AnyGeo - GIS, LBS, Geo Mashups, Mobile & Social Location Technologies: Video – NAVTEQ offers “true” human-like Guidance – NAVTEQ Natural Guidance

NAVTEQ Natural Guidance breaks new ground by enabling guidance the way humans provide directions to each other—through the use of descriptive reference cues (think real directions) . Launched at the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin, NAVTEQ Natural Guidance leapfrogs today’s linear navigation instructions—e.g. ‘turn right in 50 meters on Kurfuerstendamm—by guiding the way [...]

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Spatial Sustain: Intergraph Works to Stay on Top of Technology Trends #intergraph2010

Mark Doherty, CTO of Intergraph’s Security, Government and Industry (SG&I) division related details on the company’s view on technology trends and the company’s approach to the markets that they serve. Spatial data infrastructure is a growing issue, with kudos to the European INSPIRE initiative for raising awareness. While the initiative is focused at the national [...]
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Henri Bergius: category "geo": buscatcher: Never miss another tram

Opening public data is a hot topic in Finland at the moment. As a small experiment with the data that is available I wrote buscatcher, a simple N900 app that displays Helsinki trams (and some buses) moving on a map in real time. This makes it easy to determine when your next tram is coming to the stop, or where it is stuck.

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So far I'm keeping this application away from Extras until HSL gets scalability issues solved with their dataset. In the meanwhile you can grab and run the application from the GitHub repo.

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AnyGeo - GIS, LBS, Geo Mashups, Mobile & Social Location Technologies: Fleet and Asset Management USA 2010, 17th-18th Nov, Atlanta, GA

Here’s details of an interesting event taking place this fall. The annual Fleet and Asset Management USA 2010 (17th-18th Nov, Atlanta, GA, USA) is the most influential show for the commercial telematics and vehicle ICT industry! This year’s senior-level speakers will include US DOT, NHTSA, Ford, John Deere, GE, Lo-Jack, PACAAR and many more. Check [...]

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got geoint?: College Students Crash NASA Satellite Into Arctic


Many of us got to experience some pretty fun things while in college. From travels abroad to sports and let’s be honest, some good old-fashioned college partying. But, we have yet to run across any college students who get the rare privilege of crashing a NASA satellite. University of Colorado at Boulder undergraduates were lucky to have the opportunity to crash (come on now – how cool is that?) the Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite, or ICESat, in the Arctic. The satellite had been in orbit for seven years – and UC Boulder students have been controlling the satellite for that time period. Why did they crash the satellite? The satellite had outlasted its targeted design life, before its primary sensor – a laser device intended for measuring ice thickness, forest cover – failed last year. So, yes, while college can often include learning how to do keg stands, it can also present an incredible opportunity like this for students. Go U.C. Boulder.

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All Points Blog: DigitalGlobe CEO Jill Smith to Resign Sept 2011

That marks the end of her current contract and she plans not to renew, per a statement released on Wednesday. The company has begun a search. - Daily Camera...Read more
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Slashgeo.org: OpenDragon: Open Source Imagery Analysis Program

Still catching up recent geonews, last week the FGT blog mentioned the open source imagery analysis project named OpenDragon. While the project has been around for over 5 years, we never mentioned it in the past.

From the official website: "OpenDragon provides a robust suite of image processing operations, via an intuitive, responsive, multi-window graphical user interface. Software functionality includes full-color display, annotation, enhancement, measurement, supervised and unsupervised classification, georeferencing, on-screen vector capture, and a broad range of other capabilities to support image processing education and research. OpenDragon can access image and data files created by earlier releases of commercial Dragon, can run scripts created for other versions, and is backward compatible in its organization and navigation. OpenDragon uses an innovative client-server architecture and is based on platform-independent industry standards including Java, XML and HTML. The OpenDragon architecture supports new levels of user extensibility and will eventually allow the software to execute on Windows, Linux, Mac OS/X, and Solaris and other Unix variants. "

We previously mentioned a few other similar software, Opticks is one example.

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Google Earth Blog: 3D sounds with the Google Earth Plug-in

Paul over at PlanetInAction is at it again. The man that brought us Ships and Helicopters has a new toy for us to play with. This is more of tech demo than a game, but it's quite impressive.

He's simply calling it a 3D sound demo. Here is a brief video of it in action:

You can read the full write-up on his site, but here's the basics of it:

sound3D manages a collection of soundSource objects that have knowledge of the location they are at. A soundSource has a collection of channels. Each channel represents a sound file with associated falloff range. Outside this range the channel can not be heard.

Multiple sound channels per sound source enables you to use different sounding audio files for nearby and far away. The "far" file should sound more muffled and have a longer falloff range. These audio effects can be prepared in a sound editor such as Audacity.

