Smartphone users now have access to Field Notes—Earth, a new mobile app from Esri that employs the power of geography to answer questions about locations throughout the world. Built using Esri’s AppStudio for ArcGIS, the free app allows anyone to discover interesting facts about population, nature and physical landscapes for any location on Earth.
“Field Notes—Earth leverages the tremendous capabilities of geographic information to describe the world in detail,” said Esri president, Jack Dangermond. “Tools like these update and transform our understanding and expectations in ways that help us be wiser citizens of the planet.”
With an intuitive design available on Android and iOS devices, the app gives users the option to discover answers to questions about their hometown, current residence, or any place of interest. It lets them compare these findings to an additional location.
After selecting an initial place via current location, search, or by dropping a pin on a map, the app reveals geographic insights for three categories — Natural, Physicaland People. Sample questions include:
How crowded is it in this location?
How close am I to a recent earthquake area?
What is the predicted 2050 change in average temperature?
“Whether you are relocating, are an educator looking for a new teaching resource, or just curious about the world around you, the app reveals insights into the complexity of humanity’s relationship with Earth for everyone to enjoy,” said Sean Breyer, ArcGIS content program manager at Esri.
In addition to exploring 18 questions, users can click on any answer for more details and to learn how the selected locations relate to the rest of the world’s landscape and populations. The app reveals, for example, that the majority of people live in very hot climates and more than 40 percent of the Earth’s soil is poor for most crops.
Esri’s Content Team created the app using AppStudio for ArcGIS, which lets you build an app once and have it automatically ready for Android, iOS, Windows, OS X, and Linux.
The first Gen III F-35 Helmet Mounted Display System has been delivered. (Photo: Rockwell Collins)
Lockheed Martin and Rockwell Collins have delivered the first Gen III F-35 Helmet Mounted Display System (HMDS). The advanced technology for warfighters provides pilots with unprecedented levels of situational awareness and allows them to “look through” the airframe.
Company executives commemorated the delivery of the first HDMS on Aug. 11 with Sen. Joni Ernst in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. In addition to the HMDS, the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II demonstrator was on site at the Cedar Rapids headquarters of Rockwell Collins for Sen. Ernst to get a first-hand experience of “flying” the military’s most advanced fighter jet following the delivery ceremony.
Rockwell Collins, through its joint venture, Rockwell Collins ESA Vision Systems LLC, is providing the most advanced technology for warfighters with the F-35 HMDS, which provides pilots with unprecedented levels of situational awareness and allows them to “look through” the airframe.
The Gen III helmet, which includes an improved night vision camera, improved liquid-crystal displays, automated alignment and software improvements is to be introduced to the fleet in low rate initial production Lot 7 in 2016. Rockwell Collins ESA Vision Systems LLC also developed the Gen II helmet that F-35 pilots currently use, which met the needs for the U.S. Marine Corps and will allow the service to declare Initial Operational Capability.
All the information that pilots need to complete their missions — through all weather, day or night — is projected on the helmet’s visor. Additionally, the F-35’s Distributed Aperture System (DAS), made by Northrop Grumman, streams real-time imagery from six infrared cameras mounted around the aircraft to the helmet, allowing pilots to “look through” the airframe.
“Today’s visit was an opportunity to place focus on Rockwell Collins, as manufacturing makes up such an important part of our economy here in Iowa,” said Senator Ernst. “Having served in the military for over 20 years, I appreciate the company’s efforts in support of our national defense, our armed forces and our veterans.”
“We’re pleased to be able to demonstrate the advanced capabilities of the F-35 Lightning II at Rockwell Collins today to Sen. Ernst and members of the Cedar Rapids community,” said Steve Callaghan, director, F-35 Program, Lockheed Martin Washington Operations. “The employees at Rockwell Collins are contributing to the F-35s flying today, and we’re pleased to have the opportunity to showcase the superior performance capabilities of this aircraft with them.”
Overall, Rockwell Collins has built and fit more than 200 helmets for F-35 pilots who are being trained for the program.
