Between the Poles

Russia Opening Geospatial Data

There is an interesting blog post by Jeff Thurston about Russia making more of its technically outstanding geospatial data openly available.  Jeff quotes Prime Minister Putin as saying “maps must be free and gen­erally acces­si­ble lest the mod­ern­iza­tion of the econ­omy become sim­ply impossible.” During the Cold War Soviet satellite imagery of the world (outside of the USSR) was often better than that available in the West.  Jeff mentions that a Federal cadaster initiative was launched in May of this year.

New German Radar Satellite TanDEM-X

The new German radar satellite, TanDEM-X,  which was launched from Kazakhstan earlier this week has returned its first images. Together with the TerraSAR-X satellite launched in 2007 it will be able to produce digital elevation models to a precision of better than two meters.

The Canadian RADARSAT II was launched at the end of 2007 and provides digital elevation models with a highest resolution of 3 meters, but typically less.

INSPIRE Conference 2010: Geospatial, Cloud Computing, Social Networking, and the Economic Benefits of Sharing Spatial Data

The INSPIRE Conference 2010 is being held this year in Cracow, Poland, an absolutely stunning location.  There have been some riveting presentations as part of the first day's plenary session that for me put the INSPIRE initiative in a broader international context and in the context of some of the immense transformations that are changing the IT world such as cloud computing and social networking.

Professor Jacqueline McGlade, Executive Director of the European Environmental Agency (EEA) gave a 50,000 foot overview of what is going on in the EU with respect to the geospatial sector and the environment.  In a quick historical summary, she said the EU has moved from shipping trainloads of paper to Brussels, to electronic data submission, to open public access to electronic data.  Fully 90% of the data that submitted as part of environmental monitoring and reporting has a geospatial tag.  

Three areas that are getting a special focus in the EU are forestry, biodiversity, and drought.  For example, there is now a biodiveristy web site for Europe called BISE.  Starting in 2012 it will be illegal to import wood products from non-sustainable logging sources.  Max Craglia, of the EC's Joint Research Centre (JRC), in a later presentation mentioned as an example of crowd-sourcing that in Brazil illegal logging operations are coming under public scrutiny by way of a Brazilian Globo Amazonia site, that enables anyone to report illegal logging including digital images.  TV news channels are following the social networking site and sending reporters to the sites to follow-up on the reported illegal logging operations.

Cloud computing

But I think the item that really got my and many other people's attention was Professor McGlade's and other speaker's comments on the impact of cloud computing.  She was unequivocal about two things. 

• Data is more secure in the cloud. 
• And costs are "falling and tumbling." For example, the EEA is seeing a 60% cost reduction in running costs for spatial data. 

Max Craglia highlighted some of the dramatic changes that are happening as a result of the rise of social networking; more internet traffic associated with social networking than email, mobile exceeding desktop internet, and mobile data exceeding voice.  Professor McGlade said that research has found that 42% of EU citizens feel poorly informed about environmental issues and as a result a new site called Eye on Earth has been created to bridge the gap between initiatives like GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security) and INSPIRE and the citizen.  For example, you can find current air quality reported for your location on Eye on Earth.  But her response to a question about plans for European IT infrastructure for environmental data was very interesting.  She said that the EU should be focussing more on quality assurance than on building the IT infrastructure because otherwise there is a risk of being overtaken by the rapid change that is happening in IT, a real risk for big, multi-year government initiatives.  Essentially she is saying to leave the IT infrastructure to the commercial sector.

INSPIRE and the world

Professor Mauro Salvemini, President of EUROGI (European Umbrella Organisation for Geographic Information), put INSPIRE in the context of the rest of the world, mentioning a 2010 UN proposal for a world geospatial forum.  His argument is that INSPIRE creates opportunities for EU countries on the world stage.

Economic Benefits of INSPIRE

I have blogged previously about two studies, in Australia and New Zealand, that attempted to put a dollar figure on the contribution of the geospatial sector to the national GDP.  Max Craglia outlined the results of studies in the EU that attempted to quantify the economic benefits of sharing spatial data.  One was the cost reduction across the EU of environmental impact assessments (EIA) and strategic environmental assessments (SEA) where the savings are estimated to be €100 to 200  million per annum.  He also mentioned some smaller studies.  One was in Catalonia, where the expenditure of €1.5 million over four years saved the local government €2.6 million.  The second was in Lombardia, where the expenditure of €4 million on spatial data infrastructure led to savings of €3 million per annum.

