harmonyst.org

I’ve been waiting for this report to be published in full for a long time, and now it’s available here on the FAO site. The report is a very detailed review and inventory of gobally consistent geospatial databases, and it is being used to inform core geodatabase construction by the UN Geographic Information Working Group (UNGIWG). Anyone aquiring data for a global geodatabase or doign GIS at international level will find this to be a critical and comprehensive view of what geodata is out there, where it comes from, what it is good for, and and how to get it.

The School of Public Health is using Moodle for its online courses, and they are turning out very well. However, Moodle is a course management system, and has not been developed as a student information system. There is apparently an add-on module for Moodle in development, called Online Education Portal, but it is not yet clear how robust an SIS this will turn out to be.

While Blackboard and WebCT have received a significant open source challenge from the likes of Moodle et al., open source student/school information systems are not nearly as well developed. Centre SIS was perhaps the most widely used and highly developed, and it seems that a fork called Focus/SIS is picking up where thay are leaving off. Both are PHP/postgresql systems, which is both an advantage in that postgres is a bit more sophisticated and powerful than mysql, but also a disdvantage in that the majority of other learning paltforms (like Moodle) use MySQL.
There are currently people trying to integrate Centre and Focus with Moodle, but the progress is not yet significant. The IMS enterprise standard is the key as usual, but the integration is not o.t.b. yet.

I am also looking at Uni Open, a student and university management system out of FernUniversitaet in Hagen, Germany. I have very high hopes for SchoolTool, a python/zope application which looks like it will be ready for production implementations next year. The demo looks really slick. SchoolTool would be an ideal solution for educational institutions also employing plone/zope for learning centers and content management.

Working with the RALLY Foundation’s assessment of Central City New Orleans, I’ve been mapping some of the primary data collected. The easiest way to geocode is to use the batch geocoder here:

http://www.batchgeocode.com/

The site uses Yahoo’s Geocoding API which is based on NAVTEQ and Tele Atlas street data, hence it can give more accurate results than a TIGER-based geocoder.

I simply export unique household identifiers and their addresses from SPSS to DBF-IV, open it in Excel, and copy and past it into the html batch geocoder interface. Once the geocoding is done, I copy from the interface and paste back into excel. Save it as excel, import into SPSS, and then merge back into the original db (make sure to sort HHID in ascending order for both databases).