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The City’s First Use of Handheld Mapping Apps in the Field Proves Effective, Even with a Loss of Communications
In the hours leading up to the landfall of Hurricane Irma on the Florida Keys on Sunday, Sept. 10, 2017, a few technologists in the City of Key West’s Emergency Operations Center (EOC) began to prepare mobile data collection tools on their smart phones to track the toll of the storm after it passed.
It had been more than 12 years since a storm struck the Florida Keys, although many in the EOC had a strong memory of the impactful events of the 2005 storm season. In that year, there were four federal disaster declarations for the area, with Hurricane Wilma doing the bulk of the damage.
“Wilma was a Category 3 hurricane, but it was really a flood,” Scott Fraser, the floodplain administrator for the City of Key West, said. “Seventy percent of the island had flooding, and 80 percent of the vehicles on the island were ruined.” All waited and wondered what Irma would bring. With a forecast of a five-foot storm surge, and winds of 130-miles-per-hour, Wilma-scale damages were expected.
More than 5,000 of the city’s 25,000 full-time residents refused the evacuation order or waited too long to leave. Everyone worried about these people. Fraser kept busy by configuring a map-based data collection application on his phone, downloading map data, and testing the collection of what and where details in order to be ready to assess the damage everyone anticipated from Hurricane Irma.
Read full story at Esri Blog…
first published week of: 02/12/2018
Lewis County Assesor John Breen shows the type of ujpdated mapping that will soon be available.
( Darlene J Swiger)
New aerial mapping of Lewis County will assist several county offices, as well as those considering moving to or starting a business in the county. Once completed, the public will be able to access the information and maps.
The Lewis County Commission approved the recommendation of the $20,000 Mountain Air Service LLC bid this week to provide the geographic information system service. The company is a sister business of Landmark Forestry.
Horner will fly over the entire county in a plane and take 6-inch resolution photographs that will show buildings, landmarks, access roads and properties, Lewis County Assessor John Breen said.
Brian Mills, director of operations for Mountain Air Service, explained the county is looking for updated aerial mapping, which is a vertical map product or a photo looking straight down.
The Mountain Air Service fleet is located at the Morgantown Airport. The company owns four airplanes and a helicopter and manages two other aircraft. Its primary business is passenger charter.
Read full story at The Exponent Telegram…
first published week of: 03/05/2018
http://www.military-technologies.net
LiDAR drone has become an important tool for both the scientific and industry based investigation of forest structure. LiDAR is also known as light detection and ranging information used in surveying and graphing geographical information. The technology is integrated into the drone is used for application such as mapping, geography, geology, forestry, entertainment, seismology, precise farming, construction and archaeology. The unmatched results and usefulness in the field of geographical information system that is applied in many industry verticals is benefitting the adoption of these system. Drone are the most useful in the field of geographic information system (GIS). Drone is a technology which helps to enhance GIS technology as it is easy to deploy.
One of the major driving factor fueling the growth of LiDAR drone is increasing automation through LiDAR drone and reduction of human efforts.
Sample is available at theinsightpartners.com
Read full story at MilTech…
first published week of: 01/08/2018
While connected and autonomous vehicles seemed to be the rage at this year’s CES, a growing number of location companies exhibited new products.
Not all of the technology, much of it exhibited in IoT sections at the Westgate and Sands Convention Center, centered on GPS and other Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). A number of companies are integrating GNSS, but relying solely on such terrestrial-based technology as low-power, wide-area network protocols (LoRaWAN).
One company, TrackNet, is leveraging these wide-area networks for smart home products, and from this technology, spinning off location-based applications. The company recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to promote its technology and new products.
“[LoRaWAN] enables many more applications out of the home. The challenges with [current] smart home technology are the coverage challenges in a garage, basement, barn, boathouse and front gate. This technology overcomes these challenges and add more use cases like locating kids, pets and elderly people,” said Hardy Schmidbauer, TrackNet CEO and co-founder. TrackNet, which exhibited at the Pepcom media event during CES, launched its Tabs smart home monitoring product that monitors children’s activities and pinpoints their location through a smartphone app. The company said Tabs includes several sensors: motion sensor, door and window sensor and healthy home sensor that monitors carbon dioxide levels.
Tabs, which works with IFTTT, Amazon Alexa and Google Home, includes Wi-Fi parental controls. The company demonstrated the system at CES with Senet, an IoT provider of cloud-based software.
“You can set up a geofence and adjust the size of it. The system will push alerts as devices go in and out of that zone,” Schmidbauer said.
Read full story at GPS Business News…
first published week of: 01/22/2018
Location services provider Mapbox is giving developers a means for building location-based AR apps and multi-user experiences with its new Mapbox AR toolkit.
Mapbox AR provides developers with 125 million locations, business information from Foursquare and Factual, and live location data aggregated from 300 million users. Via the Maps SDK for Unity, the platform also enables multi-user AR experiences where users can interact in real time.
In addition, the platform includes 3D digital elevation models, satellite imagery for low bandwidth, and high resolution land cover from NASA satellites. With 32-bit vertex mesh support, game makers will also be able to use to the tool to allow users to view cities with thousands of buildings.
The company's location platform has already made its way into several mobile AR apps, including FitnessAR and Hotstepper.
Read full story at Next Reality…
first published week of: 03/05/2018
An example of the type of data capture displayed on the public map viewer
Our city-maintained trees are among Santa Fe’s most precious resources. The Santa Fe Public Spaces Tree Inventory Project, currently in its third year, gathers pertinent information about the types and conditions of our trees. The project has evolved from hand-written data collection to include digital location capture through the use of a mobile-phone GPS app.
By viewing natural-resource data on a map, we can observe both spatial distributions of these resources and temporal changes that may be occurring. Seeing all this allows us to consider various factors at play in the maintenance of the trees in what is an increasingly challenging environment for them.
The project organizes dates when volunteers and arborists meet at a designated park in order to gather tree-identification data, such as genus and species, common name, the diameter at breast height, and crown condition. With the addition of tree location data, we open up a new world of possibility for better resource management of our city trees.
Read full story at Santa Fe New Mexican…
first published week of: 02/05/2018