Greetings! With this new version of the Baruch Geoportal, launched July 30, 2015, we hope to provide you (our users) with a simpler way of navigating and accessing our content. The wiki-style interface should also make the job of our geospatial services team easier, so we can focus more on the content and can make updates more quickly. Most of the content that was housed on the old geoportal (http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/geoportal/) has been migrated to this new location (https://www.baruch.cuny.edu/confluence/display/geoportal/).
A few recent updates that I'll mention:
- The latest version of the GIS Practicum manual, Introduction to GIS Using Open Source Software, has just been released. The manual was written using QGIS 2.8 Wien, which is the current long term service version of QGIS. We'll be using this manual in our workshops for the 2015-16 Academic Year.
- Our latest spatial dataset is the NYC Mass Transit Spatial layers series, which was created to provide the public with free and well-documented GIS layers for NYC transit features. It includes routes and stops for subways, buses, and trains.
- We've consolidated a number of resources that were previously scattered on the GIS research guide and have created dedicated places for them here. This includes geographical crosswalks and maps for relating various NYC geographies, and data files with individual records for every IRS Tax Exempt organization in NYC.
- We have an About US page that discusses our mission and our services
- Whenever possible we've provided a direct link to geospatial metadata for our data files in an XML format. Over the coming months we'll be developing style sheets to make these files human-readable.
- The NYC Geodatabase is the next update on our list! We hope to have a new version posted before the end of August.
Feel free to follow this blog to keep up to date with additions and changes to our datasets. If you are a CUNY student, faculty, or staff member who has created GIS data as part of your coursework or research, please contact us if you would like to host your data on this site. The geospatial services team will assist you in preparing your data and in creating standards-based metadata for your datasets.