General Information
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Palimpsest Consulting General Information |
Contact Information
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Who is Palimpsest Consulting?
Matthew Syrett began Palimpsest in 1996 after gathering together the money to buy a SGI computer and obtaining a copy of workstation ArcInfo from ESRI. His intent was to develop a consulting firm dedicated to advancing the application of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in real world settings, developing Social Science applications, and exploring the use of Internet as a medium for information dispersal.
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Syrett's career began in Anthropology with a specialization in prehistoric studies. He has work extensively in the environmental field within New Mexico, California, Arizona, New York, Pennsylvania, and Europe. This work has included over 4,000 field hours and an appointment running the day-to-day operation of one of the eleven information centers run by the California Office of Historic Preservation (The Central Coast Information Center). During his tenure as Assistant Coordinator of the Central Coast Information Center, Mr. Syrett spearheaded a cutting-edge initiative to construct an ArcInfo-based GIS to unite the information systems of the state's eleven information centers and improve data management practices. As a graduate student at UC Santa Barbara, Mr. Syrett specialized in spatial statistics, social complexity theory, and computer applications to the Social Sciences. Syrett's involvement with the Internet was largely accidental. While working on a GIS project for the State of California, he was asked to design a remote access system for oil spill response teams to assess and avoid possible impacts to cultural resources during emergency clean up operations. The World Wide Web was just beginning to emerge as an information brokering technology with the first release of Mosaic, unfortunately given the secure nature of information to be distributed a WWW-based approach at that time seemed problematic. Instead, Syrett developed a telnet based system where oil spill response team would telnet into a secure server where they would create a query in a PERL script that would launch from the .cshr file, and call ArcInfo to pull information from a GIS database and prepare this data for file transfer using FTP. He then went on to learn HTML and develop an Intranet site for Medical Library at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan (MSKCC). Syrett then went to work for a Commercial Real Estate On-Line (CREOL, Inc.), Inc. as GIS director. There, he directed the development in conjunction with Visual Radio, Inc. and Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) of a MapObjects-based Internet mapping site for researching commercial real estate sites in the Northeast. |
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Palimpsest Consulting is presently working on a number of projects:
Biographies
Lead Consultant - Matthew Syrett
Design by Matthew D Syrett (3 Feb 1997)
Original Images and Text Copyrighted by Matthew D Syrett (1997)
