For those who need to know the geographic origin of contributions to legislators by state and by companies and other political contribution information, MapLight, a nonpartisan research organization that tracks the influence of money in politics, recently announced the launch of an extensive mapping project. This project examines the following (from the press release): geographic origin of contributions to legislators by state; contributions from companies to legislators by state; and roll call votes by state and district on key bills in Congress.

This project will shed light on how money from outside sources influences local political campaigns and also will show from what geographic locations money is contributed to key legislative initiatives.

These are some of the maps that MapLight has developed so far:

• Legislator Map: Who in Your State Has Contributed to Majority Leader Candidate Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)?

• Voting Map: How Did Your House Rep. Vote on The Farm Bill?
• Donor Map: Comcast Peppers Lawmakers Across the Country with Donations 

MapLight uses the latest available data from the Federal Election Commission as of April 14, 2014 to analyze campaign contributions in each of the above cases for a given election cycle of period of time.

According to their website,

MapLight connects money and votes. “We bring together, in one website, the money given to politicians with each politician’s votes.

We provide data, research services, and online tools that work together to make patterns of money and influence more transparent. Connections between campaign contributions, interest groups and votes that would have required days or weeks of manual research are now available at the click of a mouse.

Since last year,  traditional GIS positioning companies such as TopCon, are getting into the act of providing integration of Building Information Modeling workflows and field layout with their recent collaboration with Autodesk.  This collaboration involves an Autodesk BIM 360 app for iPad to make it easier to locate BIM coordinates precisely on a construction site. Designed for general contractors and MEP professionals, the app controls a robotic total station and the LN-100 3D positioning system from Topcon. As-built data can be fed back into the design model via BIM 360 for quality assurance. Topcon was traditionally considered a geospatial company but they have extended their reach into many other industry segments now, including the area of BIM.

Space-Time Insight, provider of next‐generation situational intelligence solutions, today introduced SI Suite 5.0, a major new version of its real-time visual analytics software.

For those who need help decifering large volumes of data, SI Suite 5.0 helps by combining a highly configurable and intuitive end-user interface with advanced analytics based on open standards. Esri is partnered with Space-Time Insight and thus ArcGIS is integrated into SI Suite 5.0, which makes it easier for Esri customers to analyze and comprehend big data. The software correlates and analyzes data from any number of enterprise (IT), operational (OT) and external (XT) sources across space, time and nodes in a network.

With SI Suite 5.0, Space-Time Insight can help organizations with decision making by intuitively correlating, analyzing and presenting data from disparate systems in compelling visual formats that are actionable.  The software allows users to interactively analyze data in real-time, reducing the dependence on data scientists which is time consuming.

According to the press release, SI Suite 5.0 includes new features that make data from disparate systems easily understandable, give business users personalized access to advanced analytics, and run on a range of platforms from tablets to operations center video walls.  Highlighted new capabilities include:

• A personalized HTML 5-based user interface that uses rich visualizations, advanced filters and alerts to drive attention to assets and events, providing 360-degree operational insight into data from any number of systems in a single pane-of-glass.  Users control specifically what data they want to see and how they want to see it, boosting productivity and speeding decision-making.

• Interactive analytics that uses the open standard R language, bringing analytics out of the “lab” and making it easily accessible to business users.  Users are empowered to interactively execute real-time statistical, predictive and what-if analysis of data, reducing the dependence on data scientists to perform analyses on their behalf.

• Delivery through web browsers on desktop, tablets and video walls of data in a wide range of visualization formats including configurable charts and tables, and geospatial presentations enabled by Esri’s ArcGIS location platform.  The software easily integrates third-party applications such as SAP, OSIsoft PI and many others, eliminating the need for users to access multiple systems and manually correlate data themselves.