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U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation Honors Jack Dangermond
Esri President Receives Arthur C. Lundahl Lifetime Achievement Award at 2010 GEOINT Symposium

geoint2010.com

Esri president Jack Dangermond received the Arthur C. Lundahl Lifetime Achievement Award from the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF) last week in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Dangermond accepted the award at the 2010 GEOINT Symposium, the nation’s premier geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) event. The nonprofit USGIF hosts the symposium as part of its mission to promote the geospatial intelligence tradecraft. The award recognizes an individual’s outstanding contributions and longstanding commitment to the geospatial intelligence community.

K. Stuart Shea, USGIF’s chairman and chief executive officer, lauded Dangermond for being a trailblazer and tireless advocate in the fields of geography, geospatial science, and geographic information system (GIS) technology.

“It was his time at Harvard University that set him on a path to where he is today,” said Shea, briefly tracing the history of how Esri’s early work on mapping projects culminated in the company’s 1982 release of ARC/INFO, the first commercial GIS software. “My former company implemented one of the first digital mapping solutions inside the CIA using his nascent piece of commercial software,” Shea added.

Dangermond, who joined USGIF’s board in 2004, thanked Shea but credited a group of visionaries who started using computers for geographic research and developing computer mapping 50 years ago. Much of the pioneering and inventive work in computational geography, he said, was pursued by “curiosity-driven researchers” such as architect Howard Fisher, founder of the Harvard lab, and geographers Waldo Tobler, David Simonett, and Duane Marble.

“It was the birthing of quantitative geography,” Dangermond said. “It moved us from observation, description, and storytelling in the geographic sciences to exploring geography using the concepts of relationships and patterns. You have taken this same set of computational geography tools and begun to apply them in important missions of intelligence gathering and analytics. You are creating new kinds of tradecraft that are saving people’s lives and giving us the strategic advantage as a country.”

Dangermond said that the role of computational geography is growing in the GEOINT community. “At this moment, computational geography and GIS are beginning to play very heavily into our intelligence picture,” he noted.

first published week of:   11/08/2010

United Nations University and ESRI to Collaborate on GIS Research and Training

www.esri.com/university

ESRI and United Nations University (UNU) recently approved a memorandum of understanding (MOU) at the university’s headquarters in Tokyo, Japan. They will collaborate on research, create Centers of Excellence, promote the exchange of graduate students, and provide geographic information system (GIS) training opportunities within and by UNU.

“This agreement will promote enhanced spatial information use in UNU’s research and education initiatives,” said UNU rector and under-secretary-general of the United Nations professor Konrad Osterwalder. “It will also support the increased presence of young researchers at UNU campuses and complement existing and planned research and education programs.”

Adds Michael Gould, ESRI director of education solutions, “The MOU will help connect promising graduate students to real-world problems, such as climate change, water resource management, food security, natural hazards, and sustainable development, and critical issues being researched at UNU institutes using GIS. ESRI is pleased to be able to support their efforts.”

UNU has used ArcGIS software since 2006. Projects include the Wildlife Enforcement Monitoring System, which documents and analyzes transboundary wildlife trade for monitoring purposes and compliance with the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. The university has also used GIS to assess flood risk and analyze climate and land-use change impacts on water resources in the Asia Pacific region.

first published week of:   02/22/2010

Utility Improves Outage Response with Mobile GIS

www.esri.com/electric

Northeastern Rural Electric Membership Corporation (REMC) is able to better serve the energy needs of its growing customer base by using mobile geographic information system (GIS) technology from Esri. The consumer-owned utility supplies electric power to more than 26,000 households and businesses in northeastern Indiana.

Northeastern REMC utility linemen once navigated the service territories by memory, armed with a handful of paper maps. Now field crews use laptops equipped with ArcGIS software from Esri to instantly update information related to work orders, regular maintenance, and customers. The GIS data is accessible throughout the company, with approximately 43 users on different devices in several departments.

Steven Weber, Northeastern REMC GIS technician, said, “Using GIS technology, we can deliver the right information to the right hands at the right time. Field crews can view, search, and revise GIS data and use GPS for facility locating and routing. This improves the flow of accurate information from the field to the office to the customers.”

Bill Meehan, Esri director of utility solutions, said, “Utilities have struggled for years to move information into and out of the field. It is wonderful to see how Northeastern REMC addressed this problem by empowering field-workers with mobile GIS.”

first published week of:   08/16/2010

Waterford Township Saves Over $130,000 Annually With Cityworks

www.cityworks.com

Waterford Township, Michigan, has experienced numerous positive results including measurable, documented financial savings utilizing Cityworks, the leading GIS-centric management solution.  Considering that in 1996 the only computer application Waterford used was their billing system, Waterford is extremely pleased with their investment in GIS, Cityworks, and other GIS-centric applications and continues expanding these applications throughout their organization.

Utilizing Cityworks since 1998, Waterford has years of positive experience with the program and uses it to manage just about everything for the Township, indoors and out.  Taking advantage of the flexible nature of Cityworks, the City has deployed Cityworks in multiple departments and integrated the program into all their major applications.  The GIS-centric nature of Cityworks provides Waterford an asset management system that truly leverages their GIS, saving them time and money.   

In 2009, Waterford documented annual cost savings of $12,416 from decreased processing time per location request in the Utility Locating Division.  Before utilizing Cityworks, the average time to process a request was about ten minutes to search for the location, determine if staking was needed, and print a map and other information needed to follow up on the request.  With Waterford’s implementation of Cityworks and its seamless integration with Dig-Smart, another NAGCS -certified application, the time it takes to process a request has been reduced to an average of two minutes.  This 80% time reduction means that staff can now process five requests in the time it took to process one.  The ticket processing ability of Dig-Smart coupled with the work order generation in Cityworks forms a transparent operation of the two programs for staff and citizens.   

Staff reductions save Waterford Township another $65,000 annually.  Similar savings of $52,000 have been realized in the operations of cemeteries in the Facilities & Operations Division of the Public Works Department as well as $2200 in managing the plants in their Water and Sewer Divisions.  Waterford’s Community Planning, Development, and Police Departments also benefit from their use of Cityworks.

first published week of:   12/13/2010

WhiteStar Introduces Streaming Imagery for Oil & Gas Exploration

www.whitestar.com

WhiteStar Corp., a supplier of cartographic data products and services to the energy industry, today introduced the WhiteStar Streaming Imagery product. Available by subscription, WhiteStar Streaming Imagery enables customers to view and stream high-resolution imagery directly into their digital mapping projects.

 “WhiteStar Streaming Imagery is delivered online in the standard web mapping service [WMS] format,” said WhiteStar President Robert White. “This means oil & gas companies using ArcMap, PETRA or GeoGraphix for their mapping projects can access the imagery without leaving the software environment.”

Undefined ShortcutWhiteStar introduced the Streaming Imagery product to facilitate the use of high-resolution aerial photography and satellite imagery in hydrocarbon exploration and production projects. The WMS-compatible streaming format eliminates the time-consuming process of importing, balancing and mosaicking large image files. The data can be accessed in any WMS-compatible mapping software including ESRI ArcMap and ArcView, Halliburton GeoGraphix and IHS PETRA,

first published week of:   01/18/2010

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