Blue Marble Geographics announces the release of Global Mapper version 14.2. This update to the company’s desktop GIS software offers many new and improved features and functions. Some of the major improvements include several scripting updates, improved Volume Measurement tools, new right-click option to the vector data Search dialog, many LiDAR enhancements and of course many new formats. Blue Marble’s geospatial data manipulation, visualization and conversion solutions are used worldwide by thousands of GIS analysts at software, oil and gas, mining, civil engineering, surveying, and technology companies, as well as governmental and university organizations.
According to the announcement, the Global Mapper 14.2 release introduces many scripting updates and additions, including support for calculating attributes, splitting layers, interactively prompting users for files and folders, to name just a few. Global Mapper is a great tool for behind the scenes processing, whether it is simply batch data conversion or complex extract, transform and load processes such as attribute or geometry merging, clipping or editing. Users can find scripting samples with Global Mapper documentation, with the ability to edit and create them in any text editor. To make this work more easily, Global Mapper workspace files also can be saved as scripts.
The company reports that the 14.2 release also includes many LiDAR enhancements such as search by elevations and the ability to color by return value, which allows users to easily see when there are multiple return values. This feature is excellent for performing vegetation analysis. There are also new point loading slider bar and reporting tools for point cloud density. 14.2 also has improved import and export options as well as support for exporting point clouds to DXF and DWG format files. 14.2 also introduces support for the new MrSID format files and exporting XYZI (XYZ + Intensity) files, typically from LiDAR data.
“Certainly we are focused on continuing to expand our support for LiDAR and more geospatial formats,” stated Blue Marble President Patrick Cunningham. “But this release has some great new scripting capabilities and we like to remind our users that Global Mapper is a powerful extract, transform and load tool as well.”
In an ambitious geospatial project, San Jose State University and local non-profit Garden to Table joined forces to connect families in need with excess local produce. This urban-forestry-meets-agriculture project enabled the group to more than double its collection and distribution of fresh produce, feeding the hungry with fruits grown locally in private yards and gardens.
Food security is a growing social and economic challenge that knows no political boundaries. Even in the United States, an astonishing 18 million households were labeled “food insecure” in 2011 because they lacked the means at some point during the year to feed all of their members. The negative impacts of food insecurity can range from poor academic performance and rising healthcare costs to increased crime and social unrest.
San Jose State University (SJSU) in California has teamed with Trimble Navigation Ltd. to deploy a high-tech solution that enhances the local community’s ability to put fresh food on the tables of families in need. Leveraging a variety of web-based GIS, geospatial, and mobile GPS technologies, the solution makes it easier for local organizations to manage productive forestry and agriculture programs in the urban setting.
Garden to Table volunteer collects fruit tree data with the Trimble Juno handheld.
“Bringing food production back into our cities and suburbs has significant environmental, economic and social benefits,” said Hilary Nixon, associate professor in the SJSU Department of Urban and Regional Planning. “A healthier community is one of those benefits.”
SJSU and the City of San Jose have jointly formed an organization they call CommUniverCity that brings together students, faculty, city staff and members of the local community to assist nearby neighborhoods in a variety of initiatives. One of these is Garden to Table, which deployed the Trimble Urban Forestry solution to feed the hungry with fruits grown locally in private yards and gardens.
Because of the increased efficiencies achieved by superior data collection and organization, Garden to Table was able to halve the amount of time it took to catalog, organize, and map Central San Jose’s Fruit Trees, leading to more time in the field, and a projected increase of 100 percent more fruit in 2013, or roughly 25,000 pounds. Plans call for all of the fruit being delivered to families within a couple of miles of where it is grown.
Greater consumption of locally grown healthy foods isn’t the only advantage of improved urban forestry, explained Nixon. She believes the same technology used by SJSU and Garden to Table to feed the needy in San Jose can be used by local governments to better manage trees in public spaces along residential streets and in city parks, further contributing to a healthier community.
Gathering Leftover Fruit
The mild climate and generous rainfall in San Jose are ideal for fruit trees, many of which were planted decades ago on residential properties. Now mature, these trees typically yield more citrus and stone fruits than one household can possibly consume, the remainder often rotting on the branches or on the ground. Concerned by the fact that much of fruit went to waste, an informal group called Neighborhood Fruit Pickers sought permission of property owners to glean the excess for distribution to food banks.
Garden to Table offered to support the Pickers in 2011 seeing an opportunity to leverage the university’s GIS resources to make the urban harvesting process more productive, said Zach Lewis, Garden to Table’s project coordinator and a graduate student in SJSU’s Urban Planning Department.
“We started mapping the fruit trees with pen and paper, walking the streets and collecting data—address, tree type, productivity and size,” said Lewis. “Then I would geocode the data and drop it into the GIS…that was incredibly time and labor intensive.”
Although the City of San Jose shared up-to-date parcel layers from its GIS for the university to use in its own ArcGIS system, the field data collection proved to be a flaw in overall efficiency. Not only was field work time consuming, mistakes were being made both in inconsistent data collection and in the entry of field notes into the GIS back on campus. These notes included hand-written location coordinates for each tree captured in the field with a simple hand-held GPS unit.
Despite these issues, Lewis and fellow volunteers mapped 930 trees on private properties within a mile radius of campus in the first year. Personnel time in the field and at the keyboard totaled more than 300 hours. Although the mapping and subsequent GIS analysis helped improve efficiency of the harvests, Lewis and Nixon saw potential in further automating
the process.
With close ties to SJSU, Trimble developed a three-part solution with a mobile GIS for data collection, a back-office application for geospatial data analysis, and a tree canopy monitoring segment for long- term planning.
More Efficient Tree Mapping
To create an integrated solution, participants contacted Cengea, a Trimble company in Vancouver, Canada, which offers a data management and visualization package specifically for forestry. This solution, called Cengea Forest, needed only minor customization to provide both mobile field and back-office analysis functionality for Garden to Table. The solution was up and running in less than two weeks.
“The mobile client application ran on handheld Trimble Juno SB GPS data collectors,” said Patrick Lefebvre, Cengea Manager of Customer Solutions. “Field crews were guided by a simple menu system that helped them record and inventory trees in the study area that could be harvested…accurately recording GPS location and key attributes such as species, size and productivity.”