The helicopter on the beach is a great example showing how this works. Move in close and notice how the engine sounds louder but also sharper.

Be sure to check out the PlanetInAction site for more info.


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All Points Blog: World Economic Forum Pioneers in Tech Winners include LBS Players

Among a class of 31 companies deemed Technology Pioneers (Google Inc. was one once) are Foursquare and Layar. Also noteworthy to me: Scribd Inc. To be selected as a Technology Pioneer, a company must be involved in the development of a major technol...Read more
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Slashgeo.org: ikiMap, create and share your maps

ikiMap (www.ikimap.com) is a free web service which allows its users to create and share their maps.

The objective is to combine the concept of a social network together with the use of cartography and maps.

Users can create their own maps (by uploading files in KML, GPX…formats or directly by drawing on the map), vote for other users maps, add comments, create groups of friends, theme channels and more! Users can actually label the map as private and grant access to it only to certain people.

ikiMap is a free service, and it's based on freeware:

* OpenLayers (http://openlayers.com/)
* MapServer (http://mapserver.org/
* PostGIS (http://postgis.refractions.net/)

There are more info about ikiMap on:

• Blog: http://ikimap.blogspot.com/
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/ikimap
• Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/ikiMap/200361580929
• Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/ikimap

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All Points Blog: Google Tidbits

There's a new version of SketchUp v8 3D. - Google Earth Blog and via Google PR Google has introduced a beta of sponsored icons for Google Maps. Instead of a generic pin, those who pay will have their own logo appear. First takers include: Bank ...Read more
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Slashgeo: Still being able to read this? Patience!

If we're not mistaken, most people worldwide now access the new Slashgeo website, launched a week ago, when they hit slashgeo.org. However, some users still end up on the old website. It's your case if you're reading this.

There's sadly nothing we can do. ISPs can take days to update their DNS tables. We obviously have no control on when your own Internet service provider (ISP) updates their 'domain names' to 'IP addresses' table. But one thing is certain, come back in a few days and eventually, your ISP will update and you'll be able to access the new site.

A quick reminder: you'll have to re-register on the new site to get the daily newsletter. The old RSS feed URL still work is almost all cases, so you shouln't need to update the RSS feed manually. We already resumed publishing geonews on the new website last Monday... it will be your turn to do some catching up! ;-)

Read more of this story at Slashgeo.

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The Map Guy(de): SQLite: Is there anything you CAN’T do?

One of my key areas of focus in preparation for the next beta release of FDO Toolbox 1.0, was to bring the Join implementation up to par. Since all my efforts thus bar has been improving the Bulk Copy functionality, joins have been somewhat left out in the cold in terms of functionality and my attention.

As it stands, the primary problem with the current join implementation is one of performance. Without going into detail the current implementation is one that uses nested loops. This, being a O(m*n) operation will get slower as the size of the data you're working with increases.

In thinking about the different join algorithms available to tackle this problem, I came to the conclusion that implementing what is essentially a core DBMS component is just too much effort, so being the lazy programmer that I am, I've updated the join implementation to delegating the join functionality a DBMS which day-by-day continues to impress me with its amazing performance and capabilities: SQLite

So now, the updated implementation can be described as follows:
  • Create a temporary SQLite database with table structure identical to our "left" and "right" sources.
  • Pump the data from our "left" source into this temp SQLite database
  • Pump the data from our "right" source into this temp SQLite database
  • Create a view in our temp SQLite that encapsulates a join between these "left" and "right" tables
  • Do some metadata hacks to make this view be recognised as a FDO feature class.
  • Pump the data from this view out to our target data store.
How much faster is this approach? I've done some tests by joining the Sheboygan Parcel SHP file (only the bare ID/Geometry attributes, approx. 17600 records) with the corresponding Parcel data in an Access Database (approx. 16100 records):
  • Old approach: 16 minutes
  • SQLite approach: 21 seconds!
That's a 45x performance improvement! Now it is true that this is only a single data point :-), but if a single data point can indicate such a monumental improvement, then I can comfortably say that you will get similar results with different data sources.

I truly <3 SQLite!
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Linfiniti Geo Blog: Welcome to our first employee!

This week we have taken on our first employee! Samantha Booysen will be working as office manager. She will keep things running smoothly so that the geek in residence can focus on coding. She is all set up with an Ubuntu computer to do her work on and we will include her on our training courses so that she starts to learn about FOSS GIS too. Samantha doesn’t have an IT background but she is very interested in social upliftment which is something close to our hearts here at Linfiniti so we are sure she will fit right in. Welcome Samantha, we hope you enjoy working here!

