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2008
CGIA Awards Winners
The winners of this year's CGIA Awards were
announced at the CalGIS conference in Modesto, CA. This year's
pool of nominees, submitted by their peers, well represented the
diversity and strength of GIS around the state. The award winners,
in the estimation of the judging committee, displayed exemplary
implementation, innovation and success.
And the winners are:
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Chairman's
Award
for exemplary service to the California GIS community:
Carol Ostergren & Michael Byrne (no photo available),
USGS and CA Health Planning and Development
This dynamic duo has fit time into their everyday jobs
and lives to help coordinate and promote GIS, collaborative
projects, and regional initiatives for the betterment of GIS
within the State of California. They have traveled to attend
regional GIS councils and collaborative meetings around the
state. During their visits they provide information about
the California GIS Council, CGIA, State and Federal initiatives,
and awareness of other regional projects. They have facilitated
the acquisition of grants to move the State along in its data
and imagery strategic planning efforts. They have also supported
regional data acquisition grants. They promote the use of
metadata tools to build further awareness of data available
around the State. Together and apart they are working to pull
together a State that does not have funded GIS organization
or leadership.
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Exemplary
Systems Award for outstanding GIS implementation:
California Department of Public Health IT/GIS Team
The IT/GIS staff of CEHTP, headed by Craig Wolff, has
made an invaluable contribution to public health GIS and the
development of sophisticated GIS technology for the implementation
of a standards-based national environmental public health
tracking (surveillance) network. Such a system must integrate
health, environmental hazard, and socioeconomic data, which
are often very disparate. The CEHTP IT/GIS team is developing
tools and services that enable the enhancement, integration,
and analysis of health and environmental data as well as play
a central role in public health and safety. The Centralized
Geocoding Tool enables users to geocode address data (real-time
or in batch) to latitude/longitude coordinates or other political
boundaries (e.g. Census Block Group, Public Land Survey, etc.)
as well as standardize and verify address data. The purpose
of this tool is to provide centralized, enterprise geocoding
service that has high geocode rates and is secure, interoperable,
spatially accurate, and available over the web. The current
tool is exposed as web services (XML-based Simple Object Access
Protocol) and CEHTP offers its partners .NET and Java-based
batch geocoding clients.
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Advancement
of Collaboration Award:
Robert Yoha, CA Department of Conservation (DOC)
and CA Department of General Services (DGS)
Robert Yoha and Diane Vaughan of DOC and Rosemary Linares
of DGS and the team have demonstrated unique and committed
dedication for the past 4 years to developing a Master Service
Agreement (MSA) for GIS software and related services. The
MSA provides for a broad range of highly qualified and pre-selected
software manufacturers, resellers, and GIS technical staff
to State, Regional, and local government users. This MSA is
the first of its kind in the Nation, and allows for government
entities to procure GIS software and services more easily
and faster. The MSA eliminates time consuming advertising,
bidding, and contracting procedures by allowing the use of
less formal ordering processes at reduced rates based on aggregate
statewide potential volumes. The MSA is available to government
agencies from city municipality to regional to state agency
and will result in the reduction of administrative, technical,
and managerial staff time historically needed for GIS-related
procurement. Nominated by the CA GIS Council Executive Steering
Committee.
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Outstanding
Internet Presentation Award:
Mike Behen, City of Palmdale
The City of Palmdale's online geographic information
system (maintained and hosted by the City's GIS Section, of
whom Mike Behen is the GIS Coordinator) is a powerful and
elegant tool used by City staff to obtain answers to questions
of a spatial nature that arise each and every working day.
The system features an intuitive, easy-to-use interface that
is both powerful and aesthetically pleasing. Its functions
have been developed carefully to match each City department's
needs and to integrate with other systems (including permitting
software such as Permits Plus) and databases (such as the
Los Angeles County Assessor property-information database
and the City's capital improvement projects database). Users
can quickly access information related to jurisdictional inquiries,
search for and locate a property by its address, parcel number,
or owner name, generate a printable report of the permit-issuance
history on a particular property, print a standard format
map (including all map elements and even a legal disclaimer)
of an area and then customize the map with additional points,
lines, polygons, and text without having to open another application.
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Excellence
in Education Award:
Maggie Kelly, UC Berkeley
Dr. Kelly's research and outreach program at UC Berkeley
has several themes and is informed by the disciplines of
GIScience, geography, and landscape ecology. She links ecological
patterns with process in spatially heterogeneous and dynamic
landscapes. For example, at UC Berkeley, we are mapping
restored and natural wetlands in the SF Bay and asking how
vegetation heterogeneity drives ecological function in these
wetlands, examining how pattern in watershed catchments
can influence water quality and delivery of materials downstream,
and quantifying and modeling the spread of a new disease
across forested landscapes at different scales. Thus, Dr.
Kelly provides data and expertise needed to understand current
and projected drivers of landscape change in California.
A second theme embraces the evaluation of new technologies
and development of best practices for ecological monitoring
and landscape quantification using integrated geospatial
technologies - GIS, remote sensing, GPS, spatial analysis,
and landscape ecology approaches. She is particularly interested
in integrating high spatial resolution remotely sensed imagery
and output from new active sensors with innovative image
processing and spatial modeling techniques.
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Congratulations
to all of the nominees and winners!
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