The sixth quarterly Salt Lake GIS Users Group (SLUG) meeting was held on October 26, 2010, from 11:30 am to 1:30 pm in the Saltair Room of the Union Building on the University of Utah campus. We had about 105 in attendance.
Business
Scott Davis, SLUG Board Chair
The next SLUG meeting will be held February 9, 2011, by the LDS Church. More details to follow. Please plan on it now.
Food and drinks were sponsored by the DIGIT Lab at the University of Utah.
SLUG Board openings: Joe Borgione, one of the SLUG founders, has retired from the Board. We are therefore seeking one or more people to join the Board. If interested, or if you want to nominate someone, please send applicable info to: saltlakeusersgroup@gmail.com.
Introduction to the U of U Geography Department - George F. Hepner, Department Chair - Slides
GIS Humor
(pre-meeting slide show) Ray Montgomery A series of GIS and GPS - related cartoons.
Presentations
Kevin Sato, Cottonwood Heights City, GIS in Emergency Management
Kevin spoke briefly about what he has done relating to Emergency Management at Cottonwood Heights. He brought and passed around some printed colored door ribbons (indicating status of the residents, such as fatality, needs medical help, etc) to be hung on front doors by the residents in a disaster. He mentioned that they got a great deal printing these through Smith's. They also have a paper form to be filled out with details for each residence.
He also discussed a series of tests that were performed to determine the effectiveness of different possible emergency radio frequencies in the different terrains in the city. They have ended up with local neighborhoods having radios to communicate to their central areas, and these then have more powerful radios to communicate to the city EOC. This was all quite interesting and helpful.
Kevin Bell, Salt Lake City GIS, Introduction to Python at ArcGIS 10
If you missed Kevin's presentation, you missed a funny demo of using Python to automate an animated Pac-Man figure following city streets on an ArcGIS screen.
With ArcGIS 10 we see a full commitment to Python from ESRI. Python is appropriate for anything from simple tasks to complex applications, and is powerful for beginners and experts alike. Kevin gave a taste of the language itself, some simple field calculations, used arcpy to execute tools in sequence, built some custom tools, automated map production, and showed how to access and manipulate data. He also showed where to find the guidance you need in the ESRI help documentation and referred us to some excellent Python books. Python 2.6 Quick Reference - Python: Visual Quickstart Guide Check out Kevin's presentation below!
ESRI Staff- Dave Vaillancourt and Jason Channin, Current and Future Trends in Sharing GIS Information
GIS and the platforms used to support and deliver geospatial information are changing. In this presentation, They discussed the current and future trends in sharing and disseminating geospatial information. Topics included the role of GIS in Gov 2.0 and social media, the proliferation of web mapping and mobile technology, and cloud computing as a new technology platform for GIS.
Check out ESRI's presentation below! ESRI Slides
To our presenters and our sponsor, “Thank you!” And thank you for your interest and support!