Last week I attended the GIS CAMA Technologies Conference in Savannah, hosted by URISA and IAAO. The event was a meeting-of-the-minds for tax assessors, property appraisers, and the GIS / technical staff for the industry writ-large to discuss the latest in tech and trends for the property assessment community.
Jason Wheatley is the Geospatial Technologies (GIS) Manager for Century Engineering, Inc. in Hunt Valley, Maryland. He has worked in both the public and private geospatial industries since 2004. He received a B.S. in Geography, as well as a M.S. in GIS and Public Administration from Salisbury University (Salisbury, MD). The Century Geospatial Technologies Group (GIS Group) provides technology consultant services to clients within federal, state, local governments, as well as the private sector throughout the Mid-Atlantic Region.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming increasingly common in mapping, offering affordable aerial imagery on demand. Once an expensive hobby for tinkerers, UAVs have quickly transformed into a disruptive force in the geospatial industry. The ability to deploy a cost-effective, agile sensor platform for real-time surveying has unlocked vast possibilities for data collection.
The holiday countdown has begun! We understand that finding gifts for map nerds can be quite tricky. So, the Fulcrum team has compiled a list of the top cartography gifts that your map geek is sure to love. Ranging from $45 to $2,000, we hope you can find something in our holiday gift guide for map geeks that is within your price range that will be treasured for years to come.
For field biologists, collecting data in the field is just another day at work. Traditionally, most field biologists carry around notepads or clipboards to take notes, document habitats, and make measurements. In addition, they need to carry cameras and GPS devices for taking photos and videos of flora and fauna in the wild, and plotting these locations.
The first in our series of customer spotlights, Blaine Hackett is the Director of Business Development, GIS for RESPEC. Blaine has been working with Geographic Information Systems since 1990. He received his B.S. in Geography from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse and Masters of Geographic Information Science from the University of Minnesota. He has worked in diversified GIS environments including state and local government, consulting engineering and planning, non-profit and Fortune 500 companies. Our team sat down with him and picked his brains on data collection methods, the GIS industry and the future of geospatial technology.
Geography 2050 is a symposium to gather the brightest thinkers that live and breathe geography, either as a core business or a peripheral part of their core expertise, and discuss the potential markets, changes, and potential for where we’ll be in the field of geography by the year 2050.
There’s been a boom in the last couple of years of big tech companies working to bring connectivity and geocoding solutions to the farthest reaches of the globe. Facebook is launching giant solar-powered drones with lasers, Google is floating balloons with antennae into the stratosphere, and smartphones are cheaper than ever.
Two weeks back I was in Washington, DC at the GEOINT Symposium, the major industry event for the geospatial intelligence market, put on by the excellent USGIF. Each year there’s a growing number of companies with a primarily commercial focus, showcasing their tech for government users, which shows that the focus of the government community is more and more shifting toward off-the-shelf and consumer tech each year.
Last week I attended an event with the US Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF) intended to showcase various cloud-based technologies for the GEOINT (geospatial intelligence) market, with speakers from HumanGeo, Agilex, DigitalGlobe, and more. The objective was to give quick lightning talks on cloud-based platforms enabling GEOINT capabilities, as part of the USGIF Innovation Task Force series.
Each year, more than twenty student researchers in the MSc Engineering Geology program at the Technical University of Munich take advantage of the Fulcrum for Education program to study and map landslides in the Austrian Alps. As GPS and GIS technology replaces paper maps and handwritten notes, these students are being trained to use modern field data collection tools and techniques in their landslide mapping courses.
I recently demonstrated to a Fulcrum customer how to georeference a floor plan of a mall for indoor use when conducting inspections of malls around the country. This same process can be used with Fulcrum for creating small offline maps. I’ve chosen not to use QGIS or ArcMap, but instead am using inexpensive or free software that anyone can learn to use in less than an hour.
Jason and I were in Portland, OR last week for the annual FOSS4G conference. FOSS4G (Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial) is the largest global gathering of developers, users, decision-makers and observers focused on open source geospatial software.
Patrick and I just returned from a week in Tunisia at the GCT 2014 Conference, where we met regional GIS organizations. We also connected with mapping companies from across Africa, discussing advancements in geospatial technology and industry applications. Throughout the event, we spoke with professionals specializing in aerial imagery, remote sensing, surveying, and field-based incident reporting. Many industries showed strong interest, including electric, gas, and water utilities, as well as rail and transportation. Law enforcement, tax assessment, and several other sectors were also heavily represented in discussions on geospatial solutions.
We just released an update to add several new tools for visualizing data in the Fulcrum web interface. Layers, which includes what was previously referred to as maps, will greatly enhance the data review experience through the Fulcrum web app. We also added a few tools to make finding locations in the web app easier and faster.
I was recently invited to give a guest lecture presentation on mobile data collection for a ‘GIS In the Sciences’ course at Rensellaer Polytechnic University in Troy, NY. This course introduces upperclassmen from various majors to the fundamentals of Geographic Information Systems. My presentation was 5 weeks into the course, so the students already had a pretty good grasp of the basics. They were familiar with using QGIS to display, edit, and analyze their geospatial data.
Before joining the Spatial Networks team, I spent the last six and a half years working as a GIS Analyst/Developer for a full service engineering firm on projects spanning the globe. One of the cool things about working in the Technology Solutions group for a multidisciplinary consulting engineering firm is that you get to be involved in a wide variety of projects across many different disciplines. Engineers are involved in everything, from transportation projects to environmental impact assessments, utility network design to water and wastewater system modeling. In my experience, this level of variety in a GIS job is rare.
One of the coolest features in Fulcrum is building offline map layers for mobile mapping. Access to a local map tile cache untethers you from the need for network connectivity to get reference map data when in the field. Using the map design software TileMill, along with some geo data or imagery, you can make your own custom map layers to load onto mobile devices for your Fulcrum field teams. In this post, I’ll walk through using some free and open resources to get your own satellite or aerial photo data, build some offline map tilesets, and load them onto your mobile devices for field use.
Connecting people to safe drinking water in Liberia with Fulcrum
Having recently used Fulcrum to map over 15,000 potential new customers of the water utility in Liberia’s capital Monrovia, the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Program is now using the collected data to help connect more people to safe drinking water, and is working on using Fulcrum to improve the customer database of the Liberia Water and Sewerage Corporation (LWSC).
Later this week we’ll be at the Esri Federal GIS Conference showcasing Fulcrum, along with some other Spatial Networks capabilities and data to a host of federal agency representatives, NGOs, GIS professionals, and others.
