From the category archives:
The U.S. Geological Survey has just made the map data for their assessment of geothermal energy potential in the Western United States available via interactive maps. The map depicts the favorability of geothermal potential as well as their location, and there are GIS data downloads as well as the means to view the data on [...]
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The Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB) has developed the Geo-Referenced Area Management (GRAM++) as a low-cost alternative to commercial GIS packages. The software was originally funded in 1997 by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and has recently been promoted for projects by NGOs and other [...]
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In a ceremony yesterday, President Obama signed the Ominibus Public Land Management Act, which includes significant spending on mapping. In Obama’s words, the bill accomplishes many things: “It designates more than 2 million acres across nine states as wilderness; almost as much as was designated over the past eight years combined. It creates thousands of [...]
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I spoke to the founders of Safe Software, Don Murray and Dale Lutz, last week about FME 2009, the latest release of their data interoperability toolset. I’ve known these two for a long time, having enlisted their expertise for the Canadian GIS Conference as far back as 2001. I’ve always enjoyed their enthusiasm for their [...]
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Forty years ago today, well-timed images of earth from the Apollo 8 crew served to provide much-needed perspective in a year that was dominated by global unrest. An editorial in today’s New York Times serves as a reminder of that time of optimism and wonder. “To see the earth as it truly is,” wrote Archibald [...]
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The UN Environment Program (UNEP) launched a new Carbon and Biodiversity atlas during the COP-14 climate conference in Poznan, Poland. The atlas was put together to demonstrate the use of spatial analysis to find areas that were both high in biodiversity and carbon. Most of these areas are in the developing world, which ties into [...]
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There’s been a great deal of reporting today about Google.org’s new Google Flu Trends site. Google’s non-profit arm has teamed with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to post a state-by-state analysis of flu-related word searches. Keyword searches used as a sensing mechanism of geographic trends is an exciting development that has some [...]
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This column is sponsored by ESRI The increasing innovation of online mapping continues to amaze and surprise me, particularly this week after viewing many interactive maps dealing with the U.S. elections. Clever interfaces for map-based views push the interest in mapping, and expand the prospects for the entire geospatial industry. The elections also provide a [...]
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Given the spread of rural homesteads and the amount of resources, Australian firefighters would have a tough time responding to all the wildfires during the fire season, and research showed that panicked last-minute evacuations caused the most deaths, so the new policy became ‘stay or go.’ This policy urges those that aren’t willing to battle [...]
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There’s a growing interest in highly accurate mapping, and a corresponding need for training about geodetic principles. I spoke recently to Patrick Cunningham, president of Blue Marble Geographics about these developments, and the expanding market for their tools and solutions for data quality management. Blue Marble recently combined their Geographic Calculator and Geographic Transformer into [...]
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