Cengea Urban Forest displays Garden to Table fruit tree locations on a parcel base map layer.
Training the volunteers to use the mobile data collectors took just a few minutes because the attribute menus were mostly point-and-click. These sessions focused on educating the crews to correctly identify San Jose’s nearly two dozen species of fruit trees, each named in the pull-down menu. Jotting down location coordinates for each tree was eradicated because the mobile GIS application on the Juno automatically recorded those points as feature attributes. Collected data was uploaded by Wi-Fi into the back-office piece of the application.
According to Garden to Table’s Lewis, efficiency and accuracy saw immediate improvements in the tree mapping portion of the project. Compared to pen-and-paper, the crews gathered tree data much faster in the field, and errors in transcription
were eliminated by digital upload to the database.
“With the mobile solution, we mapped 1,400 trees and did that in roughly 160 hours,” said Lewis, noting this represented almost 50 percent more trees mapped in half the number of hours, and in only four weeks compared with 18 months the previous time. The process of collecting data in the field and then integrating it into the GIS manually was condensed into a single step thanks to digital data collection making it easy to pick-up and go.
Participants believe the most significant advantage of the automated solution will come this year with a boost in harvest productivity.
Running the Cengea data analysis and visualization application on the GIS, Garden to Table will query the tree inventory to show the most productive trees of a specific type on the digital parcel map layer. This will help them concentrate the volunteers in neighborhoods where the most fruit can be picked.
Community food bank recipients helped out with the harvest.
Further, the Cengea application contains background information on fruit tree species including peak production times which could be correlated with specific tree locations by street address on the parcel layer. Each week of traditional harvest times, Lewis will generate custom maps of the project area along with address lists showing his teams exactly where to go and glean fruits ready to pick.
“The application revolutionizes the way we are able to look at our tree data,” said Lewis.
Among the attributes collected during field work were condition and health of the trees. As a favor to participating citizens with fruit trees on their properties, Garden to Table will also create customized pruning schedules by species. Volunteers may use this information to notify the owners when their trees should be tended. The charitable organization hopes that better maintenance will improve yields in the future.
“Garden to table will use Cengea management tools to improve harvest and prune yields in the future because in the past Lewis printed maps and manually created routes,” said Trimble’s Rick Gosalvez. “With Cengea, he can query by fruit, by season, condition, and by productivity of inventory to make more informed decisions.”
Analyzing tree canopy for Future Growth The City of San Jose and Garden to Table share a common long-term goal of increasing the total number of trees in the San Jose area. While both organizations understand that more fruit trees will ultimately yield larger harvests, the university is eying a classic win-win situation for the community at large.
“Trees really make the city livable,” said Ralph Mize, San Jose’s City Arborist who serves as an advisor to the project. “They provide many positive benefits.” The concept of urban forestry dovetails perfectly with a green initiative started by the San Jose mayor in 2009. One of its goals is to plant 100,000 new trees across the city. SJSU’s Nixon explained that a rich and lustrous tree canopy in the urban and suburban setting has a positive impact on the local economy, environment and society. Trees boost property values, reduce air pollution, improve storm water drainage, and even encourage people to exercise more outdoors.
With fruit tree canopy inventory and monitoring in mind, the project team turned to Equinox Analytics Inc. of Bismarck, N.D., to add another component to the solution. Working with the Trimble eCognition software, the firm created a script that calculates fruit tree canopy coverage by analyzing high-resolution aerial orthoimagery and airborne LiDAR elevation data that had been acquired over San Jose and provided by the City to Trimble for the project.
“The Trimble eCognition software is ideal for performing complex analysis of large, high-resolution spatial data sets,” said Aaron Smith, Equinox Analytics President. First, the eCognition script identified areas of vegetation in the digital orthoimagery using information from the visible green spectrum. But this spectral information included all green vegetation – tree canopies, grass, and bushes. To separate out the trees, the script then correlated the visible green spectral class with the elevation points in the LiDAR data, eliminating vegetation shorter than five feet in height.
“This allowed us to calculate total tree canopy coverage in the [Garden to Table] project area,” said Smith. “We refined the analysis to focus on trees [with fruit] accessible by ladder, so the script eliminated trees taller than 25 feet.”
Trimble eCognition canopy and building footprint extraction in Five-Wounds Brookwood Terrace study area.
Smith output the tree data as a geo-referenced profile across the project area and provided this file to SJSU and Garden to Table. Nixon and Lewis hope to input the data into the GIS and cross- referenced known fruit tree locations with the canopy profile. From this information, they expect to more accurately measure the size of specific tree canopies, greatly enhancing their estimates of potential fruit production.
“The profile also showed where the tree canopy was particularly dense in other parts of the city, giving them an idea of where to focus their efforts to find fruit trees that hadn’t been mapped,” said Smith.
Lewis said that Garden to Table will use the fruit tree canopy map in the future as it moves into the next phase of its project — encouraging the planting of new fruit trees. Just as the canopy map shows where the trees are concentrated, it also reveals gaps where new ones would thrive. Nixon and Lewis plan to work with both city officials and private landowners to encourage planting trees where they can provide the most benefit.
Trimble’s Gosalvez sees the tree canopy monitoring piece of the solution as having significant long-term benefits for overall urban forestry/agriculture efforts in any city. The application provides a baseline of canopy coverage and then enables the end users to make rapid change detection measurements in the future to assess the success of policy initiatives designed to foster tree growth.
“This integrated solution provides all the tools needed for communities to beautify their environments, battle food insecurity and support healthier living in the face of a changing climate,” said Gosalvez.
(This feature originally appeared in Informed Infrastructure.)
Three weeks ago I had a chance to visit the offices of TerraGo Technologies in Atlanta. I first used their technology in the early 2000s, when I was the GIS manager for the Atlanta Regional Commission. For those of you that may not remember GIS and mapping before GeoPDF maps, it was a real challenge to provide interactive maps to users outside your organization. A GIS author had to ship the data layers, attribute tables, symbol sets and layouts as a package to a user who had to have compatible GIS software. One then had to hope that the user pointed to each data layer correctly and had a good sense of cartography to create maps that told the story. If the user chose inappropriate lines, colors or symbology, the resultant map could look terrible at best, misleading at worst.