CGC 2010 Geomatics and Productivity in Canada

The first Canadian Geomatics Conference was held in Calgary last week.  The opening session includes a guest presentation by Glen Hodgson, Senior Vice President and Chief Economist at the Conference Board of Canada.  The Conference Board of Canada prepares an annual report card, How Canada Performs, that assesses Canada's performance relative to other countries in different areas including innovation, education and skills, health, society, economy, and the environment. On the 2009 report card, Canada moved from a “B” to an “A” on its education performance, was assigned “B” grades on its economic, health and social performance, but got a “C” on environmental performance and a “D” on innovation.  The dismal performance on innovation and how geomatics could contribute to solving the problem was the theme of Glen Hodgson's talk.

Productivity Crisis in Canada

Wealth generation depends on three factors human capital, investment, and innovation.  Canadians work just about as hard as Americans (98% of US working hours per capita), the capital investment in Canadian industry is comparable to the US, but Canada's productivity (multi-factor productivity or MFP) is just 82% of US productivity and the trend is getting worse. Canada ranks somewhere in the range of 12th to 14th in the OECD with respect to innovation.

The structural challenges that are making this a very serious issue right now are the aging workforce and the strong loonie (Canadian dollar), which has just about reached parity, after falling as low as 63 cents a number of years ago.  According to Glen Hodgson, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was good for the Canadian economy, as has been the reduction in capital taxes.  But the weak loonie over the past few years has been bad for productivity, because it reduced the economic motivation to innovate. He also said that whereas the US economy lost 8 million jobs in the current recession and those jobs haven't been regained, in Canada 400,000 jobs were lost and virtually all have been regained.  That is certainly good news in the short term, but because it negatively impacts productivity it may not be good for the economy in the long term.

Geomatics and Productivity

Glen Hodgson's main point was that the geomatics industry, which has historically been a world leader in innovation, can contribute to improving Canada's productivity.  The last federal budget, which was about $225 billion, talked a lot about innovation so this is a Federal priority.  As I have blogged about in the past,  Australia and more recently New Zealand have attempted to estimate the contribution of the geomatics industry to the gross domestic product.  They also attempted to estimate the significantly larger contribution the geomatics industry could make with the appropriate government policies.  In Canada there is an initiative underway, supported by the Geomatics Industry Association of Canada (GIAC) and other organizations, for a national geomatics program. 

At CGC 2010, Prashant Shukle, Director General, Mapping Information Branch, Natural Resources Canada, organized a four hour discussion with representatives from the Federal and provincial governments, academia and the private sector to discuss the what and how of accelerating this effort, which looks very promising.

Storm and Sanitary Analysis Extension for AutoCAD Map 3D

As part of its commitment to BIM for infrastructure, Autodesk released a new Storm and Sanitary Analysis Extension for AutoCAD Map 3D that provides water utility designers with tools to conduct hydraulic analyses to assess the performance of storm and sanitary sewers including urban and highway drainage systems, sanitary sewers, combined sewers, and other waste water infrastructure.

There's a video on YouTube that shows you how to use the standalone analysis application with Map 3D.

GIO of the US Army on Geospatial Trends

DLT Solutions organized a Geospatial Tech Day June 8 in Washington, DC.  Mike Evanoff of Google Earth Enterprise gave the leadoff presentation.  Jim Flyzik moderated a panel on geospatial trends that included Mike Evanoff, myself, and Steve Miller of GeoEye.  Robert W. Burkhardt, the Army Geospatial Information Officer (GIO), was the keynote speaker.

Major themes

Robert Burkhardt focussed on four themes, ubiquitous high resolution spatial data, governance, geospatial standards, and the "big" enterprise. 

Ubiquitous high resolution data

In the past the lack of data was a problem, now the challenge is increasingly being able to integrate and analyze in order to extract information from the huge volumes of data that are now available.  Robert Burkhardt gave an example where web-based mapping helped expose patterns and extract actionable information from a huge, chaotic volume of data pouring out of many stovepipes. 

Data models, critical for sharing complex geospatial data, were also mentioned, specifically NFDD, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's (NGA) data model, which may become the DoD’s geospatial data model in the future, and AGDM, which is the Army’s geospatial data model. 

Steven Miller from GeoEye expects that in the future we will see increasing amounts of imagery from other than US sources.  Increasing competition will drive up resolution, drive down costs and increase national security risks.  He also expects that licensing models for data will change as more people demand access.

Data sharing

The Army GIO was unequivocal about the value proposition of sharing data, or what he called the “disciplined sharing of data”.  Sharing data saves lives and saves money. 

Open geospatial standards

Robert Burkhardt identified open geospatial standards as one the major advances enabling sharing geospatial data and mentioned OGC, FGDC, NFDD, and other standards.

Participation and crowdsourcing

Mike Evanoff talked a lot about participation because Google has recently introduced a crowdsourcing tools such as Map Maker which allows you to contribute data and customize your own maps.  Many people are familiar with the contribution that the OpenStreetMap project made in the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti and Mike mentioned it.  But comprehensive street maps of Port-au-Prince were also produced, in just 72 hours, using Google Mapmaker. 

