About

Brief History

GISDoctor.com was first developed during the summer of 2009 to bring a wide range of spatially enabled folks a GIS resource for any number of topics.  During the snowy winter of 2011 the site was migrated to a blog format so that I could easily update the content and blog on a variety of different GIS related topics. In 2014 I put the site into sleep mode for over a year focus on other projects.  In August of 2015 I decided to wake up the site again, focusing more on geo and less on GIS.

Who is the GIS Doctor?

My name is Ben Spaulding and I am a professional geographer.  I’ve been working in the “geo”fields for over ten years in a number of different positions.  I was a project manager/web programmer/GIS tech for a web technology start-up, a GIS analyst and developer for a  state data center, and now I work in a research department for a catastrophe risk modeling firm, where I work with a very talented team designing and executing a variety of technical projects related to the analysis of natural catastrophes.

I earned a Ph.D. in geography from UCONN with a focus in geospatial analysis.  In my spare time I like to run, garden, and complain about the Red Sox.

The opinions, comments, and ideas posted on this site are mine and mine alone.  They do not necessarily reflect the opinions of my current employer, former employers, grad school cohort members, my neighbor’s pet dog or anyone else I’ve ever met.

Find me on the web:

Personal Website

8 Replies to “About”

  2. Hey Ben,

    I’m a GIS student at McGill University and a follower of your blog. I’m always interested to see other’s ideas and processes within the GIS community, and am impressed that Jack emailed you personally (both with him taking the time and you getting an email from him). I was wondering what sparked your interest in GIS?

    Thanks,
    Jared

      1. What drives me crazy is the iiinalbty to change column names, order and data type. Also nearly everything you do in ArcGIS produces another feature class. Before long there are so many new FCs that you lose track of whats what. Programs like MapInfo apply changes to the FC itself without generating a copy. Without this, editing polygons or polylines are nearly impossible (I do all my editing in MapInfo then import it).

        [WORDPRESS HASHCASH] The poster sent us ‘0 which is not a hashcash value.

  3. Hi,
    I was wondering if you knew of any program that would directly read a .mpk file from ArcMap desktop 10 and allow another person, in a different geographic location to make edits?
    I have just found your site and will be following you on Twitter.
    Sincerely,
    Bryan

  4. Hi,
    i’m a french professionnal geographer, and i found your blog on the web today…but no RSS link to follow you… don’t you have one?
    Thank you

    Clément

Leave a Reply