Esri tried to solve the problem with Map Publisher which maintained the author’s cartography, but if any data layers were corrupted or not pointed to correctly, the map failed. GeoPDF maps solved that problem since all the data layers and even the map layout/cartography were preserved as one single PDF file that could be read and interactively queried by anyone using a simple Adobe Acrobat reader. A user could turn layers on or off, zoom in/out and query attributes. TerraGo also added the TerraGo Toolbar that enhanced the map with measurements, geo-locations and the ability to collaborate with others on the same GeoPDF map.
GeoPDF maps and imagery were quite a leap in map publishing capability and soon became ubiquitous with key federal users and a de facto standard for map publishing within the Department of Defense (DOD) and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Anyone can download many GeoPDF maps free of charge, including U.S. topo maps from the USGS Store.
For federal and DOD users, the U.S. Army Geospatial Center (AGC) has published more than 200,000 maps of locations around the world. Some samples, including 3D GeoPDF maps, can be viewed by the public. In 2009 TerraGo opened “geospatial PDF” technology to all users. As a result you can create “geospatial PDFs” directly from ArcGIS and other geospatial software and display them with the TerraGo Toolbar. TerraGo, however, retained the enhanced functionality of GeoPDFs, including many new additional features and enhancements.
The term “GeoPDF” refers to map and imagery products created by TerraGo software applications. GeoPDF maps and imagery use a geospatial PDF as the container for maps, imagery, and other data used to deliver an enhanced user experience in TerraGo applications. However, GeoPDF products conform to published specifications, including both the OGC best practice for PDF georegistration as well as Adobe’s proposed geospatial extensions to ISO 32000, making them consumable by applications such as Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Reader, Global Mapper, and others. GeoPDF products often include other advanced PDF features such as layers and object data that can add significant GIS functionality to the file, particularly when used with the TerraGo plugin to Adobe Reader or other TerraGo clients. TerraGo even has the capability to create navigable 3D GeoPDF models. Here is an example of a 3D GeoPDF model of the Bin Laden compound. Click to experience the interactive PDF (requires TerraGo Toolbar.)
TerraGo’s geospatial collaboration software and GeoPDF maps and imagery are a powerful solution to produce, access, update and share geospatial information and applications with anyone, anywhere. TerraGo solutions enable enterprises to extend, exchange, collaborate and exploit georeferenced maps, imagery, audio, video, forms and other intelligence in connected or offline environments. I repeat: connected or offline. This is a key GeoPDF capability that cannot be overemphasized.
I learned the hard way during numerous emergency response exercises and events that as the number of responders ramps up, local internet connectivity degrades to the point that it’s difficult to send and receive even simple emails, let alone large data sets such as imagery. GeoPDF technology permits users to collect and assemble large data sets at the early stage of an event, use them and collaborate on the GeoPDF map locally without the need to continually reload the same data from a remote server. Building on this strength, TerraGo developed numerous related products, but the company is evolving in a more fundamental way. According to TerraGo CEO Rick Cobb, the company is moving from a product-centric organization to a workflow solutions company by expanding some of its technology, providing its solutions as APIs and SDKs for integration with high-end systems and using innovative methods to bring its capabilities to remote users even in fringe, disconnected environments.
Part of this evolution included expansion of three technologies:
increased emphasis on use of locally connected mobile devices,
enhancing the capabilities of “Composer 3D” that integrates 3D data such as LiDAR point clouds with 2D data in the GeoPDF environment, and
the acquisition of GeoXray, a “big data” exploitation tool that automates the process of discovering, geospatially visualizing, monitoring and sharing relevant unstructured information from any source.
GeoXray is a web-based software application that allows users to search the Internet and social media sites for content relating to a geographic area and filtering the results by place, time and topic. TerraGo demonstrated interoperability by allowing a user to access GeoXray directly from a GeoPDF map. TerraGo’s Michael Bufkin indicated that the next step in this interoperability will be to cache the GeoXray-discovered content within the GeoPDF map when it is created, thus enabling access to the content directly from the TerraGo Toolbar. Users would then be able to discover GeoXray content even if not connected to the Internet, while using the same tools that they use for map display and collaboration.
It’s hard to fully describe the GeoPDF/GeoXray integration in this short column but picture a sample scenario which was demonstrated for me at GeoINT 2012. A hypothetical analyst needed to determine a probable location of a kidnap victim in a remote country. The analyst first used the general mapping capabilities of the GeoPDF map to identify key geographic locations. Then, using a broad array of “big data” contents such as news, blogs and social media, the analyst was able to narrow his efforts to a few key locations through the discovery and filtering capabilities of GeoXray. Combining and layering the physical geography with mapped locations of relevant GeoXray data, the analyst was able to significantly narrow sites of interest. Further viewing and local collaboration by agents in the field using mobile devices to view and collect additional data could refine the location even more.
This was quite an elegant and robust merging of GIS and “big data” in an easy-to-use application. I look forward to this tool set being a valuable addition for DOD, businesses and any agency that needs fast collaboration in complex environments both domestically and in remote locations.
TerraGo will be an exhibitor at the ESRI Federal Users Conference this week. I’m looking forward to seeing what other new developments exhibitors will be showing at the UC. Please stop me and say hello.
Blue Marble Geographics has announced the release of Global Energy Mapper 14.1, making available a variety of enhancements in the its GIS tool for energy professionals. This update to the company’s desktop GIS software offers new and improved features and functions, including a significant improvement in the ability to process massive amounts of LiDAR point cloud data, jumping from tens of millions of points to hundreds of millions. B
lue Marble’s geospatial data manipulation, visualization and conversion solutions are used worldwide by thousands of GIS analysts at software, oil and gas, mining, civil engineering, surveying, and technology companies, as well as governmental and university organizations.
