Already this spring there have been wildfires reported in the western states. According to the National Interagency Fire Center<http://www.nifc.gov/>, more than 82,000 wildfires occurred across 10 million acres in the U.S. last year.
GISCafe Voice
Posts Tagged ‘location’
Pitney Bowes Software Risk Data Suite Wildfire Bundle launched for insurance sector
Friday, April 6th, 2012Police tracking cellphones routinely
Wednesday, April 4th, 2012WASHINGTON — Law enforcement tracking of cellphones, once the province mainly of federal agents, has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight, documents show.
The practice has become big business for cellphone companies, too, with a handful of carriers marketing a catalog of “surveillance fees” to police departments to determine a suspect’s location, trace phone calls and texts or provide other services. Some departments log dozens of traces a month for both emergencies and routine investigations.
–The New York Times, March 31, 2012
More on pothole crowdsourcing info – the City of Boston
Tuesday, February 21st, 2012The City of Boston and a company called Innocentive recently teamed up to develop a smartphone app that allows drivers in the city to help track and predict where potholes develop. Much like the one developed by CitySourced, the Street Bump app keeps track of bumps while driving, as well as their location, and then sends this data on to the city so that it can address repairs quicker and hopefully, more efficiently.
-crowdsourcing.org
There’s an app for that – from CitySourced
Friday, February 17th, 2012Residents of Longview, TX (reported on earlier this week – “There’s an app for that – citizen pothole reporting”) with smartphones can get a new mobile app called “CitySend“ created by CitySourced (didn’t credit that company in the first blog) to inform public works officials of their public issues. The mobile app, unveiled by Longview GIS Manager Justin Cure, allows users to take photos, record video and audio of a problem, and automatically provide GPS coordinates. After the report is submitted, users can track all reported problems on a map as well.
John Snow’s 1854 Cholera Map comes to life with the CartoDB platform
Thursday, February 9th, 2012John Snow created a map of a cholera outbreak in the district of Soho, London in 1854, which helped to convince authorities that the disease was caused by water ( in particular, it originated from one pump in Broad Street). The CartoDB platform allows you to map data and develop location aware applications very easily. This example of John Snow’s Cholera Map of London presented with CartoDB demonstrates how CartoDB can quickly combine different data types, then display them on a map.
Geosk search launched
Monday, November 28th, 2011In an interview with Scott Robinson, Director, Global Data Products at Pitney Bowes Business Insight, he talked about the company’s new Geosk search engine, which uses the location of the data itself to help reduce the sheer volume of the results and to rank the search results specifically to the needs of the user.
GISVoice: How does the data search work? What types of keywords and results do users get?
Scott Robinson: Search, discovery, and access of spatial content are the main objectives of Geosk. Keyword searches performed by customers in the Geosk Marketplace match up against the descriptions and metadata and records of the available listings. Users can search by keywords, like a content type (i.e. Streets), geography (i.e. San Francisco, a specific postcode), or other search facets including file format, data type, projection, data vendor, and customer rating. MapRank™ search technology is used to enhance and refine the search, ensuring that the most geographically relevant results are returned.
GISVoice: What specific advantages are there to this type of data search as opposed to a browser or other applications?
There are 2 specific advantages to this type of data search (which are part of platform services provided by WeoGeo).
The first is in the search technology itself. Text-based search dominates the search world today and search results from a text-based query can be overwhelming for the user to review. That is why there is so much emphasis by search companies on “tuning” their algorithms to the interests of the user. The spatial data industry has an additional filter that can be used to fine-tune search results, which is the geographical location of the data set of interest. We use the location of the data itself to help reduce the sheer volume of the results and to rank the results specifically to the needs of the user.
The second advantage comes from the accessibility of the data once the search is completed. If you find it on Geosk, you can have the data right now and in many cases, you can have as little or as much of it as you want.
GISVoice: How does the cloud draw from the disparate databases that information is stored in?
The information is actually stored in the cloud and has been indexed to optimize search efficiency. The information can be stored natively in one of many spatial data file formats, like MapInfo TAB, ESRI Shape, KML, CSV and many others. Once the user identifies the data they want, they can perform on demand transformations to the many file format types supported by the platform.
GISVoice: Does the data search for data such as that used by Homeland Security or other government agencies, and how does that work if so?
