France will chair and host the 21st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21/CMP11), from 30 November to 11 December 2015. The conference is crucial because the expected outcome is a new international agreement on climate change, applicable to all, to keep global warming below 2°C, a level that would ensure safety of the planet’s fragile resources. If that level is not achieved, it could have devastating consequences on world populations and survival.
One of the challenges of the Paris agreement, where heads of state will all gather, will be to establish a periodic – ideally five-year – review mechanism to raise the ambition of each Party and progressively improve the collective effort toward keeping global warming below 2°C.
Each country represented will obviously have reasons to participate but also issues, largely economic and political, that may create a climate of resistance to the review mechanism. (more…)
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.
At the Bentley Year In Infrastructure 2015 Conference held in London a week ago, it was noted that GIS was an integrated part of Bentley’s offerings, particularly in the utilities and assets areas of the products offerings. Products are being rolled into CONNECT Editions, which will allow users to leverage cloud services through a common modeling environment platform. Other products such as Bentley’s OpenUtilities, leverage GIS and their ContextCapture is being used to obtain a high resolution and georeferenced model of cities and even countries.
SA Water, Adelaide, South Australia, BE Inspired 2015 Winner in Asset Performance Management
Trimble 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.
Michael 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.”
RADM Scott Giberson, Assistant US Surgeon General Commander, Commisioned Corp Ebola Response, moderated the panel discussion entitled “GEOINT and Epidemiology : The Role of Geospatial Intelligence in Health Crisis Analysis and Mission” at GEOINT 2015.
TopoView 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:
Randy Denny, vice president of Sales for Xplore Technologies, talked recently at the Esri User Conference held in San Diego about the company’s big news: acquiring Motion Computing in April of 2015. Motion added to Xplore a broader portfolio of solutions in the “rugged category” of tablets.
A 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.
Decision making in GIS would not be possible without knowledge of location and with it, a sense of place and culture. The stories of the afternoon plenary session at Esri UC 2015 showcased real life examples of this reality, from fighting the Ebola epidemic to fighting crime in Baltimore.
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