Friday, October 03, 2003

Justice Data A national conference on justice statistics and information is concluding today in San Francisco.  Sponsored by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the Justice Statistics and Research Association, the conference was loaded with interesting presentations.  BJS supports the World Factbook of Criminal Justice Systems - not to be confused with the CIA's World Factbook which has always been one of my favorite resources.  The CCJJ website won the national award at the conference.  Watch for details on Utah.gov. The Weed and Seed Data Center is an interesting related program.  Check out what the program is doing in your state.  The site also has a good presentation on the use of GIS for tracking and projecting criminal activity.  We will be focusing one of our product management council meetings (November or December) on how to enhance web information and functionality with GIS. aside: UDOT is among the state and local agencies participating in the Stormwater Coalition's current campaign.  UDOT has now officially transitioned to their new website. The 2003 Urban Mobility Study was just released and contains all kinds of interesting information on congestion and transportation throughout the country. Adobe continues to add functionality and performance to its acrobat suite.  We will have a presentation from Adobe on Oct. 16th at 2 pm in Room B110 of the State Office Building.  Product managers and web developers are invited.  An online tour of the 6.0 product is available.  An enterprise workgroup has been formed and is being coordinated by Jeannie Watanabe to look at how to add workflow and database integration to the hundreds of static forms that the State has online. The weekly Homeland Security Newsletter from the Institute for Homeland Security has some interesting news today.  And Marty Stephens has been named to the senior advisory committee of the National Homeland Security Council. Rory Perry has developed a new resource for using RSS and weblogs in the public sector. The Utah College of Applied Technology with its 10 campuses has created a huge matrix of course offerings from throughout the state.  This data needs to be compiled in a searchable format that enables the user to make reasonable comparisons. Everybody's talking about Jeremy Allaire's RSS-Data concept.  I still need to absorb it... Political blogs are the rage.  Check Outside the Beltway.  Wow, and the DC Metro Blogmap has blogs scattered all over the capital city (mouse over each metro station). 8:32:31 AM    comment []

New UPASS System provides School Data The Utah State Board of Education meets this morning at 10:45 am.  The meeting will be broadcast via streaming video.  The new Utah Performance Assessment System for Students is a new service that contains an abundance of information on school performance.  The system will give parents an excellent tool for exploring the schools of a neighborhood before moving in or to review the performance of schools their children already attend.  According to a story on KUTV, the system cost almost $1 million and took almost three years to build.  It contains information from 40 million school records. 7:55:53 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2003 David Fletcher.