The data search is a function of what is accessible to the user using the platform. Publically available data sets that are hosted by Geosk are available to any user. Those data that are available on an access-controlled basis (where the access is controlled by the owner of the data) are only available to credentialed Users.
GISVoice: What is the pricing structure for this solution?
Geosk Marketplace offers data in 2 different ways. First, you can “buy by the drink” which is where you find, customize, and purchase data for immediate consumption. Second, you can buy an annual subscription to the data where you can get continuous access and customization services, as well as our maintenance of the data.
Geosk Library is a hosted solution for managing an organization’s spatial data assets. This offering is a monthly fee for hosting and management of content that is based on size of the data stored, and the number of users accessing the content. The purchasers of Geosk Library have the added capability to sell their data, just like PBBI does on Geosk.
GISVoice: Is the data resident in PBBIs own catalog of data sets more easily accessible than that data that comes from disparate databases?
Geosk offers the customer the ability to purchase data through PBBI’s online catalog, or also to use the Geosk platform to manage internal data stored in disparate databases. Using the Geosk platform dramatically enhances the search and accessibility of spatial content, whether the content is internally or externally licensed.
GISVoice: What advice can you give people who might be new to PBBI’s data resources and to this service?
Our customers tend to use consumer on-demand services every day, services like iTunes, Amazon, Netflix and many others. We’re trying to help the spatial industry become more productive by providing many of the same features and functionality available on these platforms to the analysts in our community. As users of mapping and GIS software, my advice would be to consider being more productive by using Geosk to find, acquire and manage their spatial content, so that they can create better analysis and more efficiently complete their goals.
Search engines and social media tracking
Monday, October 31st, 2011Last week I read the Wired Cloudline blog Beyond Google’s Reach: Tracking the Global Uprising in Real Time which talked about the search engine Topsy, which is designed to “rank people, not pages,” as Google does. Topsy is an entirely different search engine model than Google, and therefore can pick up and aggregate information from social media in perhaps a different way than Google.
A case was made that suggested that Google did not pick up tweets on the October 15th protest at Occupy Wall Street as efficiently as Topsy.
I decided to look for myself and compare the posts that have been gathered today for both Google and Topsy for Occupy Wall Street. What is interesting is that each are picking up different bits of media –
Topics for Google:
Google is picking up newspaper articles and newscasts, such as “Opinion: Occupy Wall Street is a vigil, not a protest,” New Jersey Star-Ledger, “Occupy Wall Street kitchen slowdown targets squatters,” NYPOST.com, “Occupy Wall Street in the Age of Technology”, Huffington Post, “Most Americans Aren’t Occupy Wall Street’s ’99 Percent’ The Atlantic.
Topsy has picked up the following topics in tweets: “Protesters turn their back on @ericcantor during speech at University of Michigan http://t.co/tyuLvH8b #ows ”
A trustworthy #OWS activist tells me that an influx of homeless and hardened criminals is causing major issues for Zuccotti campers
“Police use bulldozers to break up @OccupyRichmond. http://t.co/nMJW5RJw #ows ”
“#OWS has spread to 87 countries with 1,039+ distinct events. (and counting) http://t.co/wcgGqOks ”
Note that the Google search is producing articles that were published as much as three weeks ago, while the Topsy search is displaying tweets written just 18 minutes ago.
In the realm of tracking events of local or global importance, it would seem that a combination of these two types of searches would be best, so that we have well researched articles side by side with the up-to-the-minute crowdsourced view of the bystander.
On the one hand, in-depth reporting of a body of knowledge on an event is always useful in tracking history and trends, and offering insightful perspectives. What is published in newspapers, magazines and books is thought to have staying power, whereas we are not yet sure how long the impact of a tweet or Facebook post will last.
The veracity of tweets is questionable, and they are posted before anyone has a chance to check whether they come from reliable sources. When several sources convey the same message, however, it can indicate that something is really happening at a given location. Topsy can be important in tracking social movement such as the progress of an uprising or movement of a group of people. There is power in numbers, so the sheer number of people who will protest now using social media may increase because they have more confidence in doing so when they know others are of like mind.
NGA noted as instrumental in finding Osama bin Laden
Friday, May 6th, 2011The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency gets written up in the mainstream press for its role in the locating and killing of Osama bin Laden.
The Little Known Agency that Helped Kill bin Laden May 5, 2011, The Atlantic
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