Frequent users of King County iMap, the online app that provides scores of the most popular King County GIS data layers in a flexible, multi-feature, interactive map viewer, now have access to 2017 aerial orthophoto imagery as a basemap.
As a founding member of the Puget Sound QGIS User Group (PSQGIS), I am often asked why one would want to use QGIS in place of the ubiquitous6 Esri GIS software. I have two responses to this question, the first based on the ideology of software freedom and the second based on value for the dollar.
Gerrymandering, the process of manipulating political district boundaries for some advantage, is a broadly recognized but poorly understood process. This topic was first discussed here in GIS & You by Dennis Higgins in a September 2017 article. Now, Mark Salling, Ph.D., GISP, Senior Fellow and Research Associate at the Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University, has written an informative article for the GIS Professional, the bimonthly newsletter of the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association.
On International Women’s Day 2018, here are some thoughts…
If you are pursuing GISP certification, or are thinking of doing so, URISA is offering a webinar on the GISP exam process on April 3 and 4, 2018.
My first foray into the world of open source GIS occurred at a meeting of Cascadia Users of Geospatial Open Source (CUGOS) back in 2007 at the offices of LizardTech in Seattle’s Pioneer Square. At the time, I didn’t know anything about what open source was or how it was being used.
The 2017 URISA GIS Salary Survey is now available. Some highlights of the survey and an executive summary that you can download are available to everyone on the URISA website.
Data quality at King County GIS includes processes and tools for validation of the contents of the Spatial Data Warehouse. Multiple linked automated and manual steps help ensure good internal consistency and an anomaly-free environment, both for file-system and database objects.
Seattle, the county seat for King County and the largest city in the state of Washington, has seen great growth in the past 15 years in the construction of new buildings and infrastructure. During this same 15-year span, here in the King County GIS Center we have added two sets of vintage “lidar” data for the county to our GIS data library.
I am not a geographer and until I started working with the KCGIS Center team, my idea of GIS was just “maps and stuff.” When it comes to mapping, I was more of a Google Maps guy to get me from point A to point B…that’s it! Working with KCGIS has shown me that GIS is so much more than just maps and stuff…
