Patrick Cunningham, President

Low Cost GIS for Today’s GIS Professionals

Blue Marble – Geodesy to GIS

What is GIS?

What is GIS?

What is it today? Where to put a Starbucks

You can’t get more than 170 miles away form oneSource: James Davenport University of Washington

2014-1984 : What was it 30 years ago?

Geography, sociology, demography, social science, survey engineering

Life in 1984

Personal Computer’s just coming into use

No Internet but we had Beta Max

No cell phones but we had the Hail Mary

No GPS …….but we had Spinal Tap!!!And the birth of WGS 84

WGS 84

- GPS Satellite Positioning System

- a Big Deal

- Military Usage only at first

Now it’s old enough to buy cheap car insurance

GIS in 1984

ESRI, Autodesk, GE, Intergraph, Bentley

Large companies,

Big solutions,

System approach to things

Expensive solutions

GIS Today

Google Earth

A Word on Surveyors and Surveying

What is GIS Today

Is it overlaying a map on Google Earth?

Is it a pdf of a town parcel?

Is it using an iPhone to map a proposed walking path through your town

Is it scanning in old CAD drawings and referencing

Is it consuming state LiDAR data to do flood mapping

What is GIS Self Sufficiency

Self-sufficiency is knowing what you know and what you don’t know.

“Eat the bear,”“It’s low cost GIS”

A Word on the Cloud

The Cloud is to GIS Software as what is to what?

A. An e-reader is to books

B. iTunes is to music

C. PDFs are to paper

D. Lipstick is to a pig

Answer: All of the above

It’s a hosting and delivery mechanism

Don’t give up your ownership of your data …..Caveat Emptor Trust me, it will be ok

Low Cost GIS – The Concepts and the Tools

• Data

• Field collection

• Map Creation

• Publishing

• Storing and Access for Updates

Low Cost GIS: Data

Low Cost GIS: Field Collection

Free aps and cheap GPS’Smart phones all have them nowAccuracy level needs workMap2PDF, Geographic Tracker, MapMyRun, etc

Low Cost GIS: Map Creation

Data types – Terrain Model, Base Raster, Vector layer like buildings/streets

Publishing/Storing/Access

Workspaces, publishing to spatial dbs, publishingto the cloud: Post GIS

Map Creation

Global Mapper, Q GIS, Grass, Mango Maps, Google

Low Cost GIS – The Concepts and the Tools

• Data

• Field collection

• Map Creation

• Publishing

• Storing and Access for Updates

www.bluemarblegeo.com