The fifth quarterly Salt Lake GIS Users Group (SLUG) meeting was held on August 11, 2010, from 11:30 am to 1:30 pm in the Department of Natural Resources building in Salt Lake City. 

Food and drinks were sponsored by Gateway Mapping.  We had about 155 in attendance.

 

Business:

•  The next SLUG meeting will be held October 26, 2010, at the U of U.  Please plan on it now. 
• State of the SLUG report by Scott Davis, SLUG board chair.  Scott discussed how SLUG has grown over its first year, the great levels of turnout, how the topic surveys set our future meeting directions, and how great it's been to have lunch sponsors. State of the SLUG 
• He also conducted an informal poll to see what people would prefer if we don't have a lunch sponsor in the future:  A) Meet at the same time and bring our own lunches, or B) Meet later after lunch?  Bringing our own lunches was the favorite. 

 

Presentations:

Creating Advanced Shaded Relief Maps and Layer Blending with Global Mapper Software

Buck Ehler, Utah Geological Survey

Buck demonstrated just part of the capabilities of this powerful software package. He used Global Mapper (http://www.globalmapper.com/) to show how to create advanced shaded relief maps using various parameters and how to use slope to enhance shaded relief. He also demonstrated various raster layer blending methods. Blended rasters are much more pleasing in appearance than using one layer over another with transparency as we do in ArcMap alone.  

Another great feature is that you can see immediately the changes of any of multiple settings, instead of waiting for a raster to be created before loading it to see what it looks like.

This appears to be a powerful tool that's a lot cheaper and has many more features than ESRI products, and can read and write many file types.  Buck uses it to prepare background imagery that is later used in ArcMap.  Click on the following links for Buck's presentation materials.  Buck's presentation | Advanced Shading | Global Mapper Mash-ups.  Also view Buck's presentation below!

 

GIS Humor  (5 minutes)  Ray Montgomery

A short video – "Wakko's 50 state capitols" from the old Warner Brothers cartoons. View it here.

 

GIS Management (Isn't knowing where it's at enough?) V2

Don Wood, Wasatch County

Don gave a great presentation. What is the difference between being a GIS practitioner and being a GIS manager? While many of us have been taught how to be effective as GIS practitioners, what do we know about how to manage a GIS operation? Managing a GIS operation is much more than just overseeing geospatial data and output generation. It involves working with the IT manager’s budget officers and the organization's management not to mention serving our customers. This presentation discussed ideas about how to effectively manage a GIS operation as well as provided a forum for willing participants to share their ideas and experiences.  We even got to hear him sing!  Don's presentation.

 

 

To our presenters and our sponsors, “Thank you!”    

 

Thanks for your interest and support!