GeoMeetup Member Presentations

Many of you are doing interesting geo-related projects. The expertise of this group is so varied, that I thought, perhaps, we should share some of it with the rest of the group.

1.- TwitterLinguistics:

Michael D. Healy is a Data Scientist who is leading the TwitterLinguistics project to develop a resource for the understanding of regional American English dialects on Twitter.

He has used SimpleGeo for a GIS solution along with an array of Pythonic tools such as the Natural Language Toolkit, Numpy and beyond. You may end up with more questions than answers, but feedback and help on the TwitterLinguistics project is more than welcome!

2.- 5 Minute PostGIS Database Tuning

Josh Berkus is an international PostgreSQL guru.

3.- AirborneGIS

Part of FAIRGIS (Fire Attack IR+GIS) used by wildfire pilots, AirborneGIS includes symbolized SHP files overlaid on moving map topos in the cockpit, and drawing input is transmitted to the GIS team. This allows Air Attacks to operate at night and over smoke. The Windows based system is now being ported to iOS & Android for ground fire fighters.

Mark Zaller led product development teams for 3Com in the '90s, and was relocated to France as Global Business Development Manager to Hewlett Packard. In 2000 he joined the HP Intel Solution Center to lead business development & product teams. Returning to San Francisco he still contracts to HP & Intel, and donates time to his non-profit AerialFireTech while flying as an Air Attack pilot over wildfires.

4.- Radiation Data

Over the last two weeks, an ad-hoc group at Telascience pulled in disparate, authoritative data sources and created web-accessible data feeds as emergency response for the public good.Find out more about the latest developments at Fukushima Nuclear Power Plants, where you can get data feeds, and the behind-the-scenes story of the data pipelines that were built at Telascience.

Brian Hamlin is a co-founder of the California OSGeo Chapter, environmentalist and geo data coder based in Berkeley, California.

5.- The Tiles, They Are a-Changin’

We’ve come up with a few interesting ways to encode heatmap data into tiles. I’ll run through a few methods, like encoding data into the RGB channels, re-coloring raster shapes on the front-end, and vector shapes chunked in tile form.

Zain Memon is a part of the geo team at Trulia, working on data viz maps like the recently released price reductions map: http://explore.trulia.com/datavis/priceredux/Q1-2011/