At Esri FedGIS held in Washington D.C. last week, the second day opened with inspiring plenary speaker, Susan Gordon, deputy director, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA).
CartoConsult created a “before and after” photomontage to help to secure planning permission for a quarry extension in Kent. Working with DB Landscape Consultancy (DBLC) on behalf of site owners Ferns, CartoConsult prepared the high resolution photomontage to show the potential visibility for a sensitive site of the proposed extension to the existing Wrotham Quarry.
ArcGIS Earth from Esri, a free, desktop-based interactive globe that can be used to explore the world, was launched last week. The globe works with various 3D and 2D map data formats including KML, Google’s data format. Among its capabilities are the ability for users to display data on the globe, sketch place marks, measure distances and areas, and add annotations for easy understanding of spatial information.
GISCafe Voice spoke with Sean Brady, chief marketing officer of Boundless, a spatial IT solutions provider, about the new release of OpenGeo Suite 4.8that offers the ability to serve Mapbox vector tiles from GeoServer directly.
In a world that is rapidly becoming less paper based and more dependent upon digital products, the introduction of a map app that copies the model of iTunes and Kindle is an appealing commodity. Avenza’s PDF Maps does just this: makes PDF maps downloadable on mobile devices to be available anywhere – while abroad, in remote areas and in the back country.
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.
Autodesk CEO Carl Bass opened the mainstage presentation of Autodesk University 2015 in Las Vegas at the beginning of December by talking about how companies are “reframing” the way they think about their work. “Sometimes we have to reframe our view toward entire industries,” he said. Access to data was a big topic at the conference, as the building industry also has to grapple with the management of huge datasets, as does the geospatial industry.
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…)