Latin America and the Caribbean Workforce. Could the Internet help ?

Yesterday, I posted a new discussion at the “GIS Professional & Networking” group : “it is very rare to find people at LinkedIn in the geoinformatics business who live and work in Latin America. I would like to know if you can see any movement from the USA or Canada or even Europe, towards searching for GIS services across the web? or maybe even looking for people who can work remotely?”

Then I decided to put action, and created the group “Profesionales SIG y geomática“.

“Este grupo busca acercar a los miembros de la comunidad hispanohablante, que estén relacionados con la industria de la información geo referenciada, la cartografía y los sistemas SIG, y la percepción remota.”

It is intented to facilitate networking to the GIS and remote sensing professionals living in Latin America and the Caribbean. I myself am one of these, and I would like to get in contact to offer my services, in the hope that the the internet and the gis advances enable distributing the job. However, it is also a place to discuss and share opinions on the GIS marketplace and maybe even technical threads.

Apparently, it is an interesting discussion, some enthusiastic replies and people willing to join the group. My point is: let´s make a group that leads into something real. So let´s try to do a little research and see if we can find

how to, realistically

work together.

Filed under: GIS, geoprocessing, GIS, latin america, latinoamerica, sig

Pretty awesome visualization with UUorld

Thanks to my subscription to Digital Urban, I found UUorld, an amazing tool for visual data exploration. The introductory video at its website is exciting enough to make me press the Download button (and I ain´t not a big fan of downloading stuff just because it´s there).  I link here to the original post from DU.

Now,  if you wanna read me repeat (it is indeed worth it), and venture into reading my genius insights, continue further or otherwise forget what follows and just go ahead into download.

Time animation, visual variables, extrusion, navigation, data analysis, multiple formats support for geodata, online access to a data portal, UUorld promises long hours of fun. Not that I haven´t done before anything similar to what shows in their gallery, but hey, UUorld just helps exploring and crafting visualizations just easier, and being interactive. The tool is for free (not “free”, though) if you are a private explorer, and you can export your work in many ways.

How could I leave without an Obama tag on this post. The UUorld blogged on that before, with a nice display of  Red and Blue-colored maps.

I additionaly registered for an account granting me some extra downloads, and told my browser not to remember. I will remember my twentienth new password in one week (luckily they are all the same). Next killer app, an online public private password manager (sorry).

Filed under: GIS, maps, Obama, visualization

Naive thoughts before whetting my appetite by reading Guido van Rossum´s Python tutorial

I started today from scratch. I already know Python is meant to be THE scripting language for the ArcGIS platform Geoprocessing Framework. Big deal. Like everybody is supposed to go “ohhh wow!”.  I see it as something like, okay, it could be a postive side effect: I will learn this super cool language this afternoon, and tomorrow I will have fun: create some  models in Arctoolbox, see their Python code, and try to figure out (btw, how many patches for their one-month-old version yet?) and start typing code directly into my editor. The Geoprocessing object model in ArcGIS is pretty simple, we all hope not excessively so. Time will tell.

Besides, I am excited to learn the language. My aunt´s fun on me: I am always late… Some claim the Zen of Python is Dutch-like, I hope the language itself is easier than Nederlands. My confidence is: tomorrow I will start teaching it myself. Let us not fall short of ambition.

Before the real turoial begins, Meneer Van Rossum promises to “whet our appetites“. So it reads, among others, that Python code is shorter. Good, I always preferred shorter literature.Now seriously, it says “the high-level data types allow you to express complex operations in a single statement”. I will try to figure out what those higher level data types are and how to use´em. I wanna see also what the guys at ESRI thought on this one.

Filed under: GIS, geoprocessing, python, scripting