The newest version of MicroSurvey FieldGenius delivers expanded toolsets and enhanced capabilities for fast, accurate and complete field data collection, according to maker MicroSurvey Software. FieldGenius 8 was developed through close market collaboration and feedback from users, and provides tight control over crucial aspects of field data collection through expanded toolsets and an enhanced user experience, the company said.
Benefits of the new release include:
Easy GNSS Local Transformation. A redesigned interface provides a streamlined workflow along with the ability to export/import localization files and use Helmert transformation.
Enhanced DXF Support. Blocks, extrusion vectors, circles, and other entities are now supported in DXF file format for faster and easier drawing import.
Advanced Point Averaging. The routine allows users to take multiple GNSS and/or TPS temporary measurements of a point and calculate an averaged position for increased accuracy and reliability.
All-New Electronic Bubble. Integrated inertial sensors are now supported, which enables tilt compensated surveying on selected receivers and improves efficiency at difficult job sites.
Native Unicode Support. Unicode character encoding has been implemented throughout the program. International users can now use their own language for data entry inside FieldGenius.
Simplified GIS Mapping. GIS attributes can now be easily added to figures. In addition, users can quickly access default/previous values for both points and figures to make mapping tasks even easier.
FieldGenius 8 also includes improvements to road alignments, an onboard basic measurement mode, dynamic screen rotation, and expanded ASCII export options. Additionally, supported coordinate systems, geoids, instruments, and data collectors has been expanded, making it easier to integrate into existing survey operations.
Phase One Industrial, a manufacturer and provider of medium-format aerial digital photography equipment and software solutions, is offering the iXU-R camera series. Available in 80 MP, 60 MP and 60 MP achromatic versions, the cameras feature dedicated interchangeable 40 mm, 50 mm and 70 mm Phase One Rodenstock lenses equipped with central leaf shutters that can be quickly changed in the field, offering flexibility in aerial applications.
The Phase One iXU-R systems have been designed to address the aerial data acquisition market’s needs for a small, lightweight camera with the high resolution of a medium format system, plus high-performance optics, flexibility to fit into small places and Phase One’s fastest 80 MP platform. For example, the iXU-R 180 is built around a large 80-megapixel sensor, with 10,328 pixels cross-track coverage yet it is compact enough to be easily integrated into a small gimbal or pod space or an oblique/nadir array. Or it can be used as a standalone photogrammetric camera with optional Forward Motion Compensation.
Cameras are easily integrated into new or existing setups with USB 3.0 connectivity for control and storage via the Phase One iX Capture application. All Phase One aerial cameras offer direct communication with GPS/IMU systems and the ability to directly write data to the image files.
“As the use of UAVs and small aircraft increases dramatically around the world, and every gram in a payload counts, Phase One Industrial is committed to offering small and lightweight cameras without sacrificing data accuracy, image quality and resolution,” said Dov Kalinski, general manager of Phase One Industrial.
Emirates Palace, courtesy of DigitalGlobe, taken on November 14, 2014, by WorldView-3 satellite at a resolution of 30 cm.
Proteus, a provider of satellite derived mapping and geospatial services, announces the official launch of its new professional satellite image procurement service. The service provides an approach to satellite imagery sales that is sensor agnostic, calling upon partnerships and agreements with the majority of satellite operators. Because of this, Proteus has the capability to support all imagery purchasing requirements.
The service was developed from customer feedback when conducting imagery purchases, which indicated that the experience and knowledgeable advice provided by Proteus removed the stress and complexity they had previously experienced when attempting to complete a purchase and navigate the end-user licenses themselves.
“These days there are many satellite imagery providers, all with a range of products, resolutions, licensing conditions and costings,” David Critchley, CEO of Proteus explained. “This can be overwhelming and time consuming for the end users. Our aim is to break down all the technical barriers and find the best coverage for your area of interest. We strive to determine the most suitable imagery at the most competitive pricing.”
Proteus has now developed relationships with all the main satellite imagery suppliers and provide their customers with a comprehensive, sensor agnostic and personable service.
