I attended the NC GIS Conference last week. For those of you who are not familiar with this event, this is consistently one of the best regional conferences in North America. There are good reasons why I’ve only missed one conference in the 22-years it’s been in existence. First, it’s always smoothly run and well organized. Secondly, the range of content is drawn from a broad range of geospatial topics, including municipal parcel/cadastral mapping, data standards and interoperability, intergovernmental data sharing, governance, and open source software. I was astonished that registration was around 850 people, even in these grim economic times. A testimony to the lasting value of this conference as a bi-annual meeting place for not just GIS practitioners, but an increasingly broad spectrum of people who interact with geospatial information.

A prime example is the growing presence of open source geospatial innovations and implementations. Tobin Bradley and the Mecklenburg County GIS staff won the G. Herbert Stout Award for Visionary Use of GIS for their REST Web Services Framework . There was an ad hoc ‘birds-of-a-feather’ session where discussion ranged from the state of open source adoption to NSDI 2.0 and the implications for geospatial interoperability. In addition, Chander Ganesan gave a presentation introducing MetaCarta’s OpenLayers .

In addition to open source subjects, this is the first year the conference has included presentations from the ‘neogeography’ community. Andrew Turne r gave a whirlwind overview of the neogeography landscape, highlighting the differences between traditional GIS and applications emerging from the web-centric community. You can view Andrew’s presentation here .

North Carolina cities continue to provide a high level of geographic services to their constituents.  The staff from the City of Asheville under the direction of Jason Mann won the G. Herbert Stout award in the city category for MapAsheville. You can click here to use the application.

Not surprisingly, making effective use of geospatial data resources continues to be a topic of ongoing interest. The NC Geographic Information Coordinating Council (NC GICC ) sponsored a panel highlighting several issues associated with data. Naturally, data sharing was a key topic, but also addressed were data archiving and preservation, and seamless statewide coverages for street centerlines, parcels, and orthophotography. (Incidentally, the NC GICC is the focal point for governing public geospatial information in North Carolina, and as such their web site has many resoures related to the coordination of state and local geospatial resources.)

I moderated a session on emerging "where aware" technologies which included a fascinating presentation about Tangible Geospatial Modeling using GRASS GIS by Dr. Helena Mitasova from NC State University.  This technique uses a clay form to model a watershed, which is subsequently scanned and analyzed for runoff and erosion.  Read more here .

There were more than a handful of interesting presentations I couldn’t attend but would have liked to. One in particular had to do with NC’s Master Address Data Set. Another was Denis Wood’s presentation about community mapping and psycho-geographic information systems. And I also missed the presentations moderated by Julia Harrel on the GeoWeb, the sessions moderated by Jeff Essic on historical aspects of GIS, and both of Wansoo Im’s presentations on various mashups. In spite of my inability to hear these presentations, I had ample opportunity for good ‘nuts-and-bolts’ discussions with friends and colleagues.