November 16 is GIS Day 2005

The Visual Information Systems Center (VISC) will mark GIS Day 2005 and Geography Awareness Week by hosting a “GIS Day Teacher Training Session” and by participating in Allegheny County events to honor the occasion. GIS Day is a nationwide grassroots event that that encourages GIS practitioners to open their doors to schools, businesses, and the general public to showcase real-world applications of this important technology. Nationally, the event is principally sponsored by the National Geographic Society, the Association of American Geographers, University Consortium for Geographic Information Science, the United States Geological Survey, The Library of Congress, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett–Packard, and ESRI. Across the country, there are locally-produced events to mark GIS Day.

On November 18 th, VISC will offer a workshop for educators on several GIS topics including basic ArcVoyager (GIS software) functions, mapmaking and data analysis, and finding free GIS data. Educators from Western Pennsylvania will benefit from this primer on GIS techniques and tools. On November 18 and 19, VISC will be part of the GIS festivities at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh. Visitors and students will have the opportunity to sample some of the GIS-related research done at VISC and to learn more about programs at SIS. Bob Regan, a project manager for VISC, will be signing copies of his book, “The Steps of Pittsburgh,” which documents the more than 700 sets of steps within the City of Pittsburgh. Using Geographic Information Systems technology and riding a bicycle up and down Pittsburgh's many hills, Bob located and plotted every set of steps in the city. In addition, the VISC staff will demonstrate GIS techniques and actual applications in the Carnegie Science Center’s Planetarium. For more information about VISC and the GIS Day 2005 activities, visit http://visc.sis.pitt.edu/gisday/.