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...
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 multiple layouts and blueprints, today’s 3-D software ensures urban planners’ visions are construction-ready and complete with highly detailed data. The issue then becomes one of collaboration. With the exception of SketchUp, urban plannin...
Location-enabled Smart Planning and Community Development
The economic downturn impacted many nations around the world including the US. In particular, decreasing home values left many Americans underwater on their mortgages and many companies and organizations struggling to survive. Companies downsized or went out of business altogether, leaving many out of work. The impact was far-reaching and is still being felt across most of the nation and many other regions, such as the EU, which suffered even far more devastating consequences. As our country...
OGC Sensor Web Standards and the “Smart City”
Sensors are everywhere. There are now thousands of sensors for every human on Earth. And there will be even more thousands in the future. At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, applications that use sensors to monitor your home environment, track your luggage, the location of your pets, your weight and, in the case of a new "smart fork," even how fast you eat are being demonstrated. Notice that the majority of these sensor based applications have a location element. The concept of the smar...
Sensor Sensibility: Applications to Analytics, Modeling and Simulation
Deploying sensors in the environment provides opportunities that previously were impossible, or at least cost prohibitive. Twenty years ago, monitoring a wide field meant a deployed field crew visiting areas of interest frequently, or perhaps aerial surveys building an image product on a regular basis. Yet neither of these resource and cost intensive activities could provide the kind of granular insight that is becoming available today. At best, these were coarse approximations. While they allow...
The "Social Network" of Machines
The past decade has clearly been the era of social networks, with revolutionary impact on nearly everything, from social behaviour to mapping and response to emergency events. Associated with the rise of Facebook, Twitter and the other dominant social network sites, we have seen an increased emphasis on “unstructured” data such as imagery, videos and schema-less data stores. This was possible because the intent of these sites and their infrastructure is the direct interaction between humans. Fre...
The "Social Network" of Machines
The past decade has clearly been the era of social networks, with revolutionary impact on nearly everything, from social behaviour to mapping and response to emergency events. Associated with the rise of Facebook, Twitter and the other dominant social network sites, we have seen an increased emphasis on “unstructured” data such as imagery, videos and schema-less data stores. This was possible because the intent of these sites and their infrastructure is the direct interaction between humans. Fre...
Examining the Concept of Informed Infrastructure
While later columns will most often look at the details, I thought this first column should be devoted to the variety of concepts that might be attributed to Informed Infrastructure. Clearly it goes beyond the site’s byline of “Extending design to include impacts,” although this has a wonderfully vague quality that could support a variety of notions. To start with, informed infrastructure can be informed about its contents, be that people in a room, cars on a highway, water in a water main, o...
Game On – Why Your Tween is Poised to be the Next Geospatial Super User
Much has been written about converging threads in the geospatial arena over the past several years (6 articles in Safe’s blog alone!), whether it’s BIM and GIS, 3D and 2D, 2.5D and 2D, or even geospatial and music videos! But over the past couple of months I’ve noticed a significant set of developments emanating from the gaming industry that are sure to have ramifications for the unsuspecting, staid geospatial industry. I was first alerted to this trend by my friends over at the Very Spatial...
Sensor Sensibility: Deployment Strategies and Design Tradeoffs
Before we delve too far into the various applications of wireless sensor networks, it may be of some use to review the characteristics of such a system. While wireless sensor networks allow us to deploy and gather information in a variety of places that are impractical to reach - whether due to cost or inhospitableness - they also have a number of constraints that need to be understood. These constraints inform the design, configuration and deployment - and the data collected and resulting appli...
Video: Crashes Drop Measurably After Rural Road Safety Improvement Project on US 521 in Lancaster County
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June Issue 2026
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