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geo.geek.nz: Mosaic Pivot Viewer Demonstration Using The Silverlight PivotViewer Control

It’s been a while since we have heard from the Applications Prototype Team in Redlands. As always they are busy working on the next greatest idea that could eventuate into a product or provide a good showcase of technology. The Applications...
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All Points Blog: Changes and Challenges at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency

Speaking at the Intergraph 2010 user Conference, Paul Weise, the Chief Functional Manager, and Director, Office of Geospatial Intelligence Management for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) address the challenges associated with coord...Read more
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All Points Blog: Intergraph Geospatial Embarking on Goal Toward Native 64-bit Architecture

In a briefing delivered by Intergraph's Security, Government and Infrastructure (SG&I) division CTO, Mark Doherty, he reported that the company is moving forward in developing the next generation software based on a native 64-bit architecture, ...Read more
Continue reading "Intergraph Geospatial Embarking on Goal Toward Native 64-bit Architecture "
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All Points Blog: UAV’s Fill the Skies: So Much Data, So Few Ways to Analyze It

At the Intergraph 2010 conference, the defense and intelligence group was demonstrating their Motion Video Analyst (MVA) solutions to help manage data from the growing usage of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in support of the warfighting efforts ...Read more
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All Points Blog: #GeoMedia 3D Launched by #Intergraph

Today, Intergraph launched GeoMedia 3D, an add-on product for GeoMedia, the company's flagship geospatial software. It will be released with GeoMedia v6.1.8 in Q4 this year. The product uses technology from Skyline and includes features such as: fr...Read more
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The Map Room: The United States of Star Wars

The United States of Star Wars assigns a planet from the Star Wars universe to each state (list here), which then illustrated appropriately. According to the creator, Rebecca Crane, "Planets were assigned based on partial terrain, landmarks that correlate with the planet and state, types of people in the...
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Spatial Law and Policy: Spatial Law and Policy Update (September 1, 2010)

From the Centre of Spatial Law and Policy

Privacy

The Government Can Use GPS To Track Your Moves

California bill would protect privacy of FasTrak Users

Facebook's new geotagging ability brings potential to abuse

Facebook Places fights privacy concerns

USA Today article on security risks associated with location

German law would prohibit use of Facebook for hiring decisions

Technology aside - most people prefer not to be located

Miscellaneous

Knocking Down [Geodata] Brick Walls

Augmented Reality App for Autos

Intellectual Property/Copyright

Has Google Purged Yelp

UK Row Over Publishing of Public Mapping Data

National Security

Navy loses control of UAV over Washington
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The Map Room: GPSMAP 62 and 78 Reviewed

As I understand it, the Garmin GPSMAP 62 and 78 series, like their 60-series and 76-series predecessors, are essentially the same under the skin, except that the 76 series is for marine use (and floats). GPS Information reviews them both. Via GPS Tracklog. Previously: GPS Tracklog Reviews the Garmin GPSMAP...
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The Map Room: The Globe and Mail on GIS and Productivity

Today's Globe and Mail included this article discussing how GIS helps business productivity, with an aside on the challenge of getting good data in Canada (exacerbated by the federal government's recent decision to drop the long-form census). Via All Points Blog....
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The Map Room: BBC Homes and Antiques on Map Collecting

BBC Homes and Antiques has a piece on map collecting; unfortunately, like several other such articles I've read on the subject, it doesn't really cohere and isn't well-written at all. Via Jonathan Potter Ltd....
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GIS Lounge: Free GIS Stuff

All of the costs involved to learn GIS, purchase hardware and software, and obtain data can be a bit disarming. Listed here are some completely free GIS related resources. Free GIS Posts Visit the Free GIS category on GIS Lounge for some of the most recent posts about free geospatial resources. ArcVoyager Special Edition A package designed expressly [...]
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The Field Guide: Hexagon participates at Intergraph 2010 event

Today Ola Rollén, President and CEO of Hexagon AB, participates at the Intergraph Corporation's annual international users' conference in Las Vegas, USA. The event "Intergraph 2010" hosts approximately 2 000 Intergraph customers from across the world and offers previews of new Intergraph technology, presentations by industry experts and hands-on training of Intergraph technology.

In a keynote address Ola Rollén comments on the planned acquisition of Intergraph announced on 7 July 2010. He reiterates Hexagon's intentions of continuous commitment and investment in Intergraph's vision, solutions, customers and employees. Ola Rollén also confirms Hexagon's intent to support Intergraph's product roadmap and to further invest in research and development.

"It is our intention that Intergraph's solutions will become Hexagon's core software platform, providing differentiated and vertically-focused software solutions. By combining Intergraph's technologies with our global resources and technologies, Hexagon will be able to create new exciting solutions to customers going forward", says Ola Rollén.

