General News
State Cartographer's Office News
The Wisconsin Land Information Board, created in 1989, ceased to exist on July 1, 2005 due to a statutory sunset. Ted Koch, State Cartographer, had served six and one-half years as the Board’s Chair. In September, Ted also completed a two-year term on the National States Geographic Information Council’s Board of Directors. He is staying very active with NSGIC, leading an initiative to restore a unified national digital orthophoto program. He continues as chair of the WI Land Information Association (WLIA) Coordinate Systems Task Force. The task force is focused primarily on the redesign of the Wisconsin County Coordinate System. The redesign parameters and mathematical computations are being designed, tested and developed by Al Vonderohe, Professor, UW Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Proof that time flies, Jim Lacy has been with the SCO for nearly a year. He continues to lend a hand on a wide variety of statewide GIS coordination issues, including an enterprise GIS planning effort along with David Mockert, the new Department of Administration Geographic Information Officer, and a committee of agency GIS leaders. Jim is also an active participant in the WLIA Emergency Management Task Force, a group charged to assess the statewide utilization of geospatial technologies for homeland security and disaster management. He recently helped coordinate workshops on digital orthophotography quality assurance, and GIS project management.
Brenda Hemstead, the SCO’s most veteran and versatile employee, is completing work on a Federal Geographic Data Committee grant to develop content standard schemas for geodetic control. The use of these schemas is being applied to our web-based ControlFinder application (www.sco.wisc.edu/geocat/), which includes geodetic control data served by the SCO, the National Geodetic Survey, and a number of Wisconsin counties. In addition to her technical work, Brenda recently represented the office and provided outreach services at the WI Chapter of the National Emergency Number Association annual conference, and the WI ESRI Users’ Group meeting.
AJ Wortley, with assistance from SCO student employees, has been streamlining the content of WISCLINC, the state’s land information clearinghouse (www.sco.wisc.edu/wisclinc/). AJ has focused on refining WiscMap, a webmapping services viewer, cataloging metadata, and establishing links to local land information websites. AJ is staying actively involved in tracking developments in Open GIS Consortium webmapping services and developments at the federal level, particularly with keeping established connections to the Geospatial OneStop portal. Also, AJ continues as a member of the WLIA Board of Directors, and a member of the WLIA Coordinate Systems Task Force.
Conni Fialkowski continues to handle all things financial for the SCO. In her free time she has her hands full acting as surrogate “mom” for a growing family of wayward neighborhood cats.
The SCO’s talented production staff includes graduate students Catrine Lehrer-Brey (M.S. in Geography/Urban & Regional Planning), Matt Bloch and David Heyman (M.S. in Cartography/GIS), and Jared Chapiewsky a May, 2005 graduate (B.S. Cartography/GIS) who continues with us to the end of the year as an LTE. SCO student employees are continuing to make contributions to grant projects and building and maintaining several Web sites.
