Between the Poles

FOSS4G 2012 Beijing cancelled

The OSGEO Board of Directors has announced that the global FOSS4G 2012 conference scheduled to be held in September in Beijing has been cancelled.  It's unfortunate, but FOSS4G has being growing successfully, rapidly and internationally including Capetown and Sydney, from its original base in the U.S. and Canada and things like this are bound to happen once in a while.  Last year's FOSS4G 2011 event in Denver was the largest yet, with 900 people from 42 countries.  Next year's FOSS4G 2013 in Nottingham is already very advanced.  In addition there are a growing number of regional events including one for North America in Washington DC, one for Central and Eastern Europe in Prague and there will be a FOSS4G Japan in November. Many regional geospatial conferences now also include a OSGeo/FOSS4G stream.

Autodesk University 2012: Call for proposals

The Call for Proposals for Autodesk University 2012 in Las Vegas closes on May 22nd.

Note: The 5/22 deadline is for submissions for AU in Las Vegas.  Submissions for AU Virtual 2012 will open in late June.

Canadian Minister of Natural Resources says geomatics is essential to economic development

At the Global Geospatial Conference 2012 in Québec City, the Minister of Natural Resources of Canada, said that geomatics is strategic for economic development in Canada.  Geomatics annually contributes $2.8 billion to the Canadian economy, $540 million in export revenue, and employs 23 000 workers.

He said that historically mapping and geomatics have been criitical to Canada's economic development, from the early surveyors who defined national boundaries, the Canadian cadastre, and railway right of ways, through the world's first geographic information system, the Canadian Land Inventory, developed in 1963, to the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure (CGDI), which made Canada’s geospatial data and information available based on industry standards on the Web.  The Minister mentioned Canada's open data initiative, the Canadian data portal, which sees over 11 million downloads per year, 90% of which is geospatial.

Specifically in the area of natural resources, he said that geomatics is an essential tool for evaluating projects from an environmental, social impact, and economic growth perspective.  The mining, oil and gas, and forestry sectors employ three quarters of a million people in Canada, and to ensure the continued development of these sectors the government has a pipeline of natural resource development projects wirth $500 billion over the next ten years. As an example, the Government of Canada is contributing to improved mapping of northern Quebec in support of Québec's $80 billion northern development initiative Plan Nord.  The Minister siad that Canada intends to support responsible natural resource development for the benefit of the public including aboriginal peoples, but also protecting the environment.  He said that the govenment has already announced its intention to streamline the review and approval process for major natural resource and infrastructure development projects.

The Minister Oliver announced the newest series of contribution agreements through GeoConnections, investments totalling $1.6 million over three years. This is the latest funding announement that are part of the $30 million five year Geoconnections program announced in 2010.

The Global Geospatial Conference is actually a combined event involving four geospatial organizations, the GSDI World Conference (GSDI 13), the 14th GEOIDE Annual Scientific Conference, the 7th 3DGeoInfo Conference, and the Canadian Geomatics Conference 2012, and draws more than 700 geospatial professionals from around the world.

Autodesk University 2011 for utilities

Autodesk University takes place November 29 to Dec 1 in The Venetian in Las Vegas.   This year there are over 650 classes organized in 21 tracks and 10 PowerTracks on topics such as innovation strategies, web, cloud, and mobile technologies, workflows and process, visualization, sustainability, change management, design leadership, and technologies for utilities.

Utility-related Classes

There are a lot of utility-related presentations and labs at AU this year.

