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wptc inc


Corporate Bio

wptc was founded in 1987 when John Alexander left IBM. Valerie Warwick joined the company in 1988. In the late 80's and early 90's, they did redistricting. When ArcView 2.0 was released by ESRI, they started an active training program and did Avenue development. Valerie wrote the scripts in a book titled ArcView/Avenue Programmer's: 101 Scripts. In the early days of the Internet, they wrote a Internet Map server based on an open-source GIF library and wrote some JAVA utilities. By the late 90's, they had shifted exclusively to consulting and application development. They wrote editing interfaces with ArcGIS for public and private sector clients and automated mission critical business processes using geoprocessing scripts. Recently, they have worked for state agencies in Mississippi, Georgia and Texas, an oil and gas company in Houston, and real estate services companies in Austin. They have written production applications with ArcGIS, C#, JavaScript and Sql Server.

Recent Activities

Creative Thursday
On Thurday's, we study, experiment and pursue non-commercial ideas. Currently, we're working on our website (unchanged since 1998 maybe?), Sql Server 2008 spatial capabilities, writing readable URL's to do GIS queries (motivated by the concepts in REST), loading all the point data we can into a single table to see when it breaks (hard but not intractable problem: attribute queries); automating and managing tile caches with ArcGIS Server (target area for test is Central Texas -- Travis and Williamson counties + others???), and using ASP.Net server controls with Google Maps (for example, Google and a large GridView).

Fun Friday
Fun Friday is simple concept. Take what we learn on a Creative Thursday and share it with our friends and neighbors. It doesn't work real well now, but we're just beginning. We had 3 sessions at the end of 2007 and have decided they need more structure. Focusing on four very specific topics to start 2008:

  • Sql Server 2008 spatial component: loading data
  • Visual Studio 2008 (C#) new features
  • Managing Tile Caches: starting with aerial photography
  • Google Maps: the blog and writing custom overlays

Projects

Field Data Entry
Laptop application with advanced ArcGIS editing features (ArcView 9.2)

Markers from Shapefiles
Reading shapefiles with OGR tools; creating markers in Google with KML or JSON; Customize ASP.Net's web.config (with intellisense) to describe a legend. Working with large numbers of markers (500-2000); progress tracking, turn on/off markers by legend item, improve performance

Unit Tool
Polygon intersection computation in C#; oil and gas lease computations

Shared Membership System for Multiple Apps Public websites; Public reports; Private internal uploads; Point data entered by registered volunteers

where we work...