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, IETF, W3C – the list goes on. Given this commitment to the standards world, you might think that I have a strong bias toward the status-quo for standards development and use. Quite the opposite. Twenty years focused on interoperability and the standards that theoretically enable interoperability has caused me to constantly question the standar...
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 local governments that can no longer afford to continue business as usual when it comes to serving and engaging their communities. Citizens today expect and demand more from their government. This means more collaboration and better services,...
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 information and special promotions as they get closer, and finally allow them to pay for the items right from their mobile. With the hype surrounding the launch of iBeacon in the Apple retail stores, proximity sensors, also called proximit...
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 in the lavish space in which traditional IT operates with nearly extravagant disk space, CPU and working memory. In contrast, the wireless sensor is a targeted device with limited memory, limited power, and limited processing capabilities, wh...
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. No one was talking. It is pretty obvious that wearable devices will very soon replace our “phones” which will become at most a router or local http server. Longer term they will no longer exist. While the exact format (and number) of wearable dev...
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 data might include. While some real requirements are touched on, such as the importance of cross department information integration and information currency, and the need for decision support tools, most of the conversation focused on 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 become the indispensable tool for anyone to determine their location outside of a building, in a car, on motorways, in the street… More recently, cell-phone manufacturers have added GPS capabilities to mobile devices which in turn, create...
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” are becoming more common in our workplaces. Almost daily, many of us are confronted with these new concepts and must make business-savvy decisions on whether to ignore or often painstakingly leverage these new technologies. In a global economy wher...
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 within a set of hard and fast constraints. To a generation who has grown up in the era of Moore’s Law, the availability of GB of memory and TB of data storage is taken for granted. Even a bottom-end cellphone may come with as much as 16 GB...
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 https://public.resource.org/8_principles.html ). These principles emphasize availability of data in real time, availability without license constraints, machine processable, fine-grained, and obtained close to the source. Many of these p...
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AdventHealth Weaverville Hospital
June Issue 2026
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