• Working with SAP® or Maximo® Using AutoCAD® Map 3D and Autodesk® Utility Design Stephen Brockwell
• From Zero to GIS in 60 Minutes: Data, AutoCAD® Map 3D, AIMS, GO! Mark Perrott
• Breaking the Barrier Between Utility Industry Models and GIS with AutoCAD® Map 3D 2012 Bryan Tanner
• Mid-Size Utility Enterprise Roadmap Patrick Reid
• Case Study: How the Design Through Asset Management Workflow Was Streamlined at Anchorage ML&P Ray Pearce
• How to Manage Pipelines and Reduce Risk Using Autodesk® Topobase™ Stephane Viviand
• Effective Change Management: Technology-Centric Culture Change at Southern California Edison Debra Brooks
• Publishing Infrastructure Data to Map Books Andy Morsell
• Bridging the Gap between Design and Mapping: Making History at PG&E Steve Parker
• Rain in the Plain: An Introduction to Autodesk® Storm and Sanitary Analysis Matthew Anderson, PE
• Application of Standards for a Substation Design Solution Arnold Fry
• Get Your Style On Brian Hailey
• High-Quality, Express-Speed Asset Data Collection for Hungarian State Railways peter barcza
• Swissgrid: A GIS Customer Implementation Reference Frank Markus
• AutoCAD® Map 3D and Autodesk MapGuide®: Implementation and Amazing Uses Deeter Smith
• Flinders Ports: A GIS Customer Success Story Using Autodesk MapGuide® Enterprise and AutoCAD® Map 3D Michael Collins
• Evolution from Rules-Based to Model-Based Design for Utilities Walt Smith
• Stylized DWG™ to Autodesk MapGuide®: Spatial Databases Using ObjectARX® and FDO Clayton Hotson
• Maintaining Consistent Inaccuracy: Using AutoCAD® Map 3D® to Improve Utility Asset Data Jason Emery
• Global Utility Trends and Impacts on Planning and Design Alan Saunders and Geoff Zeiss
• Asset Management in a Water Utility and Our Vision for 2020 Graeme Anthonsen
• Autodesk® Utility Design and Your GIS    Prashant Srivastav
• Integrate Analysis as Part of Utility Design Jeff Saunders
• High-End Infrastructure Modeling with Low-Cost Tools: Introducing AutoCAD® Map 3D Enterprise 2012 Bradford Heasley
• City of Palo Alto: A Case Study on Implementing Autodesk® Topobase™ Drew Burgasser
• Designing with Materials in Mind Jeff Saunders
• Alignment Deep Dive Scott McEachron
• Condition-Based Assessment: Blowing Up Is Bad Stephen Brockwell
• Using Autodesk® Topobase™ to Better Manage a Water Distribution System Daniele Verde
• Autodesk® Utility Design Rules Engine Power Carsten Hess
• Configure Your Own Standards with Autodesk® Utility Design Carsten Hess
• Flying High: Multi-Utility and Infrastructure Project Implementation at Heathrow Airport, London Shashi Verma
• Autodesk® Utility Design Process Workflow and Enterprise Resource Planning Optimization at Southern California Edison Debra Brooks

There are also several utility-related talks in the virtual version of Autodesk University

• Evolution of Utility Workflow Serguei Sokolov Virtual
• AutoCAD® Civil 3D® para Infraestrutura Marcus Cardoso Virtual
• Autodesk® MapGuide® Assists Australia's National Telecommunication Carrier after Natural Disasters Steven de Rosayro Virtual
• Revitalizing a Mapping Solution with AutoCAD® Map 3D Enterprise Mohan Inguva Virtual
• Making Autodesk® Inventor® Work for Substation Design Terri Humel Virtual
• Bring the Field into the Office: Using High-Resolution Oblique Imagery with AutoCAD® Map 3D David Petterson    Virtual
• Conflation or Deflation: Tips for Conflating Your Data to Another Landbase Chris Nailer Virtual
• Generación de cartografía con Autodesk® Cristian Barria Virtual

And there is a power track for utility design.  Just so you are aware of the level of these presentators.  Walt Smith is the father of AutoCAD Utility Design (AUD), Carsten Hess is the architect of AUD including the rules engine (in my opinion the most important advance in AutoCAD for utilities since FDO), and Jeff Saunders is the product manager for AUD.

