Category Archives: Spatial IT/GIS
The Duct Tape Principle
The geospatial industry has never been short on capability. That said, industry leaders have learned to look beyond the technology, to lead with problems instead of solutions. The most successful seek to find the places where people are improvising, stitching together workarounds, doing something difficult and expensive because no better option exists, and to start...
Since Precision Exists: How Topcon Is Reframing Construction Through Geospatial Intelligence
At ConExpo, some booths display products. Others project momentum. Topcon did both. From the aisle, the scene was hard to miss. The booth was busy almost constantly, each kiosk crowded with a rotating mix of current customers, future customers, partners, dealers, and industry observers and media. Demonstrations ran continuously. Conversations layered over one another. Specialists...
Why 3D Fuels Modeling Is Now a Geospatial Problem
As wildfire planning demands better inputs, the challenge is shifting from data collection alone to how vegetation and surface fuels are measured, classified, and turned into model-ready 3D information. Wildfire is forcing a shift in geospatial thinking. High-resolution capture is no longer the finish line. The harder question is whether vegetation and surface-fuels data can...
Between the Scanner and the Deliverable: How Mach9 is Building the Missing Layer in Geospatial Production
A Carnegie Mellon-trained roboticist who learned surveying in a coal mine and mapped uranium deposits inside decommissioning pipes is now building what he calls a new category of software — one that sits at the intersection of CAD, GIS, and the physical world. Alex Baikovitz did not set out to build CAD software. He set...
Cleaner Signals, Better Sites
How Antenna-Level Interference Mitigation Improves Machine Control Productivity. Construction job sites have always been challenging environments for positioning. Steel structures, heavy machinery, changing terrain, and partial sky visibility are part of the daily reality. What has changed dramatically over the past decade is the radio-frequency (RF) environment in which modern construction now operates. Today’s job...
Brave New Coordinates: What NSRS Modernization Means for Survey and GIS Practice
NAD 83, NAVD 88 and “SPCS ’83” are finally giving way to a modern, GNSS- and gravity-based National Spatial Reference System. The technical pieces are arriving now. For surveyors and GIS professionals, the hard work will be managing the transition while keeping projects on track. For more than a decade, NOAA’s National Geodetic Survey (NGS)...