Global Energy Mapper 14.1 provides a dramatic increase in LiDAR processing and display speed and the ability to view and process point files in the hundreds of millions range, Blue Marble said. This is beneficial for previewing the data before creating a gridded surface model and includes several options for filtering the data during import and for rendering the point cloud to reflect return type or intensity. Improved metadata access provides a detailed statistical breakdown of the point cloud and customizable point size improves on-screen display. Global Mapper Package (.GMP) files are now able to store LiDAR point clouds in a special compressed format, much smaller than uncompressed LAS data and on par with the best compression available today. This allows LiDAR data to be efficiently archived or shared with other Global Mapper users.
Global Energy Mapper 14.1 also provides a new tool for creating whisker lines emanating from a selected point or points, useful for seismic survey coverage. Whisker lines are often used to estimate coverage from selected points to see if a point in a seismic survey covers what is needed. There is also a new digitizer tool for easily subdividing an existing area into four separate areas that is useful for subdividing parcels or properties.
Version 14.1 includes an enhancement to the Site Pad Placement tool so users can create a site pad for a non-level surface. There are also speed improvements when accessing Spatial On Demand data from our partner Spatial Energy, along with new built in point types for oil and gas symbology, Blue Marble said. Additionally USB dongle licensing is now available for GEM with this release.
“We are excited to be offering this significant upgrade to our Global Energy Mapper customers,” stated Blue Marble President Patrick Cunningham. “We are confident our users in the oil and gas and other energy sectors will be impressed with the improvements in processing LiDAR point clouds along with the new energy specific tools.”
Hexagon AB has acquired the business of GTA Geoinformatik GmbH, a pioneer in georeferenced virtual 3D city models and building reconstructions.
Founded in 1995, GTA Geoinformatik is the developer of tridicon software, which enables the automatic generation of high-quality, colored 3D point clouds. The company also specialises in uniting point cloud data with aerial images including oblique and LiDAR images to create intelligent, navigable 3D city models, or smart cities.
“The idea of creating a smart city has been an important part of Hexagon’s geospatial vision to merge maps with information and real-time updates,” said Hexagon President and CEO Ola Rollén. “Solutions such as those GTA Geoinformatik delivers are becoming increasingly important, as they build the foundation for industry-specific applications in areas of city development such as security, traffic, infrastructure management, energy and emergency response.”
GTA Geoinformatik, based in Berlin and Neubrandenburg, Germany, is now fully consolidated. The acquisition will not have any visible impact on Hexagon’s earnings in the short-term, according to the company.
In a repeat performance, USGIF (United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation) put on a superb conference that was really informative and well executed. GEOINT has always been a serious conference with very little partying, but this year was more so with the leadership even eliminating the traditional closing night social. The social events never were excessive in the past but no one wanted even a hint of over indulgence. It wasn’t missed, because quite frankly there was too much to see and too much to do to spend time on frivolity.
As in past years, there were so many noteworthy presentations. With more than 248 exhibitors in the Expo, it was impossible to see and hear it all. So this is just one man’s limited view of a mega conference. Luckily, many of the key presentations are on the USGIF website as daily summaries. See ShowDaily 1-5 and videos clips (make sure select the 2012 clips and not previous years).
Director of National Intelligence and keynote speaker James Clapper
The opening keynote was delivered by the director of National Intelligence, The Honorable James Clapper, who directly addressed two elephants in the room — sequestration and his take on the Benghazi attack. First he discussed several issues: the INCITE program to have an enterprise data model in the “cloud” by 2018, which he said was moving along nicely. He tied in the need for multi-int data such as GEOINT, SIGINT, MASINT, etc. and also expressed his concern that improvements were needed to speed up the clearance process. He cited reciprocity, so clearances would carry over from one agency and contract to others as a big issue.
Then he got to elephant one — sequestration. He said that it would be devastating to the intel community because there is no way to prioritize programs. Important programs would see the same cuts as less critical programs which could prove very dangerous.
The second elephant was the recent attack at Benghazi and death of four diplomatic staff members including the Ambassador. Director Clapper took a jab at our politicians and quoted a recent article by Paul R. Pillar, a 28-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that he said was thoughtful and resonated well with him.
“Information about lethal incidents is not total and immediate. The normal pattern after such events is for explanations to evolve as more and better information becomes available. We would and should criticize any investigators who settled on a particular explanation early amidst sketchy information and refused to amend that explanation even when more and better information came in. A demand for an explanation that is quick, definite and unchanging reflects a naive expectation — or in the present case, irresponsible politicking.” You can view Director Clapper’s full keynote here.
NGA Director Letitia Long addresses the opening session crowdNGA Director Latisha Long
Director Clapper was followed by NGA (National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency) Director Letitia Long, who discussed current efforts at NGA. She cited continuous creation of ever more capable applications. One example permitted a single user to locate a hard-to-find feature in imagery that took 10 minutes, which previously would have taken several analysts days to complete. She stated that during the past year NGA had developed more than 150 apps that are currently in their “app store.” Her goal was to have the majority of future apps created by commercial developers. They are even considering an “Apple iPhone like” commercial model that would pay compensation to developers based on the number of downloads and users rather than cumbersome and limited contracts.
Additionally, she spoke of their work to build a Common Desktop Environment (CDE) for NGA and DIA, which will soon top 2,000 users and is expected to grow to 60,000 users by the end of 2013. She said that through streamlining and redundancy elimination about 40 percent of their geospatial content is available to her users with a goal of 100 percent by next year.
This conference was an eye opener in that it was surprising how fast topics that were just sidebar discussions last year are moving to the forefront. Topics like human geography, social media, and pattern of life mapping seemed to be part of many presentations and some exhibitors. A few presentations stretched my concept of geospatial technology and tradecraft.
One of them was by Jeff Jonas, an IBM Fellow and chief scientist for IBM Entity Analytics, who gave a lunchtime keynote explaining work he was doing at IBM to help decipher seemingly duplicate data to cut processing time. He used a puzzle metaphor to explain his work with “big data.”
“Some of the pieces are missing, some of the pieces have errors, some of the pieces have fabricated lies,” he said, but by merging many different datasets a filtering occurs. He then explained an ultimate filter by using an example of two theoretical twins with the same IDs, same DNA, same accounts, etc. He said that with current technology we can now track the movements of individuals through their smartphones, and that unless the twins are joined at the hip, “Space time movement data is the ultimate biometric” and is one way to differentiate one person from another. This capability is also going test our concepts of privacy.
