[Mapserver-west] Hello from Portland Oregon...

[Aaron Racicot]

Hello West-Coasters,

I too would like to introduce myself and hopefully get involved with some of these very interesting topics people are bringing to the table.  First, my background...

My undergraduate work was in Computer Science from the University of Washington (go Huskies!) and more recently my graduate work (Masters in Environmental Science) was done at OGI School of Science and Engineering at Oregon Health Science University (OHSU) here in Portland Oregon.  Between my two stints in academia I worked as a professional software engineer for about 7 years.  What drove me back to graduate school was the desire to get out of software development business for "the man" and try to do something a bit more meaningful.  This has led me down the path of getting involved in environmental work, specifically GIS related work.

So, now I am working for an environmental non-profit organization in Portland Oregon as their GIS Programmer.  We focus on the whole pacific coast, from California all the way to Alaska.  We have programs in Fisheries, Forestry, Food and Farms, and Native programs.  This has been an exciting transition for me and I am having a blast!  When I arrived our organization was 100% Microsoft and ESRI.  In the last couple of months I have brought up two new Linux servers from scratch and am running Mapserver, Postgres, PostGIS, and many other Open Source tools here in house!  Our DBA is talking about migrating many of the database applications from SQL Server to Postgres, we are starting to migrate all of the IMS applications to Mapserver, and we are focusing almost all of our future development around Mapserver... it just makes sense.

I have large interests in the area of creating web-based decision support tools for environmental managers.  Many of the projects I am undertaking here are related to user based modeling and scenario based management driven from a web-based GIS environment.  I look forward to talking with people about any experiences they might have in this area.  

As far as other projects and history, I have a lot of experience using Mapserver to visualize modeling data in the marine environment (although not much experience with OpenDAP).  All of my Thesis work was related to linking web-based mapping to Coastal Margin Observatories, and specifically gathering and displaying observational and modeling data from these systems.  All of my work in this area was focused around real-time interaction with the data to create on-demand geo-referenced data products.  This included things like transects, particle trajectories, and cruise planning tools, etc.  I am very interested in the OpenDAP discussions and creating WMS servers with dynamically generated images from Modeling/Observation data outputs.  I still work very closely with the CCALMR/CORIE group at OHSU developing their GIS interfaces to circulation models.

To wrap up, I am a fanatical Telemark skier, love to climb (both Alpine and Rock), and ride my bike everywhere!  I am married with a 5 month old daughter and two big dogs.  I would love the opportunity to hook up with all of you at some point.  I will be going to the MUM conference again this year, so maybe we can get the West Coast group together there as well.  I actually remember meeting both Mathew and Doug (I think) at last year's conference talking about HostGIS and Humbolt Bay monitoring systems.  I think it would be a great opportunity for all of us to get to know each other in person.  

I look forward to helping out where I can and getting feedback from all of you on the issues we all face in this business.

Aaron


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| Aaron Racicot  | aaronr at ecotrust.org   |
| GIS Programmer | 503.467.0759          |
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| e c o t r u s t                        |
| Jean Vollum Natural Capital Center     |
| 721 NW Ninth Avenue                    |
| Suite 200                              |
| Portland, OR 97209                     |
| www.ecotrust.org                       |
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