ESRI European User Conference: 26-28 October 2011 - Madrid, Spain

Three days during which users can get updates on the latest GIS news in the ESRI world, attend useful technical workshops run by ESRI staff and hear how people are using GIS around the world in several fields. We will be there!

Italian GIS Conference ASITA: 15-18 November 2011 - Parma, Italy. Come to visit us!

ASITA, one of the biggest GIS appointments in Italy this time in our home town! Come to visit us, we will be at booth 14 available to start collaborative projects and offering specials on training and software, games and more!

The Mountaintop Removal layer available under the Global Awareness directory of Google Earth has exposed the areas affected by this destructive mining practise to the world rising awareness of the issue among citizens worldwide.

The layer includes fly through over the mining sites, descriptive balloons of each sites and before and after overlays.  Additionally through the "My Connection" tool, visitors are linked to an interactive PHP web page where their zip code, typed into a web form, is used to query a MySQL database to identify their particular electricity provider, the coal-fired power plants operated by that utility, and the actual mine sites that have supplied those plants with coal over the past five years.

Mountaintop removal coal mining is changing the American landscape on a scale that is hard to comprehend unless you see it from the air. Anyone who has ever flown in a small aircraft over southern West Virginia or eastern Kentucky will never forget the experience of seeing the massive scale of destruction - mountain after mountain blown up and dumped into valleys as far as the eye can see. Mountaintop removal affects more than mountains and streams, however; it is threatening to displace and destroy a distinctly American culture that has persisted in the Appalachian Mountains for generations.

Mountaintop removal is a relatively new type of coal mining that began in Appalachia in the 1970s as an extension of conventional strip mining techniques. Primarily, mountaintop removal is occurring in West Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee. Coal companies in Appalachia are increasingly using this method because it allows for almost complete recovery of coal seams while reducing the number of workers required to a fraction of what conventional methods require.

The US Environmental Protection Agency defines mountaintop removal as follows: “Mountaintop removal/valley fill is a mining practice where the tops of mountains are removed, exposing the seams of coal. Mountaintop removal can involve removing 500 feet or more of the summit to get at buried seams of coal. The earth from the mountaintop is then dumped in the neighbouring valleys.”

The process involves the clearing of the vegetation, the blasting of the mountain, the dumping of the debris in the valley, the pollution of water and land. A number of organizations and affected communities are fighting this type of destructive practice. Learn more on:

http://www.ilovemountains.org/resources/

Fishery analyst Online was born as a web adaptation of Fishery Analyst for ArcGIS Desktop. The online version aims to take advantage of the new web based technologies offering improved accessibility, data sharing, integration, centralization and resources optimization beside new functionalities.

New features have been added to version 3 including multiple selection menus, improved symbology, interface and independence from third party software (all you need is a browser and a web server!).

Institutions such as national, federal and international agencies and universities working in the domain of fishery science and management will benefit from this application.

Fishery Analyst Online version 3.0 is a web GIS application aiming to effectively query fishery data, analyze and visualize temporal and spatial patterns of fishery dynamics. The main functions are quantitative estimation and visualization of catch and effort and their variation in space and time, analysis of fishing vessel and gear utilization, data quality control, and deriving information on the location of important economic and threatened species. The application can easily read any type of geo-referenced fishery data.

Data can be searched and selected using a rich query interface based on criteria such as region, event, date, caught species, and gear or catch characteristics. Parameters such as catch and effort can be then aggregated on a user defined grid.

Data are also displayed in table format and plotted in bar or pie charts.

More information...

Mappamondo GIS will offer web based instructor-led training courses starting from 2012! Participants will be able to follow the course from the convenience of their desktop using the Internet with the advantage of saving the cost and environmental impact to travel to a training location. The virtual classroom supports all typical classroom features including an intensive interaction among participants and the instructor. Try it!

Geodatabase design, management and editing

Duration: 16 hours

Students learn how to use ArcCatalog to manage their data and about the different types of geodatabase that are available. Students will be introduced to tools for creation, loading and manipulating of data and will work with the most common geodatabase elements. Students learn about geodatabase behaviour including subtypes, domains, topology & relationship classes

Marine GIS

Duration: 16 + 24 hours

This course intends to give an in depth overview of the application of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping and analyses to marine environments.

Participants new to GIS or that wish to refresh basic GIS skills on the new ArcGIS 10 software can take the "Introduction to ArcGIS 10" classes in the first 16 hours of the course.

The following 24 hours will cover an Introduction to Remote Sensing, a marine habitat mapping case study from remotely sensed images including image processing, comparison of different image classification techniques, accuracy assessment, data collection on the field methods, field data entry and analysis through the Model Builder.

Dive GIS course

We are changing the modality with which we offer this unique course. The yearly offering will be discontinued and the course will be offered on demand to group of people of 10-15 participants!

Pictures of the 6th edition that was successfully held last summer are now available on our website!

Britain's National mapping agency is working to develop colour schemas for map symbology that works well for everybody including people affected by Colour Vision Deficiency (CVD).

CVD basically means an inability to see certain colours; often red and green, but also other colours too. It affects approximately one in 12 men and one in 100 women in the UK and can make the colours that have traditionally used for maps virtually indistinguishable. That’s a sizable minority of the population, all with a problem that is often forgotten or overlooked.

The agency hired a number of people affected by CVD and let them assess various combinations of colours.

Read more!

With the latest release of ArcGIS Online, you can now add shapefiles, text files (TXT and CSV), and GPX files directly to your web map. You can drag data from your computer onto your map or, with just the click of a button, add it to your map in the ArcGIS.com map viewer or ArcGIS Explorer Online. Once you’ve added your data, you can configure pop-up windows and change the symbols.

Learn more and watch a video!

A collection of GIS case studies in marine science introduced by Dawn Wright professor of geography and oceanography at Oregon State University and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The book showcases how GIS can assist meeting the grand challenges facing marine science.

Download the book!