CoreLogic reports that the national foreclosure inventory fell 28.9 percent year over year in June 2015 to approximately 472,000 homes, or 1.2 percent of all homes with a mortgage. This marks 44 consecutive months of year-over-year declines (see Figure 1).
Also in June 2015, the 12-month sum of completed foreclosures decreased 17.9 percent, to 526,000, since June 2014. The seriously delinquent inventory fell to 1.3 million loans, a 23.3 percent year-over-year decline.
There were 48 states that posted year-over-year declines in the foreclosure inventory, and 32 of those states had decreases of more than 20 percent. The five states with the largest year-over-year drop in the foreclosure inventory were Florida (-47.7 percent), Connecticut (-36.9 percent), Michigan (-36.5 percent), Idaho (-35.4 percent) and Maryland (-34.4 percent). Only the District of Columbia (+18.1 percent), Massachusetts (+17.8 percent) and Wyoming (+4.1 percent) experienced year-over-year increases in the foreclosure inventory.
Figure 2 shows that judicial foreclosure states1 continued to have higher foreclosure rates in June 2015 than non-judicial states, averaging 2.1 percent and 0.6 percent, respectively. The foreclosure rate for judicial states peaked in February 2012 at 5.4 percent, while non-judicial states peaked at 2.5 percent in January 2011. As of June 2015, 42 percent of outstanding mortgages were in judicial states, but 71 percent of total loans in foreclosure were in those states.
MAPPS, the association of private sector geospatial firms, is accepting entries for the 9th Annual MAPPS Geospatial Products and Services Excellence Awards. The Excellence Awards exemplify the professionalism, value, integrity and achievement of MAPPS member firms as demonstrated over the previous year.
A panel of five judges will evaluate the submitted projects from eight categories.
airborne and satellite data acquisition;
photogrammetry/elevation data generation;
remote sensing;
GIS/IT;
surveying/field data collection;
small projects;
technology innovation;
licensed data products.
The panel will review each submission and select a winner for each category. A Grand Award will be presented from the category award winners to represent the MAPPS Project of the Year. Winners will be announced at the 2016 MAPPS Winter Conference in Las Vegas, Nev. The deadline for entries is October 31, 2015.
Click here to learn more about the submission process.
Mansfield Correctional Institute (photo by U.S. Corrections-Special Operations Group)
A drone flew over an Ohio prison and dropped a payload containing heroin, marijuana and tobacco last week, causing a fight to break out. Prison officers rushed into the north yard of Mansfield Correctional Institution in Mansfield after noticing 75 inmates gathering and fighting, according to an incident report from the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction as reported by CNN.
Authorities later viewed a survelliance video that showed a drone delivery had caused the fighting. Inmates were able to get their hands on the delivery containing 144.5 grams of tobacco, 65.4 grams of marijuana and 6.6 grams of heroin before the fight ensued and the package was thrown into the prison’s south yard, the incident report said.
Two corrections officers called for assistance and ordered the inmates to stop fighting, according to the department. They used pepper spray to control the fight, reports U.S. News and World Report. About 75 inmates in the north recreation yard and 130 on the south recreation yard were taken to the gyms, where they were strip-searched, run through a cell sensor and checked by a clinic. The nine people involved in the fight were placed in solitary confinement. No staff members or inmates were injured, the department said.
This is not the first time an Ohio prison has had an incident with unmanned aerial vehicles, according to Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections spokeswoman JoEllen Smith. She declined to elaborate further because of a potential security risk.
Ohio authorities are now on the lookout for more attempts to use drones to smuggle drugs over prison walls and into inmates hands, and the owner of the drone is being sought. “It’s something we’re certainly aware of,” Smith told CNN. “We’re taking a broad approach to increasing staff awareness and detection.”
Eos Positioning’s Arrow 200 Bluetooth receiver now supports Hemisphere’s Atlas correction service,
The Arrow 200 Bluetooth GNSS receiver by Eos Positioning Systems now supports the new Atlas H10 GNSS correction service. Using the H10 service, the Arrow 200 GNSS receiver is able to achieve 8-cm accuracy, in real-time, virtually anywhere in the world, the company said. The H10 corrections are delivered by geostationary satellite or via Internet connection.
