ESRI Conference -- Day Two -- Part II

If not every presentation (or "paper") I attended today was the most applicable or relevant, it was almost always true that something mentioned or someone I met and talked to at each session produced either a new idea or a subject to pursue.

I didn't have time yesterday to list them, but there were a number of things I put on a "check these out" list.

They include:

Reference was made to Bloom's Taxonomy in two or three sessions. While familiar, I'm hard pressed to recall exactly what Bloom's Taxonomy is and what its relevance and/or importance are. A simple search took me to a resource at the University of Victoria's Counseling Services website which provides a clear chart laying out learning objectives formulated by Benjamin Bloom back in 1956 [Bloom, B.S. (Ed.) (1956) Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals: Handbook I, cognitive domain. New York ; Toronto: Longmans, Green]. Learning is divided into competencies (knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation). Another column lists the skills that grow out of the attainment of those competencies. Bloom's Taxonomy, then, is a systematic way of analysing learning and a tool to use in framing projects, assignments, and tests.

A number of sessions, when talking about materials used in GIS, talked about "orthophotographs." Doubting that this was talking about pictures of the mouths of middle-school kids, I needed to look this up. A pretty good -- maybe a little wordy -- primer about orthophotographs is here (.pdf file).

If you think our society, in general, is way too full of acronyms, don't come to this conference. People referred to DEMs and DLGs, among many others. DEM stands for Digital Elevation Map and DLG for Digital Line Graph. Both of these are important potential elements in maps and there are many online resources out there to download them.

Another acronym from GIS/ESRI is Arc IMS. ESRI says ArcIMS is "...the solution for delivering dynamic maps and GIS data and services via the Web." One reason I was curious about ArcIMS as a category is because it seems that such sites, as ESRI says, are ways to get access to already exisiting geographic information via the web. One site shown in a session today was OakMapper -- Monitoring Sudden Oak Death in WebGIS. Obviously a task to add to the long "to do" list is looking into more ArcIMS sites out there. Knowing the range of ArcIMS sites already out there could well save having to "reinvent the wheel" since something might already exist that meets my needs. Click here for a list of sites compiled by ESRI itself.

A book mentioned in one of my sessions seemed to hold promise in helping us get connected to data sources, particularly ones that are free or inexpensive and readily available. The book is "GIS and Public Data" by Bruce Ralston (published by OnWord Press in 2004). It appears to be a bit pricey ($75) so I'm not going to run out and buy one, but would like to take at least a look at a copy to see how useful it might be (it does come with a CD & DVD as additional resources).
Another online resrouce that seems worth checking out in more depth is CountryWatch.com. Seems this could be quite a resource for a number of courses.

I'll stop here for the time being. Not that I needed reminding, but, boy is there a lot of stuff out there!