The GEOINT Expo
In the Expo area, there were more than 248 vendors ranging from the big companies such as Lockheed, Boeing, SAIC, and others to small start-ups at the fringe of the exhibit hall. Several were showing human geography / social media tools and numerous data storage and management solutions. I didn’t see much new hardware of note other than Ball Aerospace, who was showing the latest and greatly improved version of its Flash aerial LiDAR that can create 3D models draped with imagery continuously and in real time. This was so impressive that I’m going to learn more and write a column about it in the near future.
Klee Dienes, president of Hadron Industries and former medical helicopter pilot, demonstrated Hadron’s work developing hand-gesture language to use Oblong computer control equipment to navigate maps. Oblong Industries has developed equipment that permits touch-free control of applications just through the use of hand gestures, very much like in the science-fiction movie Minority Report. Oblong not only has equipment that can follow hand gestures using a special glove, but the technology has progress to tracking hand gestures in free space without special gloves. They also developed a special hand-gesture language called g-Speak. This technology is hard to describe and is best understood viewing video clips at the Oblong site.
There were numerous presentations on the growing use of human geography and the growing need for not only geospatial technicians but of all things, social scientists. The only “wet blanket” attendee that voiced a concern during a question-and-answer session was an academic researcher who voiced a concern that social scientists were being used for intel work. He said that the American Anthropological Association (AAA) may have a problem with “weaponizing” social science. The speaker had a good answer in that he asked “How could the AAA have a problem with preventing war and reducing human misery?” My feeling, considering the stellar high-paying job market for social science majors, is why bite the hand that could feed you?
There was so much to cover in the human geography realm that in next month’s column, I will focus on the human geography aspect of GEOINT.
The Survey Summit agenda format is a bit different this year. First of all, it’s at the Hyatt Hotel next to the San Diego Convention Center. Second, it’s starting two days later, on Saturday, as opposed to starting earlier in the week on Thursday. The first day of the Summit is now a series of lightning talks and presentations followed by a keynote presentation to wrap up the day into the the expo and reception.
1:30 p.m. – 2:15 p.m.Technology PresentationSurveying the New Frontier, Mike Beavers, Frontier Surveying
2:15 p.m. – 2:30 p.m.Break
2:30 p.m. – 3:15 p.m.Keynote PresentationNOAA’s Geospatial Information Officer, Tony Lavoi , NOAA
3:30 p.m. – 6:30 p.m.Survey Summit EXPO and Reception
On Sunday, the technical presentations are in a traditional format (45-minute presentations) on subjects from surveying in the cloud to UAV mapping to handling lidar data. Of course, there’s also the annual discussion of surveying vs. GIS.
There’s no real discussion about GPS/GNSS (albeit a talk about GEOID12) at the Survey Summit, which is surprising given that GPS/GNSS such a prolific tool for surveyors and high-precision GIS users. But, you have to realize that at the end of the day, this is a vendor conference and not an industry conference. I see a real shift going back to state and regional conferences, as opposed to a national surveying conference. It just seems that attendees will get more localized and relevant information in that type of venue, and I also see the trend of state/local conferences bringing in nationally recognized speakers talking about national issues that complement the local speakers and presentations.
Esri International User Conference
Yes, it’s a vendor conference, so you get a lot of Esri Kool-Aid. But, that said, there’s no better place in the U.S. to network with your colleagues about geospatial technologies and issues like this venue. If nothing else, it’s due to the sheer volume of geospatial people that converge on San Diego…~13,000.
Nearly all, if not all of the geospatial technology trends I write about (mobile GIS, BIM, UAVs, GPS/GNSS, RFID, satellite imagery/lidar, etc.) are being discussed at this conference in some form or another. You may have to dig into the agenda a bit to find them, but they are there, and there are plenty of experts attending the conference who are presenting, manning exhibit booths, and otherwise walking around that can answer nearly any question you have. The challenge is finding the people you want to talk to among the 13,000 other people.
I’ll be there all week attending sessions and talking with exhibitors about their work, products, services, and vision. If you want to keep up with me during the week, make sure you follow me on twitter. Twitter is replacing blogging to a certain degree. I’ll be posting photos, links, and interesting comments via Twitter throughout the day, every day at the conferences. You’ll get the latest news in almost real-time.
On Wednesday, I’ll have a professional film crew following me around the User Conference as I talk with different exhibitors and attendees. We’ll produce some pretty neat videos of the conference that will be posted to a special Video Gallery section at 98.27.162.175/gpsworld.com. I’ll be asking exhibitors to talk about their newest GIS, surveying, and mapping products and services, their customers’ requirements and success stories, and any special features they may be unveiling at the show. The videos will be edited to 3- to 5-minute clips for posting to the Geospatial Solutions website. Relevant interviews may also be featured on GPS World’s website.
On Thursday at 10:15 a.m. in Room 31B, I’ll be giving a presentation on the latest developments in GPS and GNSS technology. It’s part of the “Using a Mobile GIS to Manage Assets in the Field” session in the Mobile GIS topic track. I’ll be touching on the newest developments in SBAS, GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, and maybe a little bit about LightSquared. As always, there’s a lot happening in the world of GPS/GNSS and some major changes that you should know about, so stop by and join me.
Esri Acquires ArcPad Developer Maptel
In late-breaking news today, Esri announced it has acquired Austrailian-based ArcPad developer Maptel. This adds an interesting twist to Esri’s mobile GIS development efforts. While it’s been clear that Esri has been pushing ArcGIS for Mobile as the mobile GIS path for the future, the acquisition may be signaling a change in that strategy. ArcPad is the most widely deployed mobile GIS software in the world with well over 500,000 copies deployed. Look for more on this subject from me next week while I’m in San Diego.
There’s no doubt that geospatial data collected today is more accurate than it was five years ago and will be more accurate five years from now than it is today. A couple of items had me thinking (once again) about the challenge that higher accuracy geospatial is posing and is going to pose in the future.