The Hemisphere GNSS Atlas correction service, announced in June, is a real-time correction service that meets or exceeds existing correction services. It has three service levels, with H10 having the highest accuracy.
“Eos is proud to introduce the first GNSS receiver that supports the H10 service,” said Chief Technology Officer Jean-Yves Lauture. “It will allow our customers in every country in the world to have access to sub-decimeter real-time accuracy on all mobile platforms, including iOS, Android and Windows devices.”
The H10 correction service and the Arrow 200 support all active constellations including GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, BeiDou and QZSS, giving the user ultra-fast convergence time to real-time decimeter accuracy, Eos Positioning said.
The Arrow 200 employs long-range (1 km) universal Bluetooth connectivity so the user can interface to any brand of smartphone or tablet, whether it’s iOS, Android or Windows-based. The Arrow 200 has been optimized to run all day on battery power. The battery pack is field-replaceable and rechargeable separately. All Arrow receivers have been designed to meet IP-67 specifications for immersion in water and are completely dust-proof so they will survive in the harshest environments.
The Arrow 200 GNSS receiver with Atlas H-10 service is targeted at high-accuracy applications like GIS, environmental, agriculture, electric/gas/water utilities, surveying, machine control, and federal, state and local government.
Esri has published an interactive Wildfire Public Information Map and a 2015 California Wildfire Activity Map.
Wildfire Public Information Map
The Wildfire Public Information Map provides continuously updated information about wildfires and their perimeters from the U.S. Geological Survey and other agencies. It provides live weather warnings and wind information from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as well as live weather radar from AccuWeather. A local perspective on events is available by turning on geotagged social media from Twitter, YouTube and Flickr on the Layers tab.
2015 California Wildfire Activity
This story map provides a detailed look at 15 active fires throughout California. As you scroll through the map, you can view fire perimeters and hot spots for each active fire, and get up-to-date statistics about each blaze, including total acreage, percent containment and damage caused.
Satellites, aircraft and unmanned aerial systems (UAS) collect imagery that can be displayed and analyzed within a geographic information system (GIS) to extract important information.
To familiarize GIS professionals and students with the advanced earth imaging technologies available today, Esri has publishedEssential Earth Imaging for GIS. The book is a field guide to Earth imaging, providing guidance to efficiently and effectively display, manipulate, enhance, and interpret features from an image.Essential Earth Imaging for GISprovides a basic education in remote-sensing technology, promoting the effective use of sophisticated multispectral and 3D imagery.
Chapters introduce readers to remote-sensing methods and types of imagery as well as how to display and enhance multispectral images, process images in a GIS to improve quality, generate three-dimensional data, and visually interpret images in a GIS to extract information from them.
The book provides hands-on experience working with imagery in Esri’sArcGIS for DesktopandArcGIS Online. Exercises include assigning colors in multiband images and extracting information from multispectral images by digitalizing features. Companion exercises and a free 180-day trial of ArcGIS are available by accessing theEsri Press Book Resources website.
Essential Earth Imaging for GISwas written by Lawrence Fox III, emeritus professor of forest remote sensing and GIS at Humboldt State University in California. The book serves as a starting point for GIS professionals who want to learn the basics of imaging technology so they can incorporate it more effectively into their work, while students can use this book as a reference for introductory GIS courses that make use of image display and analysis.
Essential Earth Imaging for GISis available in print (ISBN: 9781589483453, 128 pages, US$59.99) or as an e-book (ISBN: 9781589484313, 128 pages, US$59.99). The book is available at online retailers worldwide, atesri.com/esripress, or by calling 1-800-447-9778. Outside the United States, visitesri.com/esripressordersfor complete ordering options, or visitesri.com/distributorsto contact your local Esri distributor. Interested retailers can contact Esri Press book distributor Ingram Publisher Services.
