Meeting - Jan 24, 2008

Our third meeting went very well except for some brief technical problems with conecting the projector to laptops!  We were able to use an available backup laptop and it all worked out OK.  The meeting took place on Thursdy, Jan 24 from 10am to 12:30 pm, in Room 118 Purnell Hall.

The meeting started off talking about summarizing some of the features of the DelGeotech website.  A focus in the near future will be to find ways to increase member participation.  This is always hard, especially in groups that are not directly related to your full-time responsibilities. We talked about creating blogs, user showcase page, comments and a few others.  Help pages wil lbe updated to more explicitly convery the ways users can contribute and how to do that.  A couple of people mentioned the site was slow.  It has since been moved to a new server which has alleviated some of those problems.

We had two fun presentations, maybe three.  Adam Connor, DeoDecisions, talked about using GeoServer and gave us a brief demo showing how to create a server-side mapping application and viewing that data on the web as well as in Google Earth.   He also talked about using FeatureServer (OGC WFS server) with OpenLayers.  He showed another demo on how to edit features through the web using these tools.  As well, we all learned what RESTful web services means... ;)

Matt Kennedy, ESRI - Philadelphia, gave a presentation on ArcGIS Explorer and talked quite a bit about ArcGIS Server.  We also took a look at the ArcGIS Explorer Resource Center and maps from ArcGIS Online.  There were plenty of questions from the audience as we all know ArcGIS Server wil have a significant impact on many of our web mapping projects and the industry as a whole.

Meeting agenda:

• DelGeotech Notes
  • Introductions
  • Possible DEGIS Strategy Session  (DEGIS2008 web site)
  • Website changes
• ArcGIS Explorer
• GeoServer
• Feature Server and RESTful services

We had some discussions on future meetings, including one at the DEGIS 2008 conference in April.  That might be an appropriate time for a stragety session.  The plan is also to have a meeting just before or after the conference to focus on the new 2007 aerial imagery being delivered.  Probably a meeting about general image processing techniques with an emphais on Delaware imagery and specific applications.  More to come...