Monday, December 15th, 2014
In our regular end-of-the-year reflection, Sensors & Systems looks back over the past 12 months to come up with the top developments of 2014 that will have strong implications for geospatial industry growth and diversity in the coming years. Making the list are technology disruptions, acquisitions, modeling frameworks, mapping efforts and global change. 1. DigitalGlobe
Tuesday, December 9th, 2014
With holiday shopping underway, it seems odd that drones are being promoted on so many gift suggestion lists given a parallel backlash that includes a recent near miss at an airport in England. The reality is that these devices take some skill to fly, with even the autopilot option requiring training, particularly in the need
Tuesday, November 18th, 2014
It’s been a while since we’ve had a truly breakthrough mapping platform. We’re coming up on the tenth anniversary of the creation of Google Maps (Feb. 2005) and the corresponding commercialization of Google Earth (June 2005). The open source NASA World Wind is another mature, but open source, variety of online world viewer, and there
Tuesday, November 11th, 2014
Historically, a map is an abstract recording of reality that communicates information about our surroundings and the relationships of things to place. It incorporates direction and scale to allow us to navigate. In its traditional paper format, a map ranks with a book in its ability to capture knowledge in a compact and portable way.
Tuesday, October 28th, 2014
A conversation that took place at the industry’s largest geospatial gathering this summer is hard to erase from memory. There, a long-time industry veteran who is well respected to the point of holding office in a major industry association and giving many keynote addresses at regional events made a statement along the lines of, “we
Tuesday, October 14th, 2014
Earlier this month, noted geospatial author and spatial analysis pioneer Joe Berry gave a series of talks marking his retirement. His 40-year perspective on the evolution of GIS technology takes in a remarkable progression from punch cards to digitizers and on to personal and portable computers. Much of the changes to GIS were driven by
Tuesday, September 30th, 2014
A new population projection from the United Nations pushes past predictions beyond marks made just a decade ago. The new numbers show that we have an 80 percent chance of reaching 11 billion people by 2100, up from today’s seven billion number, and well beyond the prior estimate that showed growth rates leveling off. With
Tuesday, September 16th, 2014
There’s a clever acronym for the convergence of social, mobile, analytics, and cloud (SMAC). With SMAC there’s a great deal of opportunity for improved efficiency of services for government and enterprises that engage a large customer base through websites, social media and mobile applications. Using these many touch points yields a large volume of data
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2014
There has long been a call for some safeguards for location privacy, not only to put some checks on the surveillant state, but also to curb some of the bold uses that marketers are making with our data. There are many examples of corporate and government abuses of our location privacy, and they only seem
Tuesday, August 19th, 2014
One of the more amazing things to come out recently in the geospatial sphere is the coupling of GIS functionality with SAP HANA, the platform as a service that returns real-time analytics with its in-memory processing. The speed at which this predictive analytical engine operates, coupled with Esri’s GeoEvent Processor for real-time data feeds in
