igic.org

On Saturday afternoon (August 15, 2009) 18 teams fanned out across downtown Indianapolis to participate in IGIC's first-ever orienteering (urban navigation) event. The event had each team hunt down checkpoints using maps and compasses to solve realistic challenges and improve their group decision-making, problem-solving, listening and communication skills. The teams were made up of IGIC board members and their families, Boy Scout Troops, and our Corporate Sponsors. The team from Cannon IV took top honors for finding the most checkpoints, solving the final puzzle and finding the hidden key to open the prize treasure chest.

I would like to thank Janet Tomlin from the IGIC staff and Jeff Coates from TrueNorth and Associates for all their hard work in putting together this first-ever IGIC fund raising event. I would also like to thank all our participants for both their participation and fund raising donations, and a special thank you to the following event sponsors who contributed both money and prizes to our event:

$300 Contributors:
Butler, Fairman & Seufert
Indiana 811
Pinnacle Mapping Technologies, Inc.
Woolpert, Inc.

$200 Contributor:
Citizens Energy Group

$100 Contributors:
39 Degrees North
Cannon IV
Central Indiana Chapter of the Indiana Society of Professional Land Surveyor’s
Christopher B. Burke Engineering, LTD
Continental Mapping Consultants
Duke Energy
GRW Aerial Survey, Inc.
Indiana Pipeline Awareness Association
MJ Harden
Sanborn

Prize Donations:
Amish Acres
Courtyard by Marriott, Bloomington
Duke Energy
ESRI
Indiana Historical Bureau
IGIC

We hope to do this again next year! We will be evaluating the results and getting feedback from both our participants and sponsors. In the coming days we will also post more information and pictures from Saturday's event on the IGIC web site.

Harvest More with GIS is The Schneider Corporations theme for their 2009 User Conference to be held at their Indianapolis, IN Headquarters at:
8901 Otis Ave.
Indianapolis, IN 46216

Current Schneider customers with support agreements can register up to 4 people for free, additional attendees are $49. Attendees without support agreements can attend for $149 each. For more information click here.

Just in case you've been living under a rock, or maybe have been on vacation - ESRI recently released their latest version of their FREE ArcGIS Explorer software. This new release from ESRI represents a very significant advancement in both functionality and ease-to-use for non-GIS professionals to access, visualize, use and present geospatial information.

IGIC continues to seek-out and promote any free and easy-to-use GIS tools that can help expand both the business community and general publics access to geospatial information. The IndianaMap (our premier project) currently makes over 200 layers of statewide geospatial information available on-line for viewing, down loading, and as web services (http://www.indianamap.org). In 2005 & 2006 as part of Indiana's statewide orthophotography project, we made Indiana's new imagery and framework data layers readily available and usable through custom ESRI ArcReader and DDTI AccuGlobe viewing applications, and by sharing our imagery with Google Map/Earth, and Microsoft VirtualEarth.

I'm very excited about ESRI's new ArcGIS Explorer 900 product. This new software provides the best functionality from these other tools through a easy-to-use ribbon interface, provides both 2D maps and 3D globe options, provides easy access to pre-published maps/globes, layer packages and web services, allows custom mash-ups with your own data, allows API (.NET programming) customization, plus gives the user the ability to create and save dynamic/interactive map presentations.

Click here to view a brief product demo from the ESRI User Conference plenary session:
http://gisupdates.esri.com/video/uc2009/UC09_6_Explorer_Demo_Dev_Te.wmv

Click here to go to ESRI's ArcGIS Explorer product blog for more information and links to download ArcGIS Explorer 900:

http://blogs.esri.com/Info/blogs/arcgisexplorerblog/archive/2009/08/13/what-s-new-in-arcgis-explorer.aspx