WHAT: March TriLUG meeting WHEN: Thursday, March 12th, 7:00pm WHERE: Red Hat HQ, NCSU Centennial Campus MAP: http://www.redhat.com/about/contact/ww/americas/raleigh.html

This month, our very own Doug Newcomb will give us an introduction to the fascinating world of Geographic Information Systems. It's the ultimate form of representing the world around us using computers. Literally, we're mapping out our entire planet for use online.

We've all used Google Maps and Mapquest. But have you heard of the collaborative effort at OpenStreetMap.org [1] to produce a complete map of the world, entirely from user-contributed data?

Closer to home, we might use the local land records web sites: Wake County IMAPS [2], Durham GIS web [3] or the Chatham County GIS [4]. See how open source software and free-license data fit into these systems (or not).

And now, consumers with TomTom GPS's can share map updates with other users using TomTom Home "map share" [5]. Again, people helping people, correcting the data that they know about best, close to their homes.

On Thursday night, Doug will tell us about a variety of GIS projects, both commercial and open source, with proprietary and open sources of map data.

See you all there.

Alan

[1] http://openstreetmap.org/ [2] http://imaps.co.wake.nc.us/imaps [3] http://gisweb2.ci.durham.nc.us/sdx/ [4] http://www.chathamgis.com/ [5] http://www.tomtom.com/page/mapshare/