• Evolution from Rules-Based to Model-Based Design for Utilities Walt Smith
• Autodesk® Utility Design and Your GIS Prashant Srivastav
• Integrate Analysis as Part of Utility Design Jeff Saunders
• Designing with Materials in Mind Jeff Saunders
• Autodesk® Utility Design Rules Engine Power Carsten Hess - Hands-On Lab
• Configure Your Own Standards with Autodesk® Utility Design Carsten Hess

Utility Symposium

Also on November 28, the Monday before AU, the Autodesk Utility Symposium will take place.  Last year there were over a hundred participants from electric and water utilities and telecom.  You can register here.

ACE11 Issues facing the water industry in North America

The American Water Works Association (AWWA) held its annual Annual Conference & Exposition (ACE11) last week in Washington, D.C.  It was an amazing experience.  There were over 500 exhibitors and on-site attendance was expected to be over 11,000 this year and a number of the talks and presentations were available virtually.  This is a North American event with Mexicans and Canadians in attendance in addition to US participants.

Trends in the Water Industry

To me the key sessions were a series on the important trends facing the water industry.  One of the most important sources of information about trends in the North American Water Industry is the annual AWWA State of the Industry (SOTI) report.  This year's report will be coming out in the fall, but preliminary results from the annual survey of water professionals were presented last week.

The most important issue over the next year or two identified by the survey by a wide margin is business factors.

• business factors (over 50%)
• regulatory (~27%)
• source water (~16%)

Respondents were also asked to look ahead and identify what they saw as the important issues in the next three to five years.  Again about 50% identified business factors as the most important issue.

Business factor #1

The water industry is unique in the utility sector for a number of reasons.  But the most important is that safe drinking water is critical for public health. 

Secondly the water distribution network is perceived to be our most important infrastructure network.  I know people who after the last ice storm in Ontario didn't have electric power for a week, some for a month, but it is inconceivable for most of us to go without water for more than a few hours at most.

Thirdly, for most North Americans access to clean water is considered to be a basic right.  Americans accept cutting electric power and telephone for non-payment of bills, but cutting water is equivalent to eviction.  As a result 90% of US water utilities are government owned and the concept of wholesale privatization of the water industry is not popular.  The result is that a significant proportion of North American water is not metered, Chicago is an example, and where it is metered people strongly object to paying for water what they are paying for their cell phone or cable TV.  Speaker after speaker reiterated the importance of communications, of making the public aware of how much is involved in providing safe drinking water, as the fundamental problem facing the industry, because until this is solved it will be difficult to find funding to address the challenges facing the industry.  Several speakers said federal and state funds can not be expected to address the funding shortfall.  In fact there is a serious risk that funding from the federal government could decrease in the future.

Other business factors

Increasing costs

Water infrastructure is capital intensive.  In the drinking water industry you need to invest $7 to get a dollar in revenue.  Wastewater is even worse, $8 of investment to get a dollar.  By comparison in the electric power industry between $1.60 and a $1.70 will get a dollar in revenue.  And capital costs in the water industry are going up at twice the rate of inflation.

Aging infrastructure

Secondly It is estimated that 30% of US water infrastructure is old, meaning beyond its rated lifetime.  Maintaining old infrastructure is expensive.  There are about 700 water main breaks per day in the US costing about $2.6 billion annually to repair.  42 billion gallons of drinking water are produced and delivered every day in the US, of which 7 billion gallons, or 18% is lost through leakage.  In addition US water systems consume 56 billion kWh of electric power annually, primarily for pumping, and the annual electric power bill of the water industry is $4 billion.  Over 10% of this, 5-10 billion kWh is spent to produce water that is not paid for.

Rate structures

Thirdly, per capita consumption is declining in much of North America, which means that a simple volumetric rate structure is not going to lead to increased revenue for water utilities.  A number of alternative rate structures are being tried.  As an example, an increasing block rate, which means that the rate per liter or per gallon increases with the more water you use, is used by an increasing number of municipal water systems, because it encourages conservation and provides a mechanism for increasing revenue to the water utility.  I've blogged about what Atlanta and Houston have been doing to increase water revenue.

