Category Archives: Spatial IT/GIS
A State Gets Smart: SmarterBetterCities
To create and share interactive 3D building models, Oregon adopts SmarterBetterCities. To help formulate a 10-year strategic capital investment plan for the State of Oregon, the state’s Chief Financial Office (CFO) wanted to develop a dynamic, immersive, and collaborative visual platform that would illuminate key issues often lost in a tabular summary. Its audience was...
Fluid Data: GNSS and iPads
Lawrence Spencer puts the Trimble R1 GNSS receiver and iPad to work on the Kissimmee River. Pairing GNSS with iPads opens seamless data flows for a water management district in Florida facing wetlands complexity. Lawrence Spencer first joined the South Florida Water Management District’s (SFWMD) lake and river ecosystems section in 2006 as a...
Spatial Networking for Fun and Profit
Recently I attended a UAV event in my area (watch for the July issue of xyHt for more) that got me thinking about the role of networking in our profession. Not RTK, CORS, or even WANs or LANs, but person-to-person networking. Networking for fun. Meeting new people in the geospatial profession (and especially those interested...
3D, GIS, VR… We’re in Cloud City
When the father of GIS, the late Roger Tomlinson, first imagined a computerized system for handling land inventory mapping more than half a century ago, did he imagine that GIS would become such an integral part of our lives? At a click of a button, we can access directions to where we want to go,...
Do Your Work Right (and You Can Be ‘Smart’ Too)
Ever since I saw the phrase “smart city,” I have cringed. Not because of the term but because of what it alludes to. To me it says that we (geospatial experts) haven’t done our work right. Let me explain. From Wikipedia: “A smart city is an urban development vision to integrate multiple information and communication technology...
GeoBusiness 2016 – London
Wow! Just, wow [ed. Translation to US-English “Wow!!”]. Last week I was at the UK Esri annual conference with 3000+ people crammed into the tight QEII conference centre. This still didn’t prepare me for GeoBusiness this year. It was the same venue as last year but somehow they’ve crammed in a few more stands, and...
