Speakers to Highlight the 2017 National GIS in Transit Conference

Michael Ratcliffe is Assistant Division Chief for Geographic Standards, Criteria, Research, and Quality in the Census Bureau’s Geography Division. He will deliver the opening keynote address on Thursday morning, September 7: New Directions for Census Bureau Data Dissemination and Products. A key innovation area for the Census Bureau is improving and enhancing access to statistical and geospatial data, including the ability to combine data from a variety of demographic, economic, and geospatial data sets. Learn about several relatively new products that combine data to improve access to and utility of statistical and geospatial data as well as what is on the horizon for data access and dissemination. Combining data across datasets, however, has presented challenges due to different geographic concepts and definitions, different universes, and different vintages. Efforts to address those challenges will be discussed.

Derald Dudley is a Geographer at the US Department of Transportation, Bureau of Transportation Statistics in Washington, DC. His closing keynote address on Friday afternoon, September 8 will discuss Creating the National Transit Map: How we are Leveraging Standards and Open Data for a New National Geospatial Asset. The creation of the GTFS data standard and technological advances, that now allow local transit agencies to electronically publish this detailed information on bus and rail routes, stops and time tables in a machine readable format, provided a new opportunity for USDOT. The National Transit Map takes advantage of this by leveraging data that transit agencies already make available to the public and combining this voluntarily-provided GTFS data into one data set. Transit agencies that are already providing this information as open data are able to participate with little effort by registering their data and granting the USDOT a Creative Commons license to access and use the agency's transit data periodically. The result puts accurate data about the nation's transportation system, such as the location of transit stops, frequency of transit service, and transit routes into the hands of stakeholders. This project will also help educate transit agencies who do not currently use GTFS about its benefits to researchers, private software developers, and the riding public.

In addition to our keynote speakers, more than 50 presenters from academia, the private sector and experts representing public transit agencies from all over the country will share their knowledge during the conference. Don't miss the important conversations, pre-conference workshops, comprehensive education, and opportunities to connect with experts, peers and private sector sponsors, including Esri, DTS and GeoDecisions.

Attending this conference earns Education Points toward GISP certification and re-certification and the conference has been approved for 46.5 AICP-CM credits.

Take some time to review the detailed conference agenda, speaker profiles and more at http://www.urisa.org/transitgis

Wendy Nelson
Executive Director - URISA
[email protected] www.urisa.org