Aging workforce

Another serious challenge is the aging workforce.  Of the water workforce in the US 37% of water utility workers and 31% of wastewater utility workers will be eligible to retire by 2018.  It is projected that employment in the water supply and sanitation sector needs to  grow at a rate of 45% in coming years, but the pool of available, technically skilled workers is shrinking.  Several talks at the conference addressed the issue of knowledge capture and transfer. 

Technology and innovation

The aging workforce, increasing costs and funding challenges are driving an increased focus on efficiency in the water industry, which in turn is driving water utilities to increasingly turn to technology.  A related theme that I heard in a number of sessions is the need for the water industry to increase the pace of innovation - this from an industry that has not traditionally placed a lot of emphasis on innovation.

Increasing regulation

 Regulation of the water industry in the US is primarily a local and a federal (EPA) responsibility. In only four states does the state regulate the water industry.  There were a number of presentation on the issue of increased regulation, including from senior members of the EPA. 

I have blogged about the EPA study currently underway to assess the impact of the shale gas industry, especially fracking, on water quality in the US.

The next major area of increased regulation is volatile organic compounds (VOC), which includes solvents.  An area of major concern to the EPA and as a result to the water industry is pharmaceuticals in the water supply, in particular what are referred to as endocrine-altering compounds.

Combined sewer overflows (CSOs) continue to get a lot of attention in the industry not only because of the magnitude of the consent decrees that the EPA has imposed on a number of municipalities, but also because of increasing public awareness of a problem about which Teddy Roosevelt was quoted as saying, "Civilized people should be able to dispose of sewage in an better way than by putting it in the drinking water."

Sustainability

If there was one topic that seemed to recur more than any other, with the exception of funding, it was sustainability.  A common thread was the discussion on how water utilities can best adapt to climate change.  The AWWA has a Climate Change and Sustainability Technical Advisory Workgroup (TAW) that is investigating developing a sustainability rating tool, dubbed WITAF 660, to measure sustainability in the drinking water industry.

Sixth National GIS Symposium in Saudi Arabia: Remote sensing, LiDAR, and 3D for planning and analysis

The Sixth National GIS Symposium was held in Al Khobar in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia last week.  The conference was very well organized, and attracted a large number of attendees, including a significant number of international visitors.  I found it to be one of the most interesting conferences I have been to recently, because of some exceptionally interesting presentations, but partly because of the location and the especially the field trip that was arranged by Saudi Aramco to Shaybah in the heart of the Ar-Rub al-Khali desert (Empty Quarter) in southeastern Arabia.

Orhan Altan, president of the ISPRS, gave a very topical opening keynote in which he suggested that the 21st century can be either the best century ever when we overcome some major challeges or our last century.  He made the case that traditional GIS is changing, and that in the future we will need enterprise locational intelligence to address major societal needs.  Improved access to the increasingly abundant geospatial information including satellite and aerial photogrammetry and laser scanning and tools to enable science to be transformed into practice are what he foresees as the major trends driving geospatial technology.  Gov. Jim Geringer in his keynote made the case that our challenge now is to develop ways to transform the huge amount of available data into actionable information.  In my keynote I made the case that the convergence of intelligent engineering models, high resolution imagery including laser scanning, and 3D visualization technology originally developed by the gaming industry are making it possible for technical solutions to societal challenges that were inconceivable even a few years ago.  Abdul Karim Raeisi, GIS Executive Manager of Abu Dhabi, describes the Abu Dhabi Spatial Data Infrastructure program which has been able to develop a community of 45 participants from the federal and local governments, academia, and business, all motivated to use geospatial data to support egovernment services to the public.

Most of the technical and plenary sessions dealt with the application of remote sensing, LiDAR, GIS and 3D visualization to planning and analysis.  Here's just a few that I found particularly interesting.

