Today government agencies at all levels are challenged with severe resource limitation, yet they are required to foster the quality of service they offer to their respective communities. The global financial crisis made it even more difficult for state and…
How Micro-Location, Geofencing and Indoor Location Are Driving The Retail Revolution
Indoor Location has become the holy grail of location based-marketing, bringing consumers from their home to the closest shopping mall or retailer, greeting…
Sensor Sensibility: Project Planning and Deployment Considerations
The wireless sensor network is fundamentally a distributed network of constrained devices. There are a host of considerations that must be taken into…
Wearable Computing and the Internet of Things
It is hard to go anywhere now and not see individuals or whole crowds of people staring at their “device”. I was walking past an outdoor café the other day and noticed that every single person on the patio was engaged in texting, searching and scanning.…
Does the term GIS mean anything at all?
I have recently been reading a series of national and state GIS articles and user needs documents, all of which talk about the need for a National GIS or a State GIS, and the importance of GIS data, without ever stating in any way what a GIS is, or what GIS…
Indoor Location: The Mobile Revolution Starts Now
The future of mobile location-based services lies in its rapid adoption of indoor technologies. For more than 20 years, the use of global positioning system, or GPS, has been the gold standard for outdoor navigation. The satellite-based navigation system has…
Hitting the Point: A Simple Guideline for Contracting 3D Mapping Professionals
Recently, a few technologically specific themes have surfaced in the contemporary business world that all of us can relate to. Whether you are a surveyor, engineer, analyst, or somewhere in gray the topics of “the cloud”, “big data”, and “data mining”…
Sensor Sensibility: Communications Design Considerations for Energy Efficiency
One of the key design constraints in the deployment of a sensor network is the optimization of power consumption and energy efficiency. A problem familiar to those working with embedded devices is the need to eke out every possible capability while working…
Open Data Means Registries
The municipal world has been buzzing with the concepts of Open Data. Many regions and municipalities have declared their support for the idea, and a Global Open Data Day was declared on February 22, 2013. Organizations have formed and principles declared (see…
The Future of Urban Planning: Interactive 3-D Visualization
In many cases, the software used by urban planners and architects is nearly as complex as urban planning itself—especially for owners and operators of the project, who may not have design backgrounds. However, unlike the old, manual method of sorting though…
