[Mapserver-west] Introductions

[William Hudspeth]

Hello,

My name is Bill Hudspeth. It is a pleasure to meet all of you. I work at
the Earth Data Analysis Center (EDAC) at the University of New Mexico in
Albuquerque. There are actually 4 of us here who develop with Mapserver.
EDAC is a semi-autonomous entity here at the University that is
supported almost entirely by soft money from various grants and
contracts. We are the central repository/clearinghouse for spatial data
in the state of New Mexico (most data can be downloaded for free from
our website). We have a number of different divisions, specializing
respectively in aerial photography, remote sensing, desktop GIS
applications (using primarily ESRI), and my own section, now involved
heavily in developing web-based applications for our clients. The four
of us who work in this capacity have succeeded in subversively(!)
shifting the entire focus of our work into open source GIS applications.
We have worked with Mapserver for about 3-4 years, and are currently
developing a number of large public health applications under grants
from NASA and the state. At present, development involves the
integration of a variety of data sources, packages and protocols, all
orchestrated from Python scripts. These include SOAP messaging, WMS,
POSTGIS, NASA Earth Science products, GRASS GIS, the R statistical
package, GDAL, etc.

We are looking forward to sharing information and learning from this
community.

Bill