Jeddah Flood Analysis

Most people probably don't think that excess water would be a problem in Saudi Arabia, but in November 2009 in four hours more than 9 centimeters of rain, which is almost twice the average for an entire year. fell in the area around Jeddah.  This resulted in serious flooding in the city of Jeddah with over one hundred fatalities.  Dr Mashael Al Saud of the Space Research Institute of the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology described the fascinating analyses that she has conducted on the catchment basins surrounding Jeddah to understand how water was funnelled into downtown Jeddah.

Tracking location inside buildings

With GNSS technology it is possible to track the location of people, vehicles, and even animals wth high precision - even cm accuracy with an earth station.  But as soon as the subject enters a building, this is no longer possible.  A number of companies like Ubisense have been working on the problem of tracking people and objects in buildings.  Obvious applications are enabling first responders to track their location inside a building in an emergency, keeping track of critical staff and equipment in hospitals, and many others.  Professor El-Sheimy of the University of Calgary described how low cost micromechanical systems (MEMS) inertial sensors can be used to track location in a building and showed how these devices can be used to locate subjects in buildings with an average locational accuracy of about 2 meters.

Sensor Long Tail

Dr Steve Liang has looked at the world's sensors including large scale arrays that capture imagery and other data currently at a rate of terabytes per day.  These are often developed by or sponsored by federal governments.  Lower levels of government, utilities, and private agricultural organizations are increasingly sponsoring sensors for  monitoring crops, vegetation encroachment on transmission corridors, illegal construction, and other areas.  But what about the hundred of millions of devices that we all carry about with us or that are built into vehicles and desktop computers.  This is what Liang calls the long tail, and he is interested in finding a way of accessing these devices so that they can be queried for non-private information that could be used in a variety of ways such as for scientific analysis or in an emergency.  The idea of a sensor web is a fascinating idea and Liang has taken a first step in the form of the GeoCENS project, which is designed to be a standards (OGC SWE) based sensor web platform that combines a large number of sensors with geospatial information in a virtual globe environment. 

Land Encroachment

Saudi Aramco is responsible for 85,000 km² of land reservations and pipeline corridors.  One of issues that Saudi Aramco has to deal with is encroachment.  At the conference Yousif Al-Ghamdi and Saleem Haja described how their team has analyzed the workflow for identifying and resolving encroachments, and using imagery, mobile survey equipment, and custom developed applications have been able to reduce the survey time to document encroachments by 50 %. 

Shaybah

On the last day of the conference Saudi Aramco flew us all to Shaybah in the Ar-Rub al-Khali desert, often called the Empty Quarter for reasons that are obvious once you've been there. You can see Shaybah and surrounding area on Google.  Shaybah is very close the the UAE border. The Ar-Rub al-Khali desert covers 650,000 km² and is extremely arid with average annual rainfall of less than 3.5 centimeters and maximum temperatures ranging from 47 °C to as high as 60 °C.  Some of the dunes are 250 meters high.  Saudi Aramco has four gas oil separation plants (GOSP) at Shaybah producing 750,000 barrels of petroleum per day. 

We had an opportunity to walk on the dunes.  The sand, which is almost red and as fine as pastry flour, appears to undulate.  It is contantly moving and I could see plow marks along the highways to keep them clear, just as in Canada we have to plow highways to keep them clear of snow.  It was hard not to think of this as red snow. 

A most memorable experience.

Map Malaysia: Sea level rise and flood management is a top priority in Sabah

I'm in Malaysia this week and yesterday I had the opportunity to give a presentation in the plenary session at Map Malaysia in Kota Kinabaru, Sabah on Borneo, the world's third largest island as we were informed by one of the speakers.