The acquisition of Intergraph is subject to completion of regulatory process and satisfaction of customary closing conditions. Competition law notifications have been submitted to the relevant regulatory authorities and the applicable waiting periods have expired. Completion of the remaining regulatory procedures is pending. Financial consolidation is estimated to take place in the fourth quarter of 2010.

At closing, Intergraph will become a fully owned subsidiary of Hexagon AB and will operate as a separate Hexagon division under the Intergraph name and branding. Following closing, it is planned that Ola Rollén will assume the role of CEO of Intergraph in accordance with the Hexagon model for successful integration into the Hexagon Group. Following closing, the two Intergraph divisions Process, Power & Marine and Security Government & Infrastructure will continue to operate under the leadership of Gerhard Sallinger and John Graham, respectively.

For further information please contact: Sara Kraft, Corporate Communications, Hexagon AB, +46 8 601 26 23, sara.kraft@hexagon.se

Hexagon AB is a global measurement technologies company with strong market positions. Hexagon's mission is to develop and market leading technologies and services to measure in one, two or three dimensions, to position and update objects and to time processes. The group has about 7 500 employees in 39 countries and net sales of about 12 000 MSEK.

Extracted 09/01/2010 http://investors.hexagon.se/index.php?p=press&afw_lang=en
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GIS Lounge: Resources on GIS Lounge

Here is a quick guide to some of the resources available on GIS Lounge: Geospatial Conferences and Events – listings by date of events relating to the geospatial field. Jobs – Looking for a job in the geospatial field?  Stop by the jobs section on GIS Lounge.  Jobs are free to post and are listed for two [...]
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All Points Blog: Intergraph’s Federal Division to be Managed by Proxy Board

After the acquisition of Intergraph by Hexagon AB, Intergraph’s Federal Division will be run by a proxy board. Though owned by Hexagon, the new Intergraph division will be essentially autonomous. Intergraph VP Jack Pellicci is likely to head the ne...Read more
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Linfiniti Geo Blog: A week in Tanzania

I spent most of last week in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. A lovely tropical country in the heart of Africa. I was there as part of a project I am working to create tools for Biodiversity Informatics practitioners. Of course the tools are based on Free Software: Quantum GIS and openModeller.

The attendees at the workshop were entertained by my talk about what FOSS is and why it is important, an introduction to QGIS slideshow (superbly presented by Marco Hugentobler), and ending with a tour of openModellerDesktop. We also did some live demonstrations of QGIS and openModeller, before going on to discuss details about how these tools can be used to support their Biodiversity Informatics workflows.

The meeting was funded by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) with Juan Bello as their representitive, and hosted by the Tanzanian Commission for Science and Technology (COSTECH).

In case you are unfamiliar with the aims of GBIF, they are facilitating the digitisation (or digitization for our american readers) of the worlds biodiversity records – herbarium records, museum collections and so on. COSTECH provides the local infrastructure and staff for the ‘TanBif’ node in Tanzania.

The meeting also included ‘in-country’ experts in the fields of GIS, Meteorology, Ecology, IT and so on. I think for all of the attendees, the concept of FOSS was a real eye-opener. African economies can’t compare with those in Europe and the USA and the capital outlay for proprietary software that presents an irritation in the Western world is a major burden in the third world. So just knowing that they could dive in and use QGIS was a great revelation.

We finished our workshop a little early on the Friday so Marco and I offered to go along to the COSTECH offices and geo-enable their PostgreSQL species occurrence database and install QGIS on their desktop PC’s running Windows XP. In the space of a couple of hours we were done – the major part of which was spent showing the TanBif staff members how to bring up the PostGIS layer in QGIS, perform simple queries and make maps. Having spent days in the past trying to get proprietary software like Oracle and Arc*** configured, optimised, licensed and generally usable, I was struck by just how easy and quick it is to get someone up and running with a robust enterprise ready PostGIS geospatial datastore and a user friendly Free Software desktop GIS like QGIS.

Thanks to the friendly Tanzanian folks for their hospitality – I look forward to my next visit! Here are some piccies from the trip…

Juan Bello telling us about the cool things you can do with a good Biodiversity Information repository.

The workshop attendees (Marco and Juan out of shot)


Marco showing Godfrey how to use QGIS to bring up their PostGIS Biodiversity dataset.

Godfrey proudly showing off his first map (made with QGIS)!

Marco killing a mosquito – he became something of an expert!

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Spatial Sustain: Intergraph Adds 3D to their GeoMedia Product #intergraph2010

Intergraph will launch a new 3D capability within their GeoMedia product in the fourth quarter of this year. The 3D capability is an add-on component that will add the capability to view and manipulated 3D models via another desktop window. The tight integration with GeoMedia means that the learning curve will be very quick for [...]
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