Blog posts archive

Quaternary geology data update (1997) from the Ontario Geological Survey.

As of early 2015, Google Earth Pro, which used to be a $400 product, is now free. This is a simple yet powerful tool for viewing information geographically—whether it is for viewing climate information, analyzing change over time, or tracing routes from your vacation.

Quantum GIS, often referred to as QGIS, is an open source GIS desktop application, which can be installed on various system operation platforms, including Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, FreeBSD (and soon, Android!). More importantly, QGIS is free open-source software and offers numerous plugins for various functions. Since the software is open-source, there is abundant documentation submitted by web community support workers and voluntary developers. This tutorial introduces users to the basic concepts and major functions of QGIS to get them started with the software.

Effective August 31, 2020, the University of Waterloo has obtained an Esri Institutional License, which permits any student or employee of the University of Waterloo to use Esri software for teaching, learning, and research purposes. Commercial use is not permitted.

https://wiki.uwaterloo.ca/display/ISTKB/Accessing+Esri+ArcGIS+software

In an effort to serve you better, the Library's Geospatial Centre would like to offer three virtual workshops from September 28^th to October 2^nd. We'd like your input as to when they should happen during that week.

Please complete these polls for any of the workshops you might be interested in:

• Getting started with ArcGIS

Welcome to the Geospatial Resources Module. This module will introduce you to the resources in the Geospatial Centre.

Received from the City of Cambridge, 2020 municipal data updates including: businesses, steam catchbasin, steam inlet, steam manhole, steam outlet, steam culvert, steam lead, steam pipe and pavement edge.

Received from the City of Waterloo, Annual Average Daily Traffic counts (dBase file format).

Received from the City of Kitchener, 2020 municipal data updates including: bridges, pavement edge, impervious area, planning intensification areas, property unit location, road island, double line street, water hydrants, water mains, water service pipes, water valves and zoning. This vector data resource covers 1997 - 2020 and provides topographic, planning, and recreation information for the area encompassed by the City of Kitchener.

This data resource is a colour compressed orthomosaic, stored in MrSID image format and covers the City of Kitchener. Pixel resolution is 12 cm. The full colour orthomosaic was provided to the Geospatial Centre by the City of Kitchener in July 2020.

This unique product was created by Geospatial Centre staff by combining: Waterloo zoning (2019), Kitchener zoning (2019), Cambridge zoning (2018) with Teranet's Waterloo Assessment file (2008).

This data resource was received from Airborne Imaging in April, 2020.  The 1 km x 1 km tiled data was collected April 2015 with an average flying height above ground of 1,300 metres (m) producing a Horizontal Accuracy, 95% or 2σ: 30 cm and a Fundamental Vertical Accuracy (on flat hard surfaces), 95% or 2σ: 10 cm.

The data set includes 1 metre Grids (XYZ ASCII), Hillside Images (Geotiffs), Point cloud (LAS v1.2 and 50cm Contours.

Thursday, February 27 - 1:00 pm - 3:00 pm

Dana Porter Computer Lab (LIB 329)

In this workshop, we will explore agent based modelling using spatial data as an environment.

An agent based model (ABM) is a class of computational models for simulating the actions and interactions of autonomous agents (both individual for collective entities such as organizations or groups) with a view to assessing their effects on the system as a whole. - Wikipedia

Monday, February 24th - 1:00 pm - 3:00 pm

Dana Porter Computer Lab (LIB 329)