The opening address was given by Sabah Deputy Chief Minister Dr Yee Moh Chai on behalf of the Chief Minister Seri Musa Haji Aman.  The Chief Minister said that the government is committed to the development of geospatial infomation in Sabah.  He said that he wants to expand the use of  geographic information in Sabah beyond traditional applications such as mapping, disaster management, water and natural resources management  to business, design and engineering, social networking, energy, GHG emissions, and climate change.

A plenary speaker, Haji Safar bin Utong, Deputy Director of the Lands and Survey Department Sabah, reiterated the government's committment to the expansion of geographic information but identified some issues that he feels very strongly need to be addressed.  In addition to limited funds for data acquisition from companies like Intermap, who have mapped a terrain model of all of Malaysia at about one meter vertical resolution, he also identified the issue of data sharing within the government.  Sabah has a geospatial data portal, MyGeoportal, but only 16 of 200 government agencies use it and even among those 16 agencies, there is limited sharing of geospatial data.  I think it is fair to say this is a very real problem with most governments.

Water

Water is a major concern in Malaysia.  In the last few days there has been major flooding in Perlis, which has displaced thousands.  And there is the issue of rising sea level. According to global climate statistics published by NASA, global sea level rose 17 cm in the last century. The annual rate for 2000-2010 is double the annual rate for the last century.  According to some projections the rate of sea level rise is expected to accelerate in the coming decades.  According to the Director of  the Sabah Lands and Surveys Department, his department is in the process of establishing a 3D simulation system for flood management.  Digital terrain elevation data is being acquired (from Intermap), beginning with coastal areas. Based on preliminary results, for example, a rise in one meter of sea level will affect parts of Kota Kinabalu, but a rise of 3 meters would result in 90% of Kota Kinabalu being covered by water.  According to NASA, south east asia is one of the areas where sea level rise has been the highest.

The east coast of Sabah is an area that has been identified as a risk area for tsunamis.  One of the presentations described a project to produce tsunami risk maps for the east coast of Sabah that used digital terrain models and overland flow modelling to prroduce tsunami hazard maps.

Autodesk University 2011

If you are interested in new technological approaches for the challenges facing the utility, municipal government, and other industries, such as smart design, integrated substation design, records management, reducing truck rolls with high resolution imagery, convergence, digital cities, sustainability, open municipal geospatial data, and you would like to share ideas and experiences with other folks in the industry, then you might think about coming to Autodesk University in Las Vegas, November 29 to Dec 1.  

You can access last year's classes at the AU web site.

GITA Geospatial Solutions Conference - Intelligent Infrastructure for a Sustainable Future

The program for this year's GITA’s Geospatial Solutions Conference, which takes place in Grapevine TX, right next to the Dallas Fort Worth airport (DFW) April 10-13, 2011, is available.  This really is a completely overhauled event including the program.

One of the completely new things this year is an open source track organized by OSGEO, and includes open data folks from OpenStreetMap and MapQuest Open.

There is also a greater focus on some of the major challenges such as intelligent networks/smart grid and workforce challenges and new technologies such as cloud computing, 3D and new geospatial data acquisition technologies in vertical industries including electric power, telecommunications, gas, water/wastewater, the public sector, and transporation.

Peter Batty and myself will be speaking at the opening session. I'll be involved in a workshop on workforce challenges, and I'll be participating in the open source track as well.  Tuesday morning there will be the Industry Trends and Analysis Group (ITAG) session, which is a group of utility industry folks from electric power, water/wastewater, transportation, gas, and telecom talking about industry trends and what they expect to be the big items in 2011/2012 - for me one of the highlights of the conference.

Registration Open for Geospatial Open Source FOSS4G 2011 in Denver

Registration for FOSS4G 2011 September 12-16 in Denver is open.  The conference hotel is the Sheraton Denver Downtown.  All the conference sessions will be held at the hotel. 

The OpenStreetMap State of the Map conference will be happening right before September 9th – 11th, so you can attend both on a single airline ticket.

The call for papers for the main program is also open.  The abstract submission deadline is April 15, 2011.