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Blog: Chris Harlow on ITSearch The Harlow Report Archives
Technological advancements have vastly improved geospatial data, which covers maps or geographical elements like roads, rivers and land contours.
The inaugural UN World Geospatial Information Congress (UNWGIC) is to be held in China next month. It will take place in eastern China's Zhejiang Province, from November 19 to 21, under the theme "drawing a blueprint together for a better world."
The Congress, including a ministerial dialogue and four plenary sessions, aims to enhance communications among related parties and application of geospatial information management.
The sessions will discuss how to apply the geospatial data to the digital economy, sustainable development, smart societies, and growing international cooperation. China's Ministry of Natural Resources said it plans to take this opportunity to strengthen ties with natural resources administrations in other countries, especially those involved in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
Read full story at CGTN…
first published week of: 10/29/2018
During the September 2018 ArcGIS Solutions Release 26 new Solution configurations were added to ArcGIS, 26 Solution configurations were updated, and 5 Solution configurations changed lifecycle phase.
ArcGIS Solutions are industry specific app and capability configurations that are available to ArcGIS users at no additional cost.
A key theme of the September 2018 ArcGIS Solutions Release was harmonizing the configurations in ArcGIS Solutions for Local Government and the configurations in ArcGIS Solutions for State Government. That effort resulted in 19 configurations being added to ArcGIS Solutions for State Government.
Read full story at ArcGIS Solutions…
first published week of: 10/01/2018
"You cannot manage that what you cannot count, you cannot count that what you cannot locate," Dr Derek Clark, a South Africa government official once said on a forum. That's why we people should care about geospatial information.
Geospatial information is data referencing a place and space. By providing the fabric of the world, the data is able to support most decisions in policy making and development planning.
With the aim to make the geospatial more useful for a sustainable world, the first United Nation World Geospatial Information Congress (UNWGIC) kicked off on Monday in Deqing, eastern China's Zhejiang Province.
The week-long event is organized by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs under the support of the Chinese government to enhance communication, understanding, and application of geospatial information management, pooling talents to help address local, regional and global challenges.
During the opening speech, Chinese Vice Minister of Natural Resources Kurexi Maihesuti expressed "the Chinese government has prioritized the development of geospatial information and made great contributions to the global community over the years."
Read full story at CGTN…
first published week of: 12/03/2018
Ohio humorist Ian Frazier once said: "Romance lives in every page of Rand McNally."
( Getty Images)
Peter Dalbis has been alive for 76 years, and at least 50 of those were spent following directions in Rand McNally road atlases.
Dalbis didn’t stop using paper atlases when online competitors like MapQuest and Yahoo Maps came into vogue in the late ’90s, and he remains a stalwart Rand McNally supporter even in an era when almost everyone has a GPS device in their back pocket.
Dalbis and his wife, who are both retired and living in Oak Park, Ill., have crisscrossed the nation several times, for both family vacations and work trips, and they’ve done it all with the only atlas brand he trusts — even when that atlas has been wrong.
“Sometimes there were missing roads,” he admits. “Or a road on the map that didn’t technically exist. But we’d figure it out. You can’t be complacent with an atlas, not like those people who put all their trust in a GPS. We never drove a car into a swamp because our Rand McNally told us to, I’ll tell you that much.”
Those “missing” roads are just one of the reasons that Rand McNally, the largest commercial mapmaker in the US, has published a new North America road atlas every year since 1924. “Each new edition features thousands of changes that could reflect anything from road changes to a name change of a town or geographical feature update,” says Alexis Sadoti, a spokesperson for Rand McNally. The just-released 95th edition, which covers all 50 US states and Canadian provinces, is no exception.
Changes this year include updated information on Interstates 69, 95 and 11, an expanded view of the Jersey Shore and a new “detail map” of national parks like Grand Canyon and Yosemite.
Keeping the atlas as accurate as possible year to year, in a digital age when drivers expect their maps to give up-to-the-minute traffic updates, is no small task. “We have a fixed page and a fixed number of pages, so there’s not a lot of flexibility there,” says Tom Vitacco, who’s worked with the company for 33 years — first as a cartographer in the mid-’80s and today as the director of GIS (geographic information systems). “Every page has to fit states as big as Texas and as small as Delaware,” he tells me from Skokie, Ill., the world headquarters of Rand McNally.
Read full story at NY Post…
first published week of: 05/28/2018
How many times have you used Citymapper or Google Maps to guide you to a destination, only to get lost all over again?
Large venues, like shopping malls, universities and hospitals, can often require navigation that extends far beyond the front door.
Lisbon resident Joao Fernandes, 46, is tapping into it.
His B2B app, Buzzstreets, combines a number of data sources and in-house-developed tech to provide mapping and navigation services for indoor and outdoor environments.
For end users, it’s an indoor way finding app that can guide you through the most complex of spaces.
For businesses or public facilities, its location-based services can be used in all manner of ways, such as offering live flight information to travellers at airports or delivering the most relevant special offers when a customer approaches a shop.
Currently equity crowdfunding on Seedrs, where 80% of the £450,000 investment sought has been met, the CEO is confident he’s leading the charge in disruptive GPS-based offerings.
We met Joao at his London base of Level 39 in Canary Wharf to find out more.
Read full story at InYourArea…
first published week of: 05/28/2018
Artificial intelligence has made rapid progress, especially in areas such as computer vision, natural language processing, and machine translation. The intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and geographic information systems (GIS) is creating massive, new opportunities. AI, Machine Learning and Deep Learning are helping us make a better world.
Machine learning is a core component of spatial analysis in GIS. These tools and algorithms have been applied to geoprocessing tools to solve a variety of problems. Prediction algorithms such as geographically weighted regression allow you to use geography to calibrate the factors for predictions. These methods need experts to identify or feed in those factors (or features) that affect the outcome that we are trying to predict.
Read full story at Financial Express…
first published week of: 10/29/2018