Daniel, an intern here at Depiction, has started blogging about his projects using Depiction at a "Network Optimization on Depiction" blog he started. Daniel is is demonstrating how to do some very cool, very high-level analysis work using Depiction--determining, for example, the shortest route connecting a warehouse to each of its connection points.

As you might have seen on the site, Depiction's introductory discount ends in August--starting August 1, the price will be $199.00. The good news, of course, is that you can save 55% by purchasing Depiction right now. But why is the price going up? Mike explains in the news release we just put out this morning.

I was thrilled to read in a recent blog post by Brian Noyle and Dave Bouwman about their commitment to better design for mapping applications on the web: click here to read the blog. The Directions magazine folks picked it up, too: click here to read their article.

Using Depiction to create and display floods requires having elevation data. The elevation data available through Depiction’s Quickstart resource list is from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) – it is their default “30 meter resolution” – in other words, every 100 feet or so, it measures the height of the terrain. In general, this is good enough for big picture stuff.

Linux.com has a great story this month on open source GIS in government.

Large number of links to data sources and different GIS data visualization tools.

As I posted earlier I gave a presentation of Depiction to the Northwest GIS Users Group Meeting gratiously hosted by Stefan Freelan at Western Washington University and the great folks at Skagit County GIS.  It was really nice to catch up with a lot of faces that I have not seen lately and learn about the interesting projects that everyone is involved in.  Skagit County did the first two presentations; Dr.

One of the conversations I have been having recently with a number of individuals is in regards to the US National Grid.  The US National Grid stems from a recommendation from the Department of Homeland Security for the use of a nationally defined coordinate system for all spatial referencing, mapping, and reporting.  The US National Grid uses the Universal Transverse Mercator coordinate system and a reference system based on the Military Grid Reference System.  While we all like the concept of greater interoperability, questions always arise as to how well these types of standardization

The Northwest Washington GIS Users Group will be holding its quarterly meeting on Friday Dec.