Does the term GIS mean anything at all?
I have recently been reading a series of national and state GIS articles and user needs documents, all of which talk about the need for a National GIS or a State GIS, and the importance of GIS data, without ever stating in any way what a GIS is, or what GIS data might include. While some real requirements are touched on, such as the importance of cross department information integration and information currency, and the need for decision support tools, most of the conversation focused on GIS,...
Indoor Location: The Mobile Revolution Starts Now
The future of mobile location-based services lies in its rapid adoption of indoor technologies. For more than 20 years, the use of global positioning system, or GPS, has been the gold standard for outdoor navigation. The satellite-based navigation system has become the indispensable tool for anyone to determine their location outside of a building, in a car, on motorways, in the street… More recently, cell-phone manufacturers have added GPS capabilities to mobile devices which in turn, create...
Hitting the Point: A Simple Guideline for Contracting 3D Mapping Professionals
Recently, a few technologically specific themes have surfaced in the contemporary business world that all of us can relate to. Whether you are a surveyor, engineer, analyst, or somewhere in gray the topics of “the cloud”, “big data”, and “data mining” are becoming more common in our workplaces. Almost daily, many of us are confronted with these new concepts and must make business-savvy decisions on whether to ignore or often painstakingly leverage these new technologies. In a global economy wher...
Sensor Sensibility: Communications Design Considerations for Energy Efficiency
One of the key design constraints in the deployment of a sensor network is the optimization of power consumption and energy efficiency. A problem familiar to those working with embedded devices is the need to eke out every possible capability while working within a set of hard and fast constraints. To a generation who has grown up in the era of Moore’s Law, the availability of GB of memory and TB of data storage is taken for granted. Even a bottom-end cellphone may come with as much as 16 GB...
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...
Stormwater Interview with Robert Page, P.E., Vice President, HNTB
Santa Barbara County North Branch Jail Expansion
February Issue 2026