The first was an interview I did with Dale Lutz this week. Dale is the vice president of software development and co-founder of Safe Software. Dale is a great person to talk to about trends in geospatial data because Safe Software produces geospatial data conversion software tools. Essentially, the company’s software allows users to seamlessly merge geospatial data sets from different sources. For example, a user may have a requirement to merge data sets from AutoCAD, Esri, and Smallworld along with lidar data. Doing so manually can be a terribly laborious task. Not only does the user have to deal with different data formats, but also data of varying accuracy and unknown sources.
“One thing that is an ongoing issue, we see a lot of files that frankly don’t have the right coordinate systems in them or it’s missing, so then that relies on users to know,” said Lutz. “That kind of lack of metadata is going to pose a challenge for people as time goes on because folks aren’t going to remember and the file is going to get passed around. They are not going to know which datum it was collected with and they may not get exactly the correct answer.”
Dale succinctly summarizes the problem. After 20+ years in the geospatial industry, working in many places in the world, and teaching numerous workshops, matching spatial data is the #1 problem people ask me about. It’s fascinating to watch how diligent people are in acquiring the best data collection devices and collecting the most accurate data in the field, only to see it be diluted as it is integrated into a GIS or passed around without the metadata being communicated.
I’m guilty of it as much as anyone. On many mapping projects, I integrate data from several different data sources. Many times the data is a free download from the web with no metadata provided and no technical support. If I’m able to reach someone to ask a detailed question about the data, 90% of the time they will make their best guess as to the datum used and when the data was collected. Was it in the original NAD83 horizontal datum? HARN? NSRS 2007? And even, ugh, NAD27? The difference can be more than a meter or much greater. It doesn’t take much of an error to negate the value of the expensive high-precision GPS receiver you spent thousands of dollars to acquire.
Dale knows all too well. “When we used to deal with a MicroStation file that was accurate to a meter, we didn’t lose too much sleep, but now it’s more of an issue.”
Not only are horizontal datums an issue, vertical accuracy is a challenge of a different kind.
“It’s really doing a good job with the Z (elevation) that is the challenge we are working on. That’s been a big focus for us,” said Lutz.
Another item about geospatial data accuracy I ran into this week was a thread on an Autodesk discussion forum. It was an entertaining thread about parcel maps and how they don’t reconcile nicely.
The original poster summarizes the problem:
“I am trying to draw a parcel map in AutoCAD, using the distance and bearing info that was added by to the original hand-made drawing by the surveyor. The parcels don’t quite close perfectly… Does anyone know what the acceptable tolerances are for parcels of say 1 acre and under, 1-5 acres, and 5-20 acre sites? Will it ever close EXACTLY, or am I a dreamer?? WOuld you send the surveyor back out to take new measurements if, lets say, he was off by .3″? Or a foot? Or 4 feet on a huge parcel? I am new @ this and just getting started. Thanks!”
An obviously well-informed poster responded:
“That is one major open-ended question…
There are all kinds of things that come into play. Some of it is the age of the original plat. There are many places around our country where we have plats created in the 1700’s, using the proverbial “one-eyed goat and a rope”. Those surveys could have major errors, when compared to what we can achieve with today’s technology. But there’s a whole string of law that decides how all of that gets resolved, and it favors the “original survey” whenever possible. But above that, it favors any monuments that are found and recovered. Those typically hold precedence, even if they disagree with the legal record.
There are also standards that you may need to live to now, in our current age, especially if you’re doing something like an ALTA (Land Title) Survey. You have to make sure to perform within the standards set by the law. With today’s technology, this is often relatively easy, but you still may run into issues when dealing with older neighborhoods, laid out in past times when measurements were not as exact, and especially when original monumentation can’t be found… It can get worse; sometimes you find inconsistent monumentation, and have to try to sort through different surveys, figuring out which monuments were set when… It can become quite a puzzle.
Learning all of this stuff is what becoming a professional land surveyor is about. And it takes years to do that. So there’s no real way to explain it all in a forum post.”
Finally, in one sentence the same poster summarizes the colliding worlds of digital cartography, one of the newest digital technologies, and land surveying, one of the oldest professions.
“A jig-saw puzzle made by blind men with dull saws. As I sometimes describe it.”
Two weeks ago I gave a presentation, at the Transportation Research Board (TRB) annual meeting. This is one of those mega-meetings attended by almost anyone involved in the transportation related professions. TRB is part of the National Research Council jointly administered by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine. TRB’s active members include more than 7,000 engineers, scientists, and other transportation researchers. The program is supported by state transportation departments and federal agencies including the U.S. Department of Transportation.
The TRB annual meeting is huge — 11,000 attendees spread out among eight D.C. area hotels in four main venues. TRB is involved in every possible aspect of transportation: public transportation including highways, mass transit, aviation and marine, and freight movement by rail, water and pipelines. With more than 4,000 presentations, it reminded me a lot of the ESRI Users Conference — absolutely impossible to see and hear it all.
The presentations ran the gamut from political and financial, engineering and construction to advanced research into safety, human factors, energy and the environment. As you would expect there were many presentations that were Greek to me, as I’m sure some of the geospatial ones were Greek to other attendees. There were a lot of engineering/construction-related sessions. A significant number of advanced research presentations dealt with statistical analysis of factors related to highway safety, including a heavy emphasis on the mind-eye interaction. Even the poster sessions were tough to comprehend, with a lot of statistical analysis covering human factors related to safe highways. Although I had calculus and calculus-based statistical courses, it hurts my head to see a lot of integral signs in a poster. The learning curve to understand the work is just too tough in a “drive-by” viewing.
Several sessions dealt with FAA GIS and the NextGen air control system in particular. See the column on Airport GIS for more details and to understand where we are headed in aviation. The GIS-related presentations were concentrated in a track under the broader concept of Virtual Design and Construction (VDC). These sessions were organized by Lance Parve, MSCE of the Wisconsin DOT, Charles Hixon of Bergmann Associates and Kevin Gilson of Parsons Brinckerhoff. They did an exceptional job of tying together visualization, GIS, CAD and BIM with a focus on interoperability in final construction.
My attendance was prompted by a presentation I did in August at the once-every-5-year TRB Visualization Symposium. The conference committee invited three presenters out of 120 to speak at the TRB Annual Meeting, so I was pleased to be one of the three. I spoke about the benefits of oblique imagery and related 3D models for planning, public safety and public involvement meetings.
