At work doing some GIS programming in view of Mt. Ellsworth in Utah's Henry Mountains, the last continental U.S. peaks to be mapped and named. Photo by SB/Columbine.

Wm. A. "Bill" Allen - GIS Services

GIS technician/programmer
custom map maker
technical editor/science writer
AAS GIT, certified in GIS with ArcGIS 9

Columbine, Inc. of Maine - based in Santa Fe, New Mexico

• Contact: <margis@cybermesa.com>
• Available for GIS technician or programming work on a freelance or temporary-hire basis.
  • Interested in tackling a good variety of GIS tasks to build experience.
  • Special skills in GIS programming and database organization. Experienced primarily with Python but also with ActionScript for Flash, C++, Java, JavaScript, Perl, SQL, and Visual Basic. ArcGIS geoprocessor scripting is a specialty, mainly using Python.
  • Extensive background in technical editing, science writing, and illustration.
  • Flexible about hours and work situations. Willing to travel on temporary assignments.
  • Work equally well as a team member, team leader, or solo.
  • Quick learner: Self-taught or OJT'd on all skills prior to attending school for GIS certification.
  • Like to share skills and knowledge.
  • Among the many GIS specialties, some that hold special interest include cartography, marine GIS, and GIS for facilities management.
  • Based since 1991 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Former resident of California, New Hampshire, and coastal Maine.
  • References available on request.
• Education
  • Graduated Spring 2006 with an Associate in Applied Science Degree in Geographic Information Technology from Albuquerque Technical Vocational Institute (TVI, since renamed Central New Mexico Community College).
  • Student projects included building a composite high-resolution coastal shape file of the Maine archipelago, writing a "special problems" paper on An Introduction to ArcGIS Python: Problem Solving for Non-Programmers, and creating a presentation on the Upheaval Dome structure. This last-mentioned project was actually more about dealing with the underlying data than the imagery, and it piqued my interest in GIS metadata and its problems.
• Member:  International Map Trade Association (IMTA) and New Mexico Geographic Information Council (NMGIC)
  • See an example of my cartographic work on the cover of the April 2007 issue of the IMTA's The MapReport (3.98Mb PDF)
• Current GIS-related experience
  • Team member on Horton Family Maps new (June 2008) Street Maps book for the North Estancia Valley and East Mountain area, a growing but heretofore cartographically underserved region in north-central New Mexico. Responsibilities included assembling a new GIS database in ArcGIS 9.2 from scratch, custom programming, symbology creation, and doing a share of the cartographic work, mainly for Santa Fe County and regional overview maps. The Santa Fe data came out of another project, overhauling the company's flagship product, Street Maps for Santa Fe, Espanola, Los Alamos, and Taos. It was originally done by hand (remember crepe tape?) and was later maintained in FreeHand/MAPublisher, from where I have been porting it to ArcGIS.
• Past GIS-related experience
  • SDTS Notes - This is my explanation of how to parse USGS SDTS files from scratch in any computer language and operating system, demonstrated with Python.
  • PullSDTS - This is a program that I wrote -- a stable, ready-to-use, freeware Python 2+ cross-platform application for inspecting, viewing, and converting all types of USGS SDTS DEMs to graphic file formats (8-bit GIF and 8- or 16-bit RAW), and for inspecting SDTS DLGs, and all that without having to mess around with tarballs and DDF spills. Note that, for graphical rather than GIS technical purposes, PullSDTS can be used to assign a common grayscale range across multiple converted DEMs, which can then be joined nearly seamlessly in an image editing program such as Photoshop.
          After all these years, ArcGIS and many other programs still won't tell you what an SDTS file contains, and the (probably cryptically named) *.tar.gz "tarball" on your computer can only be used if its many constituent .ddf files have been ungzipped, which can quickly become a big mess since geographically neighboring DDFs can have identical namings. By constrast, PullSDTS since 2001 has let its users directly inspect any SDTS file with absolutely no fuss.
          There were plans and some good progress toward updating PullSDTS for georeferencing, GIS metadata export, 3D file output, and 3D viewing. However, SDTS DEMs are now almost obsolete and Seamless National Elevation Data can be better and more useful, so the effort probably is better spent on other projects. Some individual PullSDTS modules may still get updates, however, when and if they are incorporated into those projects.
          My practice area for this programming effort, by the way, was building a 3D graphics landscape database for the larger Lake Powell area in the southeastern Utah. Visiting and studying this area, along with living in and studying the Gulf of Maine region, led to my interest in the special field of marine GIS.
  • As Editor/Publisher of 3D Artist magazine during 1991-2002, I worked with writers to help them prepare their how-to articles. This technical writing included GIS and 3D landscape programs such as MicroDEM, World Construction Set, Bryce, World Builder, and the various 3D graphics packages such as 3D Studio and LightWave 3D, as well as CAD programs such as AutoCAD. (PullSDTS arose from this work when it became clear that 3D graphics software users didn't have good access to the best terrain data then available.)
  • Coming from a journalistic background and seeing that there was no central source of GIS-in-the-news coverage (just a deluge of widely duplicated commercial news releases), I twice attempted to help fill this void, but found that it required more time than I had available to volunteer. During the fourth quarter of 2006, this effort was in the form of news links to a limited selection of news media articles and institutional news releases about the practice of GIS and cartography and about the sciences related to the marine GIS and temporal GIS specialties, including archaeological GIS and paleo-GIS. Earlier, back when I was preparing to begin school for GIS certification, I set out to compile a comprehensive set of annotated GIS news links. Through this I learned a lot about how GIS is actually being used in communities around the U.S. For those who might find those old links to still be of some interest, I have left them posted as news media headlines and other announcements of February 2005, and also see the archive for January 2005 and December 2004 news.