It's Geography Awareness Week!

National Geographic invites budding explorers on a seven-day "tour" of the marvelous cultures and natural wonders of the Americas during Geography Awareness Week 2008, Nov. 16-22. Geography Awareness Week is part of Geography Action!, an annual conservation and awareness program for schools and students in grades K through 12, designed to educate and excite youngsters about the world's natural, cultural and historic treasures.

Visit our Geography Action! and My Wonderful World web sites for more information, activities and teacher resources.

Coincident with Geography Awareness Week is GIS Day on November 19th. GIS Day provides an international forum for users of geographic information systems (GIS) technology to demonstrate real-world applications that are making a difference in our society.

TOPO! Maps for ArcGIS Users

Over the years we've found many GIS users like having topographic maps as a base layer for their projects. We created a product based on our TOPO! software that lets ArcGIS users easily add our high-resolution, color-corrected scans of USGS topographic maps, along with hillshade and DEMs.

TOPO! Pro for ArcGIS is available along with an individual state's data, or you can buy a dataset for the entire US on a USB drive.

It supports KML export for ArcGIS Explorer or Google Earth.

Please ask about our ESRI Conference special, good through August.

We also introduced TOPO! USA Cache for ArcGIS Server for those needing an enterprise solution.



For more information, please call David Wright at 800-962-1643 x 108

GIS Day - November 14

GIS Day provides an international forum for users of geographic information systems (GIS) technology to demonstrate real-world applications that are making a difference in our society. More than 80 countries will participate in holding local events such as corporate open houses, hands-on workshops, community expos, school assemblies, and more.

If you haven't heard of GIS, according to the National Center of Geographic Information and Analysis:

a GIS is a system of hardware, software and procedures to facilitate the management, manipulation, analysis, modelling, representation and display of georeferenced data to solve complex problems regarding planning and management of resources

GIS is a part of our lives, whether we realize it or not. When you go to a retailer's web site and search for store locations by zip code, you're using GIS. When the Centers for Disease Control collect information on occurences of a disease, it is georeferenced data that can be analyzed as well as visualized on a map.

The National Geographic Society is a principal sponsor of GIS Day. Visit the GIS Day web site for more information.