GIS Day at the Oklahoma Capitol on Wednesday
(UPDATE below)
Dozens of federal, state, tribal and local agencies will show off the latest in GIS projects and mapping on Wednesday, March 2, on several floors of the Capitol Rotunda in Oklahoma City. The event will be from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. All told, more than 50 organizations will be at the Capitol to explain how they use GIS in everything from conservation and education to energy, city planning and public safety.
We use GIS here at The Oklahoman to explain census information, city code violations, election results and the upcoming congressional and state redistricting process.
This will be the 17th GIS Day, which is organized by the Oklahoma Geographic Information Council. For more information on the council, check out their website, where they’ve posted some pictures from GIS Days in prior years.
Update: From Mike Sharp, Oklahoma Geographic Information Coordinator:
One of the key theme’s emerging from our elected officials at the state Capitol this year is focused on a more open and transparent government.
Government at all levels deals with an enormous amount of information, so it follows that making government more open places an emphasis on government making more of its information open and available to its citizens.
For many years, the Oklahoma GIS Community has been a leader in making location-based data available to the citizens of our state.
With over 80 percent of all government data having a location-based component, it is important that we continue to develop the infrastructure to not only deliver but to easily consume this vast amount of information. Through today’s technology, we have many open source and commercial Geographic Information System tools to not only deliver but to bring together a wide variety of information sources and display the result in an easily understandable format that has been in use for centuries … a map.
Whether it is a government official wanting to manage government-owned assets or a private consultant looking for business opportunities in our state, the bringing together of location-based data into a map provides an ideal platform to assist them in their decision-making process.
–Paul
Written by Paul Monies
Follow @pmonies
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Go MAPS17! Thanks for posting Paul, hope to see you there.