Tomorrow, I’ll be heading up to the Towson University GIS (TUGIS) conference with 500 or so of my closest Maryland geo-friends. It has been restructured into a one-day event and the program seems to be very content-rich as a result. I am particularly happy to see more open-source content this year. There’s an intro session featuring PostgreSQL, PostGIS, QGIS, and GeoServerpresented by Salisbury State University. Salisbury was once known as a bastion of Manifold so they’ve got a long history of thinking outside the Arc. Additionally, there is a session (by Towson University) discussing the use of GDAL, OGR, and Shapely in the development of a spatial service.
One thing I like about regional GIS conferences like this is that they tend to focus more on solutions to real-world problems instead of the latest technological bells and whistles. I spend so much of my time with my head in Federal requirements that it’s nice do a reset and get different perspectives on how geospatial technologies are used. I am particularly interested to hear the keynote from Learon Dalby of Sanborn and formerly of the Arkansas GIO office. I had the pleasure of working with Learon and the AGIO team on a project a couple of years ago and am impressed with what they accomplished.
I appreciate the new format of TUGIS as a one-day event is much easier to fit into the schedule. I’m looking forward to it.
I’m glad you are going to be there. I’ve enjoyed following your work, and have learned a lot. It will be nice to actually meet you.
Just so you know, we are still a bastion of Manifold 🙂
Thank you. I’ve followed your work as well and agree it will be nice to meet. Happy to see Manifold still going strong. We had a license that we used for a few geoprocessing tasks on a couple of projects. There were some things that it did more smoothly but there was a steep learning curve for our Esri-trained analysts.