Between the Poles: FOSS4G: Open source geospatial newcomer event attracts a full house

Geoff Zeiss

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Gene Roe's laser scanning industry news
Open Source Geospatial Foundation OSGEO
OSGeo was created to support the collaborative development of open source geospatial software and promote its widespread use
Proven guidelines for reducing underground infrastructure damage at airports, university, industrial, and commercial campuses, and towns
There are proven measures that an administration, owner, or municipal government responsible for an airport, university, industrial or commercial campus, or town can undertake to reduce the risk of underground utility damage, the associated disruptions to operations and business and the danger for workers and the public.
Sharing information about the location of underground utilities
The U.S. devotes an estimated $10 billion annually to locating underground infrastructure. Every construction project requiring excavation involves significant efforts in locating underground utilities prior to and during construction to reduce the risk of injuries and unexpected project delays. But this information is rarely shared and the location of underground infrastructure is recaptured over and over again. There are successful examples around the world where municipal and regional governments have helped enable a shared underground utility network database.
Growing evidence of the benefits of an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach to construction
Building information modeling (BIM) has been applied to design-build construction projects for many years. A growing number of countries are mandating BIM for public projects. While the UK government has said that "...we know that the largest prize for BIM lies in the operational stages of the project life-cycle", until recently there has not been hard data to support this conjecture. Similarly there has been only anecdotal support for an integrated BIM and geospatial approach for design, build, operate and maintain projects. Now we are beginning to see data from real world projects that offer evidence for the benefits of an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach for construction projects.
Progress in geospatial, civil, and BIM interoperability promises efficient workflows for infrastructure
The BIM and geospatial interoperability challenge is the latest symptom of the broader problem of integrating AEC and geospatial workflows, that has contributed to low productivity in the construction sector. After the announcement about a year ago by Jack Dangermond and Andrew Anagnost of a new relationship to build a bridge between Autodesk and ESRI technologies, I thought it a good time to review progress toward interoperability between the AEC and geospatial worlds.
Geography2050: Accurate location information about