SDI Events Roundup – January 2016

January 26, 2016

Gordon Plunkett

Access reports, presentations and recordings from recently held SDI events such as the 2015 Pan-Canadian SDI Summit and get the latest news on upcoming SDI events in this month’s roundup.

Here’s a roundup of events happening in Canada and globally related to Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI). You’ll also find insightful reports, presentations and recordings from recently held SDI events that you may find useful for your own projects.

Map to the future: Establishing a roadmap for the Geomatics, Geography and Geospatial Community in Canada

GeoAlliance Canada will host an event on March 15-16, 2016 to map out a path forward for the Canadian geocommunity. In order for the geomatics, geography and geospatial community to thrive, there’s a recognized need to work collaboratively across Canada’s well-established sectors and silos. This event is an opportunity to benchmark where the Canadian geocommunity is nationally, determine the metrics of success and map out a way to meet targets by pooling the community’s energy and resources, undertaking collaborative projects and making targeted investments in key initiatives. Everyone is welcome to attend the free event and contribute meaningfully to in-depth discussions, workshops and sector-specific breakout sessions.

2015 Pan-Canadian SDI Summit presentation videos now available

The Province of British Columbia, in collaboration with the Canadian Council on Geomatics, Natural Resources Canada and the Open Geospatial Consortium, hosted the second Pan-Canadian SDI Summit on November 24, 2015. This meeting explored the role of governments in realizing better means for sharing geographic data and developing improved location-based services for meeting real-world needs. Online videos of the Summit presentations are now available.

Living Atlas Community Webinar recording now available

In this Webinar, Esri’s Courtney Claessens explains how GIS users can address growing open data demands by sharing their data with the public to enable their users to access, explore and use open data to solve real-world problems. Esri Canada’s Paul Heersink describes the Community Map of Canada initiative undertaken by Esri Canada, and the value organizations find from contributing to this collective effort to build a better national map. Finally, Shane Matthews explains how to contribute their high-resolution, current imagery to the World Imagery Map through the Community Maps Program. This effort helps both contributors and the GIS community. Contributing imagery comes with no processing or hosting costs, making this an ideal way to make imagery accessible to a broad audience.

UN-GGIM outlines future trends in digital mapping

The United Nations Committee of Experts on Global Geospatial Information Management (UN-GGIM) has published a new report setting out the vision of the rapidly growing geospatial information industry. This visionary report presents the thoughts of leaders in the geospatial world as to the future developments in mapping and surveying over the next decade. It takes a global strategic view of geospatial, technological and societal trends that are likely to impact the geospatial sector, which include: Smart Cities and the Internet of Things; Artificial Intelligence and Big Data; indoor positioning and mapping; and integrating statistical and geospatial information.

New Free Training Seminar: Evaluating positional accuracy using ArcGIS Data Reviewer

Every day, users make decisions based on the assumption that their GIS data is complete and accurate. The positional accuracy of this data is an important aspect in determining its fitness for use. This new free 45-minute training seminar highlights how to identify spatial data that does not meet your requirements for positional accuracy. It discusses common data alignment problems, identifies national and industry standards related to reporting positional accuracy, and highlights use of the ArcGIS Data Reviewer Positional Accuracy Assessment Tool (PAAT) to calculate and report positional accuracy.