Moving along



5/30/2012

Today I met with Frank who introduced me to the social science coordinator Daniel who is also working with a volunteer named Chema from Spain. The social science division is fairly new here and is working towards becoming highly GIS focused. Our meeting was to lay out their goals and visions which are a great step in the right direction. Basically they want a standardized way for field workers to collect data with field methods like GPS's and for them to be able to download their own information into an open source geospatial program. From there they want another set of decently trained individuals to be able to produce quick maps of that data. Then the final tier is to have a core group of GIS professionals to manage, analyze, and implement solutions with advanced functions.

However, their information is highly scattered throughout multiple data sets and saved in different formats. Their goal is to bring this all into a geodatabase with a clear emphasis on organization. Since this is all new to them they don't have a database designed yet to handle the mass amount of information that they have. So between Chema, myself, and Danial we are going to design a geodatabase that will categorize the information. This is going to take some time and their chaotic nature here doesn't have workflows so day to day we are going to do what we can...They use ArcGIS like we do at the University but they want to get away from it and onto an open source program called Post-GIS. Since they don't have the money for expensive ESRI licensing they want for their field staff to be able to use the open source as a collection database and then determine what extensions they could implement using the more expensive ESRI software. 

They also have two projects going on that are within the social science division and that is a simple locational project to show were eco-tourism is occuring on the various islands. They want to show, describe, and give information about the places to get a sense of what each place is offering. They also have a GIS fracking project going on but Daniel didn't go to far into that one with Frank there.

Our office at the station

Chema is the volunteer from Spain who is here for one year. He doesn't speak very good English and I don't speak very good Spanish and we'll be working with each other on GIS stuff. Shall be an interesting experience for the summer. But after our meeting we biked into town and ate lunch. Figured if were going to need to chat all summer might as well start now. They serve lunch meals to many of the employees on the island so the place we ate for dinner the other night serves lunch for $4.50 which includes soup, rice, and meat (chicken or fish). Found out he wants to learn to surf as well and he mentioned that Sam the programmer guy is willing to teach us. SCORE.

For now though we'll be sifting through 80gb of geospatial information that is again highly disorganized. I'm also in the process of downloaded Arc 10 on my computer in order to see what they actually have sitting around in these folders. However we started transferring files at 1...and its now 3 with only little over half to go...

I've been checkin my email like crazy :) for some entertainment as well as writing this up. I also have a shotty office which im jazzed about and soon to get keys to the building...get some. Back to organizing files in ArcCatalog.



Rum sautéd banana's

On top of sugar rolls
with chocolate

We've been getting pretty creative with food with everything from squeezed lime-orange juice topped vegetable salad to chocolate barbeque sauced chicken. Joe heard of a great dessert that he put together. Try it out, simple and quite delicious. Light the rum on fire within the pan it makes it look 100 times fancier.