I wrapped up my presentation by highlighting the superb example of a 3D web application for public involvement visualization built by Fairfax County under the leadership of Tom Conry.
Combining GIS and GPS technology, David Brown of Delcan explained how his firm kept track of quality control inspection results using Trimble GeoXT GIS GPS Data Collectors. His team of inspectors recorded each inspection point and inspection results in a GIS. The collection and creation of the GIS database was accomplished quickly and efficiently using the GeoXTs to capture the location and inspection values in one step. They also used cameras to record problems and bar codes/readers to speed data entry. At left is a GIS plot of all the data points. The GIS analysis tools helped identify clusters of poor samples that signaled the start of quality issuesso they could be corrected early in the construction process.
There were sessions on LiDAR point cloud captures and converters to 3D models. A very impressive example was TopoDOT by Certainty 3D is a MicroStation application for extracting topography and digital models from point clouds. The system tool suite extracts ground topography quickly and accurately from airborne, mobile or terrestrial point clouds and calibrated images. It then extracts breaklines, elevations, cross-sections, and other DTM componentsaccording to project requirements.
Not surprising is that the common thread was a path to BIM models. Civil engineers have adopted BIM models aggressively and all this technology has led to VDC (Virtual Design and Construction) a technology wave that is revolutionizing the construction industry. In March 2011, I wrote about how even Granite Counter Tops were being measured, digitized and the digital design models fed directly into the digital controlled stone cutting machines to fabricate the tops quickly and accurately. The same kind of process is revolutionizing civil engineering.
Back in the Paleozoic era, when I was in college, I worked part time in a machine shop. Traditional machining was done by moving rotating cutting tool across metal blanks to create objects described in mechanical drawings.The machinist did this by manually turning operating wheels that adjusted the cutting tool to fabricate the part according to the design blueprint. Early automation at that time, called Numerical Control, used digitally controlled motors to move the same cutting tools according to predefined paths to make the same parts. There was considerable time spent manually programming the machines to do the jobs. Current technology, just like the granite cutting system, goes directly from the digital design to fabrication of the finished product.
The same process is being done on a mega scale with bulldozers and other heavy earth-moving machines. You may remember that a number of years ago farmers started using aerial CIR imagery to map soil and water conditions of their land. They then used GPS to do precision farming by metering the optimal distribution of fertilizer based on mapped water content and the location of their tractor relative to the GIS data. The same kind of GPS machine control has been perfected by companies like Trimble and John Deere.
On the right is a bulldozer that is accomplishing its work no differently than a machine shop milling machine or precision farming tractor. There are GPS receivers mounted on each end of the dozer’s blade. The operator in the cab can be guided by the CAD image or turn over steering and blade depth control to the automated system. There is no longer a need to place wood marker stakes and constantly survey the progress of the excavation. The bull dozer operator is clearing the land at double speed guided by GPS and a GIS/CAD/BIM 3D model.
It’s strange seeing this kind of automation and precision in heavy earth moving equipment, but this type of technology is making inroads into all phases of construction. So next time you pass a major construction site, see how many GPS receivers you can spot and appreciate the GIS link.
There’s been a tremendous push in the past three decades to map what is outdoors. While there is still a long way to go, the path to a complete, accuracy outdoor GIS seems clear. On the other hand, mapping the unseen and indoors is in its infancy, and the path to a complete and accurate GIS of unseen infrastructure (eg. underground) and indoors (eg. building infrastructure) is not clear.
Cost-effective and efficient methods of data collection are the primary reasons for the proliferation of outdoor GIS. Remote sensing (satellite/aerial imagery, lidar, etc.), GPS, and other sensors have become common technologies for populating an outdoor GIS. If one studies the data sources in a typical GIS, they can be sourced to one of the technologies mentioned above.
The challenge of populating a GIS with spatial details of hidden infrastructure and indoor features is purely a function of efficient and cost-effective sensors. Satellite/aerial imagery doesn’t help and GPS doesn’t help in either case. Therefore, new sensor technologies must be adopted that make data collection efficient and affordable. The good news is that there are many
INTERGEO, held in Germany every year, is the best all-around geospatial conference that allows vendors to showcase their technologies. With ~17,500 attendees, it’s certainly the largest geospatial conference in the world. From my experience, it’s also the best.
Simply, INTERGEO attracts vendors who offer a collection of technologies from GPS/GNSS to remote sensing, 3D scanners, and mapping software that would satisfy the curiosity and needs of any geospatial professional. As I wrote last year, don’t expect to be tied up in sessions, this is a trade show where people come to visit the vendor booths, and the foot traffic is non-stop.The display booths are fantastic. Check out Topcon’s booth below. The seating looks like the airliner I flew in to Germany on.
Topcon introducing Magnet, their Cloud-Based Precise Positioning Solution
Lidar data processing and management software, such as Terrasolid’s solution, was common at INTERGEO. As the cost of high-precision data becomes much cheaper to collect, the bottle-neck becomes data processing and management.
Lidar data management
3D mobile mapping was a hot topic. This 3D Laser Mapping vehicle was used to help assess damage in Japan after the March 11, 2011 earthquake.
3D scanning autos were abound on the trade show floor
The world’s leading GNSS receiver manufacturers attend in full force. You’ll see every major vendor.
Javad GNSS displaying their receivers as well as their new iPad app
As expected and reported over the past few years, the market for machine control products is developing and expanding. There were a number of interesting displays, including this one from Moba AG.
Demonstration of Moba’s excavator machine control system
UAV’s (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) also continue to be a hot topic. The benefits of UAV for remote sensing geospatial activities are clear. What’s not clear is the commercial adoption of UAVs for mapping. Europe and other countries have been much more progressive than the U.S., which still severely limits the use of UAVs for non-government and non-university activities.
Of course, BIM (Building Information Modeling) is another significant trend and there were no lack of vendors at INTERGEO on that topic. The GIS world has just started to get a handle on mapping outdoors while indoor mapping is vastly untouched. OrthoGraph displays their indoor mapping app for the iPad.
