Many changes have taken place in Online GIS and geospatial course offerings over the past year, since we first covered the topic on GISCafe. The range of topics has increased to include even courses for high schoolers, and the ever popular drone classes and Geodesign. The popularity of “Massive Open Online Courses” or MOOCs allows colleges and universities to teach thousands of students at one time, at their convenience, rather than at a prescribed day and time.
GISCafe Voice
Archive for the ‘analytics’ Category
New Autodesk InfraWorks 360 Release Offers Improved Productivity Enhancements and Performance
Wednesday, October 28th, 2015Autodesk’s mid-year release of InfraWorks 360 was discussed in a recent press webinar.
Eric Chappell, Community Evangelist, Infraworks 360, noted that the latest version was released September 2.
InfraWorks® 360 model analysis tools can help you understand a project’s geographic context more clearly. With InfraWorks 360 software, geospatial analysis, such as buffering, overlay, and slope analysis, is integrated into the planning and design environment to help you make better decisions throughout the project.
The release is divided into three areas:
The highly intuitive graphical interface of the Traffic Simulation module makes it clear when roads have exceeded capacity requirements and make it easy to identify where changes need to be made.
Attention all GIS Online Universities and Course Providers!
Tuesday, October 20th, 2015We here at GISCafe Voice are about to update our special coverage on Online GIS Courses offered. The reason being: so many new classes are now being offered in this format, and the demand for them is exploding.
Data from terrain maps, aerial photographs, GIS data, building models & more used by a team at Autodesk to create a proof-of-concept 3D model of the City of Los Angeles. Image Courtesy of Autodesk.
Technology Shrinks Geography
Wednesday, October 14th, 2015Author Robert D. Kaplan Author of “The Revenge of Geography” Senior Fellow, CNAS spoke recently on the topic of technology and geography.
“Technology has not negated geography, but has shrunk geography,” stated Kaplan, “it has made it claustrophobic. The fights over packets of ground are more intense than before. Each part of world interlocks with the other.”
He chose to talk about the Middle East, then about Asia Pacific, then Europe.
Trimble Geospatial Announces New Solutions at INTERGEO
Thursday, October 8th, 2015Trimble Geospatial announced several new solutions at INTERGEO in Frankfurt, Germany this past month. Tim Lemmon, marketing director Geospatial Software for Trimble and Todd Steiner, marketing director for Imaging and UAS platform for Trimble. outlined what the new products and enhancements are for this release.
Survey Trimble R2 TSC3 Bridge Inspection
MetroTech Offers Real-Time Traffic Intelligence
Thursday, September 17th, 2015MetroTech is a company that provides an Intelligent Transportation System with its “IntelliSection” data analytics tools to use on an existing city infrastructure, to turn it into a smart city.
Geometri Spins off from GISi
Friday, September 4th, 2015Michael Healander, founder of Geometri, spoke with GISCafe Voice about the evolution of that company, and the recent announcement from Geographic Information Services, Inc. (GISi) an Esri Platinum Partner, that its Board of Directors has formally approved the spin-off of its operating unit, GISi Indoors, as an independent company. The new business is named Geometri, LLC., Geometri is the name of their flagship indoor GIS software-as-a-service product.
Healander said he and Lee Lichlyter, CEO of Geometri and former CEO of GISi, are looking for strategic partners in the industry so they can grow faster. Geometri is still part of the GISi family but is now more of a holding company.
GISi was one of ten Esri platinum partners and now Geometri is part of the Esri startup program.
“The reason we got into indoor mapping,” said Healander, “Is we focused on the fact that when you go indoors you lose your navigation on your phone. And there’s a lot of opportunity as people spend money indoors. It’s hard to navigate, and we took on that problem. We built a platform and called it Geometri. We have taken complex pieces of technology to create indoor GPS, whether indoor maps, indoor routing or indoor search. We’ve taking the outdoor routing algorithms that we used in our main company and now we make them for indoor.”
TopoView from the USGS is Available
Wednesday, August 19th, 2015TopoView provides one of the USGS’s most important and useful products, the topographic map, in a way that is easy to use, accessible and provides wonderful historical map data.
In 1879, the USGS began to map the Nation’s topography. Just like in a lot of modern mapping, this topographical mapping was done at different levels of detail, as needed to support various land use, exploration and other purposes. The collection of maps deepened and expanded as the years passed, with the USGS producing new map versions of each area. The most current maps are available from The National Map. For those users who need historical reference maps, TopoView shows the many and varied older maps of each area. TopoView also takes into account the fact that the names of some natural and cultural features have changed over time, and the ‘old’ names can be found on these historical topographic maps.
According to USGS materials, this interface was created by the National Geologic Map Database project (NGMDB), in support of topographic mapping program managed by the National Geospatial Program (NGP). Geologic mapping and topographic mapping at the USGS have a long tradition together (see 1888 report). The NGMDB project is proud to assist the NGP in bringing these maps to the Web.
TopoView is packed with new features as well as downloadable file formats such as jpeg, GeoTIFF, and KMZ. The maps shown through topoView are from the USGS’s Historical Topographic Map Collection (HTMC). The goal of this scanning, which started in 2011, is to provide a digital repository of USGS 1:250,000 scale and larger (more detailed) maps printed between 1884 (the inception of the topographic mapping program), and 2006. Currently, there are more than 178,000 maps in the HTMC. The NGP is accurately cataloging and creating metadata to accompany high-resolution, georeferenced digital files of each of these printed maps. At present, these maps are offered as GeoPDFs, through The National Map and the USGS Store. However, additional formats are now being offered for evaluation and use through topoView to include:
AccuWeather Addresses the Storms of our Century
Wednesday, August 5th, 2015“The business of weather is a storm of data driven change,” said Dr. Joel Myers, founder, president and chairman of AccuWeather in his keynote address entitled “Transformational Change Driven by Big Data” at the Esri User Conference 2015 held in San Diego. Myers added that, “We are reinventing ourselves over and over, to become the world’s most trusted source of weather information.”
AccuWeather Portal
Weather information has definitely morphed over recent years, with maps that can be customized to the user’s requirements. With weather that has become increasingly unpredictable in the world, the challenge to provide up to the minute accurate coverage of weather patterns has also increased.
Tile data from AccuWeather allows users to see an accurate representation of the weather and “manage their business processes via the weather,” said Myers.
This certainly does seem to be the case for big weather events. Myers said that the key criteria for weather are the following: what was it and what will it be, how severe and how will it be presented, when will it happen? Where?
Weather today is the original Big Data, according to Myers, and has helped drive increases in data power.
In the 1940s, thousands of pieces of data were collected and plotted onto maps called weather maps. They were analyzed by meteorologists to create forecasts, including how terrain, water and land boundaries impacted the movement of weather patterns. Weather forecasters were among the first to use big data collected in real time. In 1960 the first accurate weather prediction was made 24 hours ahead of the weather event.
From the Exhibit Floor: Esri User Conference 2015
Wednesday, July 29th, 2015A look at what is being demonstrated on the Exhibit Floor is a great way to see what is trending in the geospatial industry. Location, navigation, GIS positioning, sensors, geospatial intelligence, UAS, 3D, emergency response are just a few of the areas covered in the vast offerings seen throughout the week.
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