Category Archives: Spatial IT/GIS

The Trimble Line: Accuracy, Trust and the Future of Connected Work

For more than two decades, Trimble Applanix has shaped the practice of mobile mapping and survey-grade positioning in air, land and marine domains. Today, it sits at the center of Trimble’s broader move toward connected workflows, subscription-based performance, and end-to-end accuracy. Few people have watched that evolution more closely than Steve Woolven, who has overseen Trimble...

Precision or Nothing: The Millimeter-Level Future of Geomatics

By any measure, INTERGEO 2025 marks a turning point for Topcon. But for CEO Ivan Di Federico, the momentum behind this shift started well before the show floor opened. It began last November, when he outlined what would become Topcon 2.0—a reset of the company’s identity that re-centers geomatics as a foundational discipline and sets a...

Oriented Imagery in GIS: Unlocking Value From Unstructured Data

In an era defined by explosive data growth and rapidly expanding drone-based sensing, the geospatial community faces a new frontier: unlocking the value of unstructured imagery. Chad Lopez, a solutions engineer with Esri’s Imagery and Remote Sensing team, is at the forefront of this effort. In a recent interview, Lopez discussed how oriented imagery—raw photos...

The Cloud, The Edge, and the Beast

How are various platforms for processing and managing reality capture data best leveraged? The answer is a moving target, constantly evolving… for the better. There are sometimes strong views on reality capture (RC) processing approaches, particularly between cloud-based and local approaches. Recently, an acquaintance, a respected practitioner of high-profile RC projects, told me that he...

A Conversation With Spatial Storyteller, Pete Kelsey

Geospatial storytelling, geo-evangelism, and how to build the ultimate reality capture kit. By Pete Kelsey and Gavin Schrock, PLS The geospatial sector has a bona fide “geo celebrity”, and that distinction is well deserved. Pete Kelsey has been out there in the geo trenches with the rest of us for decades. Beginning with military service,...

Advancements in Parcel Mapping Tools – Part 1

Whether a parcel map is created for an engineering project, land development, valuation, tax assessment, land administration and management, for a subdivision, city, county, or whole country, the tools to create and manage them have dramatically improved.