Purdue University Libraries hosted the 8th Annual College GIS Day celebration at Stewart Center on Nov. 12th, 2015. The event was a great opportunity for the campus GIS community to learn about new developments in the GIS field, connect with external GIS professionals and collaborate across a variety of university divisions and disciplines. The program included presentations, a poster competition, career luncheon discussion and workshops (detailed program agenda is available here: Agenda
)In addition, the Libraries launched the Geodata Portal @ Purdue. This Geodata Portal allows geospatial information users to search for information by two simple criteria: where and what, which greatly reduces the geospatial information access barrier for researchers and learners. Users can preview maps, preview metadata and download maps from the portal. Currently, the portal includes data from: (1) open data at all the collaborating universities including Tufts, Harvard, MIT and Berkley; (2) data from IndianaMap; (3) Purdue open access map collection — historic aerial photos, topo maps and campus maps.
According to the poster judges, this year’s poster competition winners are:
- First: Yuki Huang, Civil Engineering, “Human Mobility Patterns Probability Measurement: An Example Using Twitter Data at Purdue”
- Second: Ryan Schroeder, Natural Resources and Environmental Science, “Characterizing and Mapping the Field Scale Spatial Variability Of Surface Horizon Soil Properties and Water Content with Noninvasive Em38”
- Third: Lakshya Garg, Purdue Polytechnic, “User Interface Design Evaluation for L-thia Watershed Analysis Tool”
To increase learning opportunities, this year’s GIS Day offered four workshops that included topics about State’s geospatial information resource for geocoding, Web GIS, Mobile GIS and GIS project ideation.
Members of the GIS Day planning committee included: Ann Bessenbacher (Discovery Learning Research Center), Larry Biehl (ITAP), Melba Crawford (College of Engineering), Jarrod Doucette (Department of Forestry and Natural Resources), Angela Ewing (PSET of Libraries), Michael Fosmire (PSET of Libraries), Megan Sapp Nelson (PSET of Libraries), Jonathan Pettit (Department of Sociology), Matt Pike (Department of Anthropology), Nick Rauh (College of Liberal Arts), Gideon Singer (Department of Anthropology), Angela Slocum (Physical Facilities Fiscal Affairs), Steven Smith (Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences), Larry Theller (Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering), and Sara Wiest (Department of Political Science).
GIS Day is supported by Office of the Provost, The Graduate School, College of Agriculture, College of Liberal Arts, College of Education, College of Science, College of Engineering, Polytechnic Institute and Purdue Libraries.