Africa Rising - Geospatial Must Underpin Economic Development

In November last year, Andrew Coote of ConsultingWhere visited Addis Ababa for the joint Global Spatial Data Infrastructure (GSDI) and AfricaGIS conferences. GiSPro originally commissioned him to write a GSDI-focused report. But with colleague Phil Knight they realised that a wider focus on the rising use and importance of geospatial technology on the world’s most misunderstood continent would perhaps be a more valuable contribution. The quality and diversity of the projects described by African geospatial scientists in Addis Ababa was humbling. For too long, western eyes have often viewed Africa with a mixture of pity and despair, perhaps conditioned by... (read more)

2017-05-31 03:28:35

Hexagon Acquires Geospatial Information Visualisation Specialist Luciad

Hexagon has announced the acquisition of Luciad, a Belgium-based software company specialising in the visualisation and analysis of real-time geospatial information. Luciad will be fully consolidated, operating within Hexagon’s Geospatial division. Luciad’s visualisation technologies support live connections to dynamic sensor feeds in a 3D environment. The result is a 5D digital reality: real-time, rapid fusion of multi-source content and the ability to perform analytics on-the-fly. These intuitive command and control systems benefit all kinds of applications - from public safety and smart cities to defence and intelligence - enabling users to make critical decisions based on changing information in real time. This... (read more)

2017-10-04 10:20:07

Australia - A Nation Embracing its Geospatial Future

Despite having a population which is relatively small to its geographic side, Australia is a country which punches well above its weight on the global geospatial stage. In this article, Niall Conway provides an overview of the Australian geospatial industry, its active community, as well as the many geospatial initiatives which are taking place in the land Down Under. Although Australia’s first map by Western definition can be traced to the relatively recent date of 1810, it is actually a land with a long, rich history of maps. The second largest continent in the world contains a complex web of Aborigine... (read more)

2017-08-07 11:04:52

The Breadth and Depth of Smart Geospatial

With the summer now well past us, I’m sure many of you (like me) are reminiscing of peaceful days in amazing and beautiful places, escaping from the desktop. I really did opt for remote this year, with an escape to Shetland – time in the most northerly settlement in the UK and never 3 miles from the coast, it made for spectacular views and a feeling of being incredibly close to nature. Over recent weeks, I’m reminded that our planet is breathtakingly beautiful the world over – but also incredibly fragile. It’s impossible to avoid the news of environmental devastation... (read more)

2017-10-11 01:59:31

Geospatial Gender Balance - My Two Cents

The gender imbalance in the STEM world is, according to Niall Conway, no secret; we only need to look at the industry’s past to try understand why this is the case. The geospatial industry, is to a certain degree, tied to its traditional male-dominated roots. From the early exploration and conquering days, to the resources, utilities, and military industries, maps were created and used for the purposes of acquiring and maintaining power. This perhaps explains why the technical subject which is map-making appears to have, before now at least, neither appealed to, nor been as accessible to women as it... (read more)

2018-08-13 12:08:52

Hexagon’s Geospatial Division Releases Luciad V2018.1

Hexagon’s Geospatial division, a global provider of high-performance geospatial solutions, has announced the V2018.1 release of the Luciad Portfolio. The new version focuses on further expanding 3D capabilities and includes additional data formats and standards for users in military and maritime domains. To accommodate organizations’ expanding geospatial data, LuciadFusion introduces a RESTful API to automate the entire process of data crawling. Both the server and desktop solution, LuciadFusion and LuciadLightspeed, have added support for the E57 point cloud format and automate point cloud data optimization through the Tiling Engine API. LuciadLightspeed now includes Inland Electronic Navigational Charts and updated support... (read more)

2019-01-16 09:20:55

How to Increase Retail Sales Bridging IoT, Geospatial and AI

In the modern world, brick-and-mortar retail stores have to focus on new technologies to improve user experience (UX) and compete with the e-commerce stores. Geospatial analytics of location characteristics, demographic data, and trade areas helps retailers understand the impact this data has on store sales so that they can moderate success rates and improve performance. Internet of Things (IoT) also provides businesses with the ability to analyze the in-store impact light and temperature level has on consumer buying behaviour. However, defining true buying behaviour patterns can only be accomplished by using artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that combine IoT data with... (read more)

2019-07-19 05:28:34

OGC, GEO & UN-GGIM - Driving the Global Geospatial Agenda

This article sets out to explain the distinct but interrelated roles of the three international bodies which are driving the global geospatial agenda which underpins the need for smart and sustainable growth in the 21st century: The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), and the United Nations Committee of Experts on Global Geospatial Information Management (UN-GGIM). If you are interested in how the geospatial industry and associated policy supports government and broader commercial sector activities, then it is important to understand the global influences which are shaping these sectors. You need to look at the world... (read more)

2017-08-03 02:57:52

Global Forum on the Integration of Statistical and Geospatial Information

The Global Forum, held at the UN headquarters in New York, 4-5 August, brought together for the first time the heads of national statistical offices and national geospatial information authorities from around the world. Their mission was to discuss the strategic goals and vision for the integration of statistics and geospatial information. The Forum reflects the critical importance of integrating geospatial information with statistics and socio-economic data as well as the development of a geospatial-statistical framework. It was stressed that maps and statistics are not so effective in isolation; only when they are combined within an overall information management framework... (read more)

2017-01-06 04:29:07

Airbus and Orbital Insight Announce Geospatial Analytics Partnership

Airbus Defence and Space has entered into a partnership with Orbital Insight, a US-based geospatial analytics company, to build a suite of geospatial analytics services and tools. The agreement will provide Orbital Insight with access to Pleiades and SPOT satellite imagery at scale and provide Airbus with analytics services. This makes Orbital Insight the first analytics partner for the Airbus digital platform, ‘OneAtlas’. The OneAtlas platform is a collaborative environment enabling users to easily access constantly updated satellite imagery, perform large-scale image processing, extract industry-specific insights, and benefit from Airbus assets to develop tailored solutions for a wide range of... (read more)

2018-09-13 09:14:37