Top trends that we can expect to see dominating the geospatial landscape in 2016 are trends driven in large part by world events and climate change. Technologies play a large part in how well we will be able to manage climate change and attendant disasters, world events that include terrorism, and disease.
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
Author 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.
This panel discussion, entitled “A Conversation with NGA Leadership,” conducted Wednesday June 24th, at GEOINT 2015 had the flavor of an inside meeting, according to USGIF CEO Keith Masback, who joked that “we cleverly tricked about 1,500 people into coming to a staff meeting.”
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.
Partnerships, unmanned spacecraft, technologies and sensors were some of the topics covered in a panel discussion and press luncheon held at GEOINT Symposium 2015 in Washington D.C. recently, by Northrup Grumman.
An E-2C test aircraft assigned to Air Test and Evaluation Squadron (VX) 20 conducts an aerial refueling dry-plug engagement with an F/A-18.
Rand Worldwide announced that its IMAGINiT Technologies division is partnering with Pix4D, leading developers of 2D and 3D mapping and modeling software. This collaboration will help architectural, civil and manufacturing design engineers extract imagery taken from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and convert it into usable 2D and 3D models.