Society of Cartographers Annual Conference - September 2010

46th Annual SoC Summer School

8-10th Sept 2010

The 2010 Society of Cartographers Summer School will be held at the University of Manchester from Wednesday 8th September 2010 to Friday 10th September 2010.


The venue in Manchester is the University’s Chancellors Conference Centre, with lectures, accommodation, meals, and social events all on a single site. The Annual Summer School is open to members and non-members and is usually held over four days in September at a different location each year. It creates an ideal opportunity to attend lectures, exhibitions, seminars and workshops, as well as to visit a broad spectrum of cartographic establishments. The friendly and relaxed atmosphere is also ideal for informal discussions with fellow cartographers and is a pleasant and stimulating way to keep up to date with new technology. It is especially beneficial for those cartographers working within small cartographic units who can perhaps remain isolated from new developments and trends within cartographic circles.

The 2010 conference themes this year will include:

• Art and everyday mapping
• OS OpenData
• Maps and geopolitics
• Transport mapping
• Mapping Manchester
• Crowd-sourcing and open data
  

The Wednesday afternoon starts off with three lectures to set the cartographic scene, focusing on the mapping history of Manchester and showcasing examples of current Manchester-based map design. This is followed by papers on the geopolitics of mapping, focusing on the changing political life of a single map, the geopolitical significance of media mapping and a new school-based mapping initiative.
On Wednesday evening the popular quiz will be held in the bar in the Conference Centre.

On Thursday morning the focus shifts towards design and practical aspects of production, with sessions on transport mapping, followed by an opportunity for delegates to share their own practical experiences in a members session. In the afternoon the programme moves on to some of the challenging ways maps are being deployed in wider social contexts. Three papers around everyday encounters with urban life chart psycho-geographical use of maps and explore the potential of community mapping initiatives. These are followed by a session on modern art and the map, including embodied and performative cartographies. The day concludes with the conference dinner in the evening.

On Friday papers focus on the twin challenges of Opensource data and crowdsourcing. Three papers explore OS Opendata, its politics, qualities and applications, before a concluding session where the wider implications of crowdsourcing are explored. A final session offers opportunities to reflect on the Summer School with panel discussions relating to issues brought up during the three days.
If you would like to become a member of the Society of Cartographers or explore the benefits of membership, please visit our website at http://www.soc.org.uk

Full Details on this event at:
http://www.soc.org.uk/manchester10/

ESRI Users Questions Answered

ESRI Users questions answered from ESRI International User Conference 2007



Mapperz Mixed Pick from http://gis2.esri.com/library/userconf/index.html


When will ESRI certify support on Microsoft’s Vista operating system?
We will complete our testing and add support for the Microsoft Vista operating systems in the third quarter 2007 for ArcGIS Desktop 9.2. We will support all products on Windows Vista at the ArcGIS 9.3.

NOTE: Due to some issues with Vista, several patches from Microsoft will be required in order to run ArcGIS under Vista.

What is the status of ESRI’s support for running ArcGIS on 64-bit operating systems?
ESRI is currently performing certification testing for ArcGIS Desktop 9.2 to support 64-bit processors. This will be delivered with service pack 3 in July.


What is ESRI doing in ArcGIS to make it easier for users to share geoprocessing models and best practices?
ESRI will publish a new Web site named the Geoprocessing Center to coincide with the ArcGIS 9.3 release in an effort to promote the sharing of geoprocessing models and scripts among the ArcGIS user community. This new resource center is part of the ESRI support site. By openly sharing these models and scripts, we can help each other learn and apply geoprocessing for solving many types of problems. ArcGIS 9.3 will make it easy to publish models to, as well as search for and download models from, the Geoprocessing Center.


When will ESRI support better handling of graphical exports of large format maps (72 x 55 inches and larger)?
The next major release after ArcGIS 9.3 will include a new plotting and graphic display system that will significantly increase display performance and support large format map export as a primary capability.


Can you improve the performance of the “Near” spatial analysis tool?
(Requested many times to ESRI UK - you try using 'near' with 28 million addresses)

Yes, ArcGIS 9.3 will include a new approach for performing proximity analysis that substantially increases the performance of the Near tool. New functionality will be provided that calculates the distances between and among various features (points, lines, and polygons). The output of this function will be a new "near table" that can be subsequently used for various kinds of spatial analysis (e.g., spatial statistics).



What is ESRI doing about the speed of ArcMap?
In the next major release after ArcGIS 9.3, ESRI will implement a new display pipeline into ArcGIS that will radically improve display performance and scalability.


Microsoft is developing a spatial type in SQL Server. Will ESRI be supporting this?
(codenamed 'Katmai' will be SQL Server 2008 with Spatial Database Support. This manages any type of data from relational data to documents, geographic information and XML.)

Yes, ESRI is working closely with Microsoft and will release support for this spatial type as a standard part of ArcGIS clients (direct connect) and ArcGIS Server (ArcSDE gateway). This capability will be supported with ArcGIS 9.3. We will coordinate the timing of the release of this functionality with Microsoft’s release schedule.

More info on Microsoft SQL Server 2008
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/prodinfo/futureversion/default.mspx