OT: UofM wins ESRI's president's award for excellence in GIS
Cool U of M accomplishment to pass on...
For those not familiar, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is the field of creating, managing, analyzing, and mapping all types of data.
I say "all types" because GIS as a field/industry is a mile wide and a mile deep -- it's more than just cartography -- it makes data spatially available. So one can map environmental, economical, social applications.
ESRI, which has the cornered the market on commercial GIS tools, is holding their annual user's conference now. At the plenary address yesterday, the CEO recognized the University of Michigan as this year's President's Award recipient for excellence in GIS. This is among tens of thousands of submissions from around the world.
Go Blue!
U of M Bar Rescue?
New course taught by Jon Taffer?
The first week of the course teaches students how to properly yell “SHUT IT DOWN!!!”
Nice! Working on HD maps for a GIS company right now. Exciting time for the industry, I think, given the overlap with the autonomous vehicle industry.
Congrats to UM. ESRI is also the GIS application of choice for NGA. Seems whatever ESRI says, NGA does...
Wow!
I doubly join in congratulations, both b/c I'm a Michigan grad AND because I had a cartography class at UM. It was one of my favorite classes, combining philosophical issues of mapping and the craft-like practice of mapping.
Congrats GIS!
Michigan has always had a good ground game.
Can they help us map out a winning season including a victory over OSU?
/asking for a fanbase
Our utility design system is based on ESRI. I am fairly certain I will never learn all that this program does, mainly because the functions not relevant to my particular job are mostly grayed out on my screen. Still, it is vast even at that.
Yes, one can make a career out of trying to figure out everything an ESRI app does.
I learned GIS at UM, so yay. Didn't really use it afterwards, but I recall it was gearing up to be ESRI vs Autodesk. Looks like they are now collabing together, more yay
ArcGIS is an amazing piece of software. Not cheap but incredibly capable. I was so dumbfounded by the all of the things that you could do with it, that I had analysis paralysis about where to even begin. Good for Michigan on taking home a second national championship this year. Can’t wait to see what comes of our ESRI expertise in the form of new research and breakthroughs.
Having once been a "GIS Analyst" using ESRI products, I'm glad I switched careers.
Great accomplishment! ESRI is a good vector software, but lacks a bit on the raster side of things. When i first started in GIS ESRI was it. Now there are plenty of strong open source options like QGIS, GDAL, GRASS, Python (w/Fiona) etc. If you know some simple scripting you can get around the price of ArcGIS leveraging other tools and options.
I've tried to play with GRASS in the past and found it confounding to set up. Do you know of any simple tutorials for GRASS?
osgeo.org has some basic resources and you might start there. And i think it was either Utah St or Penn St had a good "tutorial" combining GDAL with GRASS with practice data and that might be worth your time as well. Good luck!
As can be common with any free software or GIS software handling large amounts of spatial data, things can get buggy in a hurry. Generally, I do any processing outside of a GUI environment using scripting tools and then use a GUI to make sure the data looks like I need it to and try to use whatever application the end user might be using to address any formatting issues or band rendering concerns. Most of my work, nearly all of it, deals with satellite imagery processing rather than vector analysis/processing.
+1
Thanks!
Yea us! ?