Redefined Horizons Blog

The day has finally arrived!

You can now download San Joaquin County GIS data from the web. Here is the web address:

http://sjmap.org/GISDataDownload.asp

Note: Read the legal stuff carefully. I believe some of the old licensing language still applies to the downloaded data.

The Sunburned Surveyor

Lathrop High School ACE Team

Last Wednesday evening I gave  group of high school students a crash course in 3D modeling using SketchUp. It was an interesting demo, as I hadn’t used SketchUp for a long time. The students are required to use SketchUp to prepare a 3D model and rendering of the monument they are designing. The students are designing the monument to represent the City of Sacramento as part of the Sacramento ACE design competition.

The American Surveyor – Footsteps Column

I wrapped up the article graphics for two (2) of my latest articles on boundary surveying that will be published in the Footsteps column of  The American  Surveyor Magazine. The graphics for my article on Best Practices for Very Large Boundary Surveys were completed on Friday. Today I completed the graphics for an article discussing the court case Fripps versus Walters. I’ll start working on the graphics for my article Determining Property Corner History tomorrow. The first of these 3 articles, Best Practices for Very Large Boundary Surveys, should be published in the February issue of the American Surveyor.

CCVGPG Working Groups

I started work today on the web pages for the working groups of the California Central Valley Geospatial Professionals Group. I hope to have the the web pages up this week.

The Sunburned Surveyor

Bruce Joffe has graciously volunteered to give the main talk at the Spring Meeting of CCVGPG. His topic will be geospatial data licensing strategies and considerations for public agencies.

The meeting is schedule for Friday, March 16. It will be held at the SSJID office in Ripon.

I’m looking for a second speaker. Please contact me if your interested. If I can’t find a second speaker, I’ll give a talk about the Creative Commons, Public Domain, and Open Data Commons licenses to coincide with Bruce Joffe’s talk.

If you would like to sponsor our meeting and cover the cost of lunch, please let me know.

The Sunburned Surveyor

I’m giving a 30 minute talk at UC Berekeley’s GIS Day tomorrow. The talk will be about how GIS can help solve three (3) problems faced currently by communities in the California Central Valley. I’ll try to video tape the talk and post a link later to it later in the week. I was also pleased to learn that my friend Ragi Burhum will be giving the keynote address at the event. Ragi said I could tape his talk, so I will try to post a link to it as well.

The Sunburned Surveyor

I recently stumbled across a blog on spatial law topics. I wanted to share the blog, entitled “Spatial Law and Policy”, with my readers. The author of the blog, Kevin Pomfret, is the Executive Director of the Centre for Spatial Law and Policy.

The Sunburned Surveyor

I just learned that during the State of the Map 2010, MapQuest announced their support for OpenStreetMap. The OpenStreetMap wiki indicates this is the first large online mapping service to embrace OpenStreetMap.

On a MapQuest blog post from December 16, 2010 the company announced the addition of the US open map site in partnership with OpenStreetMap. The US site was being added to 10 open sourced maps in Europe and Asia.

I’m still not clear on exactly how the partnership between OpenStreetMap and MapQuest works. What does each partner get out of the arrangement? How does this fit in and improve the MapQuest business model? The information in the blog post and on the OpenStreetMap wiki didn’t seem to have the answers to these questions.

The Sunburned Surveyor

The October 22, 2011 issue of the Economist Magazine had an article entitled “The Dismal Scoop on Groupon”. The article offered a few insights on Groupon that I thought were worth noting. (I’ve never used Groupon myself.)

The first insight explains why Groupon is open to copycat competition. The article states: “Groupon created a new market. This is a boon to consumers, but confers no lasting “first-mover” advantage on Groupon. Its business model is unpatentable and simple to replicate, so there are already more than 20 copycats.”

This means the company has the first in the market lead, but copycat companies that do a better job with the same business model will offer stiff competition to the company.

The second insight is the importance of geography to the way Groupon works. The article states: “Groupon aspires to be global, but the markets it serves are intensely local. Internet selling is best suited to “experience goods”. These are goods and services the quality of which you cannot judge until you experience them, such as haircuts and Thai meals, so there is no advantage in having a bricks-and-mortar shop for people to browse in. (In North America 83% of Groupon’s deals fall into this category.) The trouble with experience goods is that generally you cannot separate manufacture from delivery: you cannot cook a meal in Guangzhou and eat it in New York.”

I’d never heard the term “experience goods” before. It made me wonder what other types of goods and services were inherently “local”. At any rate, it sounds like geography is really important to the Groupon business model. There has got to be room for some GIS analysis that would allow Groupon to improve on its operation.

The third insight is that Groupon’s system can be abused by the businesses that offer discounts through the service. The article states: “A final woe: the Groupon model is open to abuse. Nicole Peters, an avid online shopper, describes how she bought a massage via one of Groupon’s rivals. The day before the appointment, the massage firm e-mailed her to say it had gone bust. Ms Peters also bought a voucher for several pairs of men’s underpants. When she logged onto the supplier’s website, there were only huge pairs or bright pink ones available. She says she will never shop this way again. Groupon’s webpage includes a guide to avoiding arguments with merchants, which suggests such tiffs are common.”

This makes me cautious about using a service like Groupon, and goes to show how important community management is to a business model based to a certain extent on trust, like the Groupon business model is.

The Sunburned Surveyor

I attended the Fall 2011 Gold Country GIS User Group meeting yesterday in San Andreas. I was late to the meeting, and missed the first speaker. However, I caught the last talk on GIS projects and GIS web application development at Calaveras County. The portion of the talk on GIS projects being completed by the County was given by Tim Koch. He talked about three (3) projects:

1. The County’s participation in PSAP as part of the 2010 Census.
2. Re-districting of the County Board of Supervisor Districts.
3. RIMS mapping for 911 emergency response.

It was interesting to hear about the projects of a local government and their corresponding challenges. It sounds like accurate street addresses and the way they are used in computer aided dispatch for emergency response are a real problem.

Tim Koch did a good job on the presentation.

I volunteered to do a short talk on OpenLayers and web GIS application development at the spring meeting. We’ll have to see how that pans out.

The Sunburned Surveyor

Michael Michaud recently posted some interesting OpenJUMP download statistics to the OpenJUMP user mailing list. Here is the top 5 countries for download of OpenJUMP, at more than 300 downloads a month:

• Germany
• France
• Brazil
• Italy
• United States
• India

Here is the next 5 countries, at 100 to 300 downloads a month:

• Spain
• China
• Canada
• Belgium
• United Kingdom

One of the things I’ve always enjoyed most about working with OpenJUMP is the global user community, as these download stats show. Its too bad all of those other countries are using the meter instead of the foot. :]

The Sunburned Surveyor

Michael Michaud has created a new plug-in for splitting or adding nodes to features in OpenJUMP. The plug-in can optionally comply with snap settings and will preserve attributes.

There is some English documentation for the new OpenJUMP noder plug-in.

I look forward to checking out this excellent work by Michael Michaud in the most recent nightly build of OpenJUMP.

The Sunburned Surveyor