Since the Environmental Protection Agency, and in turn state and local regulators, have gone all in on green infrastructure (GI) and low impact development (LID) concepts a seemingly regrettable consequence has emerged. Topics specific to the broader adoption…
Improving Pipeline Information Sharing
On September 9, 2010, a section of natural gas pipeline in San Bruno, California, exploded leading to significant property damage and the death of 9 people. …
Do We Still Need Geospatial Standards?
Since 1994, I have participated in, facilitated, and lead a variety of standards activities. I have helped develop standards in the OGC, OASIS, ISO, OMA,…
Harvesting Transparency with Location Intelligence
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 them with a message as they enter the mall or the store, helping them navigate indoors, send product…
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 account when planning and implementing a wireless sensor network – considerations that are often overlooked…
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”…
