Jesse and Sue cover what they saw and discussed at the 2009 Game Education Summit.

Click here to download GES Video Wrap-up (7 MB)

We are nearing the end of our current social media poll with Facebook in a controlling lead with Twitter placing well and the other options each at less than 10%. Head over to the website and let us know which social network you go to for your spatial information and networking.

As a former horse owner, exercise rider, and all-around horsey person, I think the British Horse Society’s EMAGIN – Equine Mapping and Geographic Information Network – is a really cool GIS project and I just had to give it a mention. With the goal of creating a database of equestrian-related information, including routes for riding in the countryside, the EMAGIN project received an Awards for All England grant to help with the project. Currently the project is ongoing, with some riding routes available for download in a form that can be manually overlaid on Ordnance Survey maps.

Future plans include an online version of EMAGIN, and the BHS is looking for help in mapping coastal riding areas, among other tasks.

So, if you’re a horse enthusiast in the UK, definitely check out EMAGIN. For those riders and horse owners in other countries, you might be thinking how you could utilize GIS for lots of horse-related things, including directories of services and farms, mapping trails, etc.

Our second Tweet4Trees sponsor is our friends over at ESRI. Our Tweet4Trees campaign is part of our fourth anniversary celebration and is a pledge to recognize our listeners and readers by donating to tree planting charities based on the number of twitter followers we have as of our 4th anniversary episode on July 15. It is also a pledge to support the environment where we can. ESRI has clearly shown their support for environmental change over the years in numerous ways including support for the Society for Conservation GIS, recognition of the Green Belt Movement, this year’s ESRI International User Conference keynote by Willie Smits entitled “Designs for the Environment: Rebuilding Forests”. These are just a few of the ways ESRI has supported awareness of the environment.

Since 1969, ESRI® has been giving customers around the world the power to think and plan geographically. The market leader in GIS, ESRI software is used in more than 300,000 organizations worldwide including each of the 200 largest cities in the United States, most national governments, more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, and more than 7,000 colleges and universities. ESRI applications, running on more than one million desktops and thousands of Web and enterprise servers, provide the backbone for the world’s mapping and spatial analysis. ESRI is the only vendor that provides complete technical solutions for desktop, mobile, server, and Internet platforms. Visit us at www.esri.com.

While we most often focus on ESRI’s software on the podcast and blog, they offer a wealth of options including training, professional services, enterprise support, customization, and others to support end-user needs. These services are conducted and supported by a group of great folks as we have found out over the last few years in interviews and conversations with ESRI employees.

We would like to thank ESRI for supporting our Tweet4Trees campaign and for helping us to make it to four years.

A VerySpatial Podcast
Shownotes – Episode 206
June 28, 2009

Main Topic: Our conversation with Drew Davidson of Carnegie Mellon University’s ETC

Click for the detailed shownotes

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Google labs has launched a neat new feature called City Tours.  The idea is similar to other sites (like Microsoft’s BING!) in that you can enter in a destination and the site will give you a bunch of things to do there.  What’s nice is you get it all laid out on Google Maps, with travel times by foot and the estimated visit time.  The site tries to give you a couple of days worth of stuff, but it only has so much material in its databases.  That’s why the feature includes some crowd sourcing so the public can add more attractions.  I punched in San Diego for our upcoming UC trip and found a couple of places that might be worth checking out!

Over the years we have seen many geovisualization technologies emerge, each with their own ups and downs (pun, sadly, intended). All of the approaches, however, can be broken down to two styles: 1) flythrough visualizations, where the creator has setup a prescribed flight path that the viewer can not escape (often distributed as a video), and 2) interactive visualizations, where the viewer has control of how and where they approach the visualzation they have been given.

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