Francois Valois, vice president, Civil Engineering with Bentley Systems spoke at Bentley’s recent Civil Design Virtual Press Briefing about the current state of civil engineering and how we now need to do things differently. Civil infrastructure will continue to need to accelerate, according to Valois. “There has been an enormous infrastructure deficit over the years. Any time we stop accelerating we make the problem worse. Now we have social distancing, and funding challenges. Projects may be funded by a special tax on gas, for example. In addition to this, we have to stay home and when we’re onsite we must have less people onsite and find new ways to work. Our answer is the digital twin, and helping our users to go digital.”
Pascal Strupler, Product Manager, HxDR, Hexagon Geosystems spoke with GISCafe Voice about its recent product announcement, HxDR. HxDR is aiming to be Hexagon’s central smart digital reality data hub, a new cloud-based digital reality visualization platform that can import and visualize any type of reality capture data from airborne, ground, and mobile sensors. This data can be integrated together easily, according to Strupler.
GISCafe Industry Predictions for 2020 move forward into February. Topics covered this week are cloud-based asset management systems, artificial intelligence, smart cities, citizen science, open source mapping and data, GNSS advancements, big spatial data analytics, drone industry, enterprise scale and dashboards and data visualizations.
We’re coming down the home stretch with our GISCafe Industry Predictions, so if you haven’t sent yours in, please feel free to do so until January 20th, for inclusion in a series of editorial articles to be published in January. This article is the third installment of those articles.
The year in review is defined in large part by what drives the technology sector. Natural phenomenon such as fires and floods, earthquakes and hurricanes require continual vigilance to be able to record, predict, respond to and recover from. The effort of Digital Cities is an effort to maintain cities in a more efficient manner, with heightened emphasis on people and data.
According to ABI Research, 500 smart cities will have digital twins by 2025. Currently the cities of Boston, New York, Singapore, Stockholm, Helsinki, Jaipur, Newcastle and Amaravati have deployed digital twins.
Richard Leadbeater, State Government Industry Manager for Esri spoke with GISCafe Voice recently about Esri’s approach to smart cities and takeaways from the Smart Cities DC conference held in October. Leadbeater oversees all the state government stories and the area of smart space such as redistricting and elections.
Nearmap’s high-resolution aerial imagery and Cityworks announced a partnership last week that joins lifelike, 2D and 3D, HD-quality visuals with a GIS-centric asset management system that helps organizations oversee assets, maintenance, permits and licenses for public asset management.
Belgian company Orbit Geospatial Technologies (Orbit GT), specialists in 3D and mobile mapping, was recently acquired by Bentley Systems at the Bentley Year In Infrastructure 2019 thought leadership conference in Singapore.
With all the uses that have been discovered for GIS, humanitarian demining is one that has not gotten a lot of attention. Land mines and unexploded remnants of war are embedded in the soil and structures of one-third of the world’s developing countries. These abandoned time bombs affect innocent people long after the war has ended, making so many areas uninhabitable.