Convergence (of geospatial, engineering design, 3D visualization)

This was a major recurring theme that just about every speaker talked about.  It involves intelligent models such as BIM, which not only enable better design, but also sustainable design.  In the future convergence will help us to model and design entire sustainable cities.

3d visualization

This was a theme that Jim Flyzik, who has had over 20 years experience in government, really picked up on, the importance in government of visualization for communicating technical information to citizens.  In his summary of the panel discussion Jim highlighted what he thought were the three key takeaways, convergence, intelligent models, and especially visualization and how important visualization is for communicating to nontechnical people like politicians, bureaucrats and the man in the street.

Cloud computing

Mike Evanoff of Google talked about the advantages of cloud computing, and how Google does not consider itself a data vendor, but a vehicle for providing access to government and other data.  It is interesting that as a result of Google's crowdsourcing tools, Google Maps in North America now no longer relies on TeleAtlas or Navteq for their vector maps.

Importance of geospatial

It seems clear that the importance of geospatial within government will to continue to rise.  The Army appointed its first GIO in 2001 and Robert Burkhardt predicted that we will see more GIO’s in the federal government in the future.

Convergence in Geomatics Calgary June 15-18

The Canadian Geomatics Conference 2010 is just around the corner.  It's going to be in Calgary the week after next and the theme is Convergence in Geomatics: Shaping Canada’s Competitive Landscape.

According to the Geomatics Industry Association of Canada (GIAC), the national advocacy organization representing a cross section of firms conducting geomatics activity in Canada and one of the organizers of the event, the geomatics industry in Canada employs about 23,000 specialists and generates about $2.8 billion dollars per year.

The Opening Ceremony will take place Tuesday, June 15 and the guest speakers will be

• The Honourable Doug Horner, Minister of Advanced Education and Technology and Deputy Premier of Alberta
• The Honourable Christian Paradis, Minister of Natural Resources Canada

This will be followed by a panel discussion on the way geomatics can contribute more significantly to Canada’s productivity and competiveness.  Panelists include

• Mr. Glen Hodgson, Senior Vice President and Chief Economist, Conference Board of Canada
• Governor Jim Geringer (Wyoming 1995 – 2003), Director of Public Policy and Strategy, ESRI

The panel will be facilitated by Mr. Prashant Shukle, Director General, Mapping Information Branch, Natural Resources Canada and Mr. David Gariepy, Chair, GIAC.

the featured panellists for the Plenary Session on Wednesday will be

• Professor Orhan Altan, President of ISPRS
• Professor Mark R. Shortis, ISPRS
• Dr. Geoff Zeiss, Director of Technology, Autodesk, Inc.

Some of the technical sessions of general interest that caught my eye include

• GeoConnections Plans and Priorities - Sylvain Latour
• The Geobase initiative: an examination of the key framework data component of the CGDI. Corinna Vester (NRC), Éric Loubier (NRC)
• SDI: An international perspective. David Coleman (UNB)
• Convergence and the digital infrastructure for a green economy. Geoff Zeiss (Autodesk)
• Convergence and societal impacts of geographic information in the geoeconomy. Robert Ryerson (KGC), Stan Aronoff (KGC)
• Critical infrastructure monitoring using high resolution SAR satellites. Desmond Power (C-CORE), Paul Adlakha (C-CORE), Marina Dragosevic (C-CORE), Peter McGuire (C-CORE), Paris Vachon (DRDC Ottawa), Pierre Meunier (DRDC CSS)
• Polar View – a program to support climate change adaptation. Paul Adlakha, Thomas Puestow, Desmond Power (C-CORE)
• The dissemination of government geographic data – best practices guide version 2.0. Jennifer Sokol (NRC), Gordon Garrard (NRC)
• Federal geomatics standards - the story so far. Brian McLeod (GeoConnections), Mohamed Habbane (GeoConnections)
• CGDI in action: exploring quality of service. Sheng Gao (UNB), David Coleman (UNB), Craig MacLachlan (ESRI Canada), Gordon Plunkett (ESRI Canada)
• Pillars of the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure, Ryan Ogston (NRC), Andre Pregent (NRC), Jeannine Parent (GeoConnections, NRCan), Rebecca Last (NRC), Jennifer Sokol (NRC)
• Spatial data quality compliance: a preventive approach. Joel Grira, Stéphane Roche, Yvan Bédard (Laval University)
• When open data meets closed data. Sandy Ward (HomeZilla)
• Compiling a geospatial database of existing oil sands industrial features for Alberta Environment. Caroline Bampfylde (Alberta Environment), Simon Hughes (Hatfield Consultants), Don Page (Alberta Environment), Brett Purdy (Alberta Environment), Susna Stanley (Hatfield Consultants), Aneeqa Syed (Hatfield Consultants)