, then this is a good solution.
The service includes both basemaps, reference maps and elevation maps.
There is a high degree of US maps, but still lots of valuable and time saving maps for the rest of us.
More info here.
GeoSpatial Modelling Environment
Posted on 6 February 2010 | 1 response
The Geospatial Modelling Environment (GME) is the predecessor of the Hawths Tools extension for ArcGIS. It is designed to facilitate rigorous spatial analysis and modelling by linking ArcGIS to the statistical software package R.
The new software has increased graphic ability in addition to batch processing, and records the workflow to ease replication.
One additional huge benefit with this new release is the ability to call on GME commands through Python.
More info here.
See also the documentation here.
FME 2010 released
Posted on 6 February 2010 | No responses
FME or “Feature Manipulation Engine”, is a spatial ETL (extract, transform and load) engine, that supports over 250 formats. The new 2010 desktop version of the software includes new powerful transformers, which are able to do various geoprocess your data.
The neat part with FME is the ability to make complex models (something like ArcGIS model builder), and the ability to translate almost any spatial data format.
More information available here
International Conference on Crisis Mapping 2010
Posted on 6 February 2010 | No responses
According to crisismappers.net, the 2010 conference will be held in Boston on October 1-3. The website for the conference is due to be published february 15.
See ICCM 2010 for more information.
Open Street Map Visualization
Posted on 6 February 2010 | No responses
Open Street Map visualizes all the 2008 edits in the database.
Highly recommended video!
ArcGIS 9.4 becomes ArcGIS 10
Posted on 6 February 2010 | No responses
As a result of many new features, new interface and additional changes in the structure of ArcGIS, the ArcGIS 9.4 will be released as ArcGIS 10/X.
GISintersect visited an ESRI conference, and can provide some additional updates on the functionality.
ArcMap 10 will be able to host a ArcCatalog window, easing your access to your files or geodatabases. However, it will still be possible to use ArcCatalog as a stand-alone program.
For geoprocessors, there will be many new tools available, in addition to increased support for Python. Now it is possible to edit maps and layers using Python scripts.
Other interesting news are, New search tool, new editor, raster editing on the fly, python commands in the field calculator. Regarding the attributetable, it is now possible to scroll between attributetables using tabs. This means that you no longer have to minimize attribute windows which is somewhat annoying.
For full details on new functionality, see the list at ESRI: http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/whats-new/whats-coming.html
According to ESRI dealers, the software will not be available public until after the summer.
Welcome to GISintersect.com
Posted on 6 February 2010 | No responses
Welcome to GISintersect.com!
This site will provide you with news regarding geographic information systems, in addition to updates on software, data, conferences and more. The idea behind gisintersect.com is to provide news about scientific use of GIS, and write on the use of geographic information systems in new fields of research.
We hope you will enjoy our news and articles.
Best regards,
Andreas