Spatial Data Accuracy and Georeferencing Standards

The Arizona Professional Land Surveyors Association has teamed with to produce a "Spatial Data Accuracy and Georeferencing Standards". I think this is a great example of land surveyors and GIS professionals working together for the betterment of both professions and larger society. You can download the standards here.

The Sunburned Surveyor

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Revoking the Name Change

I decided to revoke my recent name change. It didn't make sense to rename the blog, but not change the URL. I didn't want to change the URL, because that would break a bunch of links, and people might not find the blog at the new URL.

So the "OpenJUMP Blog" it will be.

The Sunburned Surveyor

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Name Change

I've changed the name of this blog from the "OpenJUMP Blog" to the "Sunburned Surveyor's GIS Blog". Stefan suggested this name change long ago, and I'm just now getting around to it.

I'll still be talking about OpenJUMP quite a bit, but since I talk about a lot of other programming and GIS related topics (and not just OpenJUMP) the name change seemed appropriate.

The Sunburned Surveyor

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WKT for curves?

The original spec for WKT (Well Known Text) geometries did not include (to my knowledge) support for 2D curveys, like circular arcs. I didn't realize that had changed, and the WKT spec now includes some limited support for 2D curves. You can see this paper for more information:

http://doesen0.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/proceedings/paper/68.pdf

This is cool, because I will need support for circular arcs in WKT if I am ever get around to working on a linear referencing (route stationing) application for flood control levees. I don't think will be seeing support for these curves in JTS anytime soon (because of the complexities that it introduces), but I wonder if we might find room for it in Geotools?

The Sunburned Surveyor

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New CIO Pushing "Data.Gov" Portal

The new CIO for the United States Government is pushing for a new web-site used to distribute government data to the public. Sound's like the CIO is also an advocate of open source software and open file format. Is this an exiting shift in the way the government distributes data (including geospatial data)?

One can only hope. :]

Here are a couple of articles about the data.gov portal:

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/05/white-house-names-first-chief-information-officer/

http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Open_Up_Government_Data

The Sunburned Surveyor

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Summary of Important "Open GIS Data" Court Decision

The California First Amendment Coalition has a summary of a very important court decision in California. The decision involves requiring Santa Clara County to give the public reasonable access to the parcel GIS data it maintains. This is a great court decision and I hope we see more decisions like it.

Here is the link to the summary:

http://www.cfac.org/content/index.php/cfac-news/legal_development/

The Sunburned Surveyor

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