OrthoGraph Architect for iPad
I heard some good things about OpenStreetMap. I’ve written about OSM before. Take a look at their website when you have a chance. Also exhibiting was OpenSeaMap.
Open Street Map stand
At the Nuremberg Messe, there was plenty of space to accommodate the ~17,500 attendees as well as an outdoor demonstration area.
INTERGEO 2011 outdoor demonstration area
On the second day of the INTERGEO conference, the Forum for Satellite Navigation (SatNav-Forum) held its one-day meeting. This was the first time it was co-located with INTERGEO. You can view the agenda here, though it’s in German so you’ll need to use an online translator. Note that yours truly gave a short presentation in the afternoon. Some Galileo literature I read tried to make the point that Galileo is superior to GPS and GLONASS. I tried to make the point that GPS and Galileo (Europe’s GPS) are complimentary systems, not competitive systems. By using both GPS and Galileo, high-precision horizontal and vertical data will be very easy and inexpensive to collect in the future. I hope I made my point.
SatNav-Forum display at INTERGEO
Back to the INTERGEO conference. If your company manufacturers something related to geospatial hardware or software, you’re making a big mistake if you are not attending INTERGEO. This is, by far, the single best conference in the world to attend in order to understand the latest trends and developments in GIS, surveying, engineering, and all other geospatial-related disciplines.
Four weeks ago I attended a USSOCOM and Navy Post Graduate School event known simply as Camp Roberts TNT. Located in a remote part of the California Central Valley near the town of Paso Robles, the best way to describe Camp Roberts is that it’s like a Boy Scout Jamboree for engineers, scientists, and military operators. However, Camp Roberts focuses on the serious business of Special Operations that was made even more somber by the loss of 30 Navy SEALS the day before the start of the event.
Sunday, as I was packing to go to Camp Roberts, I couldn’t help but reflect on the loss of the Special Operations team that day. I knew that throughout the country there were 30 Navy and Marine Corps officers putting on their dress uniforms to personally deliver the most horrific news a family can get. Each officer held a message that would turn into a dagger which would penetrate and twist in the heart of a mother, wife, or children. At Camp Roberts many attendees had personal connections to the lost troops but everyone hunkered down to the business at hand.
The USSOCOM Camp Roberts TNT (Tactical Network Testbed) was well attended with more than 850 registered attendees. Camp Roberts is about 15 miles from the charming wine country town of Paso Robles. The camp is mostly dirt roads and gravel, 42 degrees in the morning up to 98 by noon. There are two primary buildings (double wides): a large briefing room that was designed for about 80 but packed with 200, and the TOC (Tactical Operations Center) with numerous flat screens showing different displays depending on who was demonstrating.
Unlike trade shows, TNT is mostly live equipment demos, outside, in the dirt with very informal discussions. But unlike contract delivery testing, perfection was not expected since some of the equipment was still in the development stage. Uniform of the day was khakis, jeans, T-shirts, polo shirts, caps and water bottles. Lunch was a vendor tent with hot dogs, chips and drinks. TNT has become so popular, that other COCOMs are looking to start their own.
Every morning there was a group meeting led by Dr. Buettner (NPS, retired Navy) who heads up the TNT effort. The staff reviews the plan of the day, demos, weather, safety (heat, snakes, foxes, elk, moving equipment, etc.) and logistics. Each participant quickly explains their demo, time, and location. I highlighted my 30-minute lunch time session on oblique imagery. Dr. Buettner, who has a dry sense of humor, interjected that I may or may not be there in November with a live aircraft demo if the audience gives me a thumbs down. I had good attendance at my presentation and closed by asking for a show of hands if we should come back in November for a live aircraft capture demo. Fortunately all hands went up, which I was quick to point out to Dr. Buettner. He muttered something about old Navy guys being mission focused.
The majority of demonstrations focused on communications equipment ranging from very secure high bandwidth line of sight to satellite up and down links. Although there was a schedule, the schedule was done primarily to prevent frequency interference so demonstrators had a clean hour or two. Most of the demos went on all day as attendees walked from one tent to another or to remote locations on the base.
Ball Aerospace highlighted geospatial technology. Ball had helicopter flying overhead carrying its Flash liDAR system downloading imagery and 3D data.
For those of you not familiar with Flash LiDAR, it is what the name implies. Rather than a raster point scan the Flash LiDAR shoot all points at once. That permits the union of other data such as full-motion video with the 3D data of the Flash LiDAR. Therefore, 3D video on the fly. Their field of view is was a relatively narrow but engineers are working to widen it.
Outside the two main buildings were numerous companies set up under pop-up canopies ranging from Lockheed Martin and Harris with high-end communications gear.
Shown here are two battery powered UA’s. The helos with installed video cameras have loiter times of up to 45 minutes. There were many examples of wireless handheld com gear and high bandwidth Line of Sight transmission devices such as the example below.
There was a demonstration of paint-on antennas that turn trees or wall into an antenna and very compact fuel cells shown here.
ITT had a field demonstration of a two-way audio/video link designed for corpsman operating in remote locations. The corpsman wore a vest that contained mics, earphones and a video camera (the white device on this man’s vest). The entire system was very light and unobtrusive. It permitted multiple corpsmen to communicate directly with mobile field locations or even a specialist in a hospital. The doctor could see exactly what the corpsman was seeing and give the corpsman directions real time and hands free. This also permitted the doctor to make advance preparations to receive the patient when he was medevaced.
All during the field exercise each corpsman was tracked via GIS on an image base map. The tracking and communications were never lost even though the corpsmen were traveling behind hills with no line of sight to the mobile bases. This was accomplished through a system of local and satellite communications that reached back to Reston, Virginia. I could see that this would be beneficial for domestic first responders as well as the military. The quality of the video being sent from the corpsman was extremely good and the GIS display at the mobile base station tracked their movements very accurately.
Camp Roberts is unique in that it’s not a “sound clip” marketing bombardment like most trade shows. Since attendance is by invitation only, marketing is discouraged. What does happen are informal and in-depth discussions between field operators and engineers. Attendees get a chance to see equipment in action and exchange ideas freely. I felt lucky to be invited and hope that I can do some small part to help our troops accomplish their missions.
