geoLibro.org

Spatial Sustain notes that NASA has awarded South Dakota State University’s Geographic Information Science Center of Excellence (an ESL student named it, then?) with a five-year, $3.29M grant to shore up gaps in Landsat coverage and availability. GIScCE? Could you please not just make this “available” online (i.e. downloadable or connectable via ArcIMS), but rather make it available in really useful, open ways like (WMS, naturally) WCS? That’d be great.

Eesh. GeoChalkBoard recently posted about FindGIS.com. I hate to be a full-on bastard about this, but is this “new” site not reminiscent of Homer’s first website from the Computer Wore Menace Shoes episode?

At least it’s offering syndicated content, and one could argue the more access points to geospatial data the better, but…yikes. I’ll bet it looks great in IE, though.

The NSF announced today that the Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) will continue to operate, now under the auspices of NCAR in Boulder. This is good news for, well, everybody. Although it’s true that DLESE is cluttered with junk in some places (I’m looking at you, link-out to the general USGS site search), and although it’s true that it does look a little Web .5, it’s really a rich resource for all kinds of earth science lessons, concepts, even data. They offer several feeds and I find it sort of hard to not go look at each new resource that comes in.


“Alaska’s Cold Desert? Damn straight I’d like to learn about how well arctic wolves are coping up there.”


“National Snow and Ice Data Center? I like snow, maybe I’ll go check out why it doesn’t seem like it snows anymore.” Etcetera.

It looks like the hint Senator David Ford let out at IU’s GIS Day keynote is true: Google Earth has been updated with very high-resolution imagery that looks to be courtesy of the Indiana State government. And all of those rural areas whose states haven’t provided Google Earth with high-res coverage are just going to have to groove on that.

(I’m practicing to be a headline writer for The Post.) Once again I’m proved ignorant. DataFerrett, the Census data extraction app, is available for the Mac. I have no idea how long this has been true, but I most certainly hadn’t seen it before (I’m not clear on the versioning, but the Mac page says they’re testing 1.3.2 right now. The launcher .app is at .1). It’s a Java app, so don’t expect it to look great, but it does work. And quite frankly? Even if it didn’t work it’s encouraging to see the attention. They’ve even included a .mov of DataFerrett at work on a Mac (see Poster Frame, below); I guess to prove they’re not joking.

No word on a Linux version, and Linux doesn’t even make it into the FAQ, but still…

Get DataFerrett for Mac here.