Esri Press publishes books on GIS, cartography, and related topics. The complete selection of GIS titles from Esri Press can be found on the web atesri.com/esripress.
SAP SE is offering new capabilities to turbocharge spatial intelligence by simplifying, accelerating and geo-enabling access to enterprise data.
In the era of the Internet of Things (IoT), proliferation of low-cost location-aware devices is augmenting enterprise data with the “where” component. The SAP HANA platform can help break the silos between enterprise and GIS systems, enabling companies to get more value from corporate data and uncover trends and patterns in a visually intuitive manner, the company said in a statement.
The announcement was made at the Esri User Conference (Esri UC) being held July 21–23 in San Diego.
Accelerating Spatial Processing for Real-Time Insights. The latest release of SAP HANA further enhances in-memory spatial processing capabilities to deliver faster responses for millions of data points, the company said. SAP HANA SPS10 brings new spatial features and enhancements, such as support for multidimensional geometries and on-the-fly spatial coordinate transformations, driven by customer innovation projects such as flight operations for Lufthansa Systems.
Case Study: Lufthansa
Lufthansa Systems is using the spatial capabilities in SAP HANA for tracking global flight operations. Changes in airport, meteorological and fleet data are monitored in real time and used to reroute flight trajectories in split seconds while optimizing fuel and crew costs. Lufthansa Systems believes that this innovative technology for dispatching, monitoring and visualizing air traffic by providing instant insights and real-time decision support will help change the face of its business.
“Together with SAP, we built a prototype of a future operational database for commercial flight support,” said Christoph Krüger, lead architect, Lufthansa Systems. “The spatial engine in SAP HANA has given us the ability to track thousands of flights per day on a rich 3D mapping interface that includes both spatial and temporal coordinates. At the same time, we were able to uncover breakthrough application scenarios that would not have been possible without the SAP HANA platform.”
Deeper Integration of SAP HANA and Esri
In addition to the existing read-only query layer integration to SAP HANA released by Esri in 2014, ArcGIS for Desktop now supports feature services providing a method for users to create, read, update or delete spatial data directly in SAP HANA. This simplifies the access and use of spatial data in SAP HANA and provides powerful, transactional spatial data creation and editing capabilities to support real-time operational and analytic applications, opening a broad new range of use cases and workflows for both Esri and SAP users.
The State of Indiana uses SAP HANA, SAP Lumira software and SAP Predictive Analytics software in combination with Esri for geo-spatial analytics to help ensure safer roads and traffic conditions and improve the lives of its citizens.
“Our long-standing technical co-innovation with SAP has taken a major step forward with the introduction of the SAP HANA platform and its spatial capabilities,” said Jack Dangermond, founder and president of Esri. “We now have a single platform from SAP that simplifies both integration and the deployment of mapping and spatial analysis across the entire SAP application landscape.”
Analytics Solutions from SAP Enhanced by Partner Extensions
The native integration between Esri ArcGIS and data visualization software from SAP, SAP Lumira, provides new capabilities for customers. It includes a rich library of charts and visualizations, overlay charts with geo-spatial data for location-based insight, support to visualize multiple layers of business data on top of Esri base maps and support to embed and create custom extensions with software development kits (SDKs). SAP partners such as Galigeo use these SDKs to extend the value of analytics solutions from SAP with new options for visualizing and analyzing information in SAP Lumira and SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio using Esri cloud and on-premise resources. A free version of SAP Lumira is currently available for download.
Geo-Enablement of SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA
SAP is delivering geospatial enablement of SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA software with a geo-enabling services offering. Geo-enabling allows SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA to store spatial data directly on SAP HANA instead of on a third-party database, resulting in faster response times and a simpler architecture.
Spatial Enhancements in SAP Work Manager
The SAP Work Manager mobile app has added Esri feature layer integration and offline mapping capabilities. These improve user interaction on mobile devices and enable mobile technicians servicing clients in the field to access their maps and associated information without Internet connectivity.
For more information, visit the SAP News Center. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews, or view the video below for a demonstration from the 2015 Esri UC.
