City of Calgary Public Data Catalogue

FYI

http://calgaryonlinestore.com/publicdata.asp

Free CAD Editing Software

If any of you do not have CAD software and need to edit CAD files this free application might be for you:

http://giscadblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/free-cad-editing-in-draftsight-and.html

Online Community for GIS Users

For anyone interested in a spatial social networking site:

http://www.gisdomain.com/

GNSS 3D Mission Planning Tool

For anyone doing GPS field work a new free tool:

http://www.vector1media.com/vectorone/?p=6704

GIS / CAD Interoperability

Hello Everyone,

This might interest some of you:

http://giscadblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/arcgis-for-autocad-250-and-other-new.html

Cloud Computing

Since we've had dicussions on this topic at our last meeting this article may help some of you. Some GIS vendors are now offering "GIS in the Cloud".

http://www.govtech.com/gt/articles/769253

Comparison of geographic information systems software

Some of you might find this interesting:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_geographic_information_systems_software

Regional GIS in Oregon

Here's an example of an interesting Regional GIS in the US:

http://www.esri.com/news/arcnews/winter0910articles/portland-oregon.html

A Nifty Metadata Tool from your friends at Miistakis!

Hi everyone;

As I mentioned at the last Technical Committee Meeting, I recently re-discovered a handy tool that Ken (Miistakis' GIS Programmer / all-around genius) developed a while ago, and I thought I would share it with you.

If you download GIS data from the internet, you will frequently see metadata published in html format (here's an example) that is not readable/importable to ESRI ArcCatalog. Your only option if you wish to attach this metadata to your downloaded spatial data is to either copy & paste data from the html file into your metadata editor, or to re-write the metadata from scratch. If you have never done either of these things, just trust me when I say that they're not very palatable options.

Lucky for us, Ken has created this tool for more or less automatically converting web-published html metadata files to ESRI-readable xml format.*

Here is a link to the Miistakis ftp site, from which you can download the tool:
ftp://goliath.rockies.ca/public/greg/RGISBlog

Please copy the zip file into a new folder, and follow the instructions that Ken has laid out in the handy "convert html files help.txt" documentation file.

I hope you all find this as useful as I have (especially those of you working on web-based resources for the RSDF). I'm sure Ken would appreciate feedback if you try the tool and have any questions or comments.

Have a good day,
greg

* The tool only works on html files created using "mp" - see Ken's help file for more details.

Open Access to Data

More news on Canadian data:

http://blog.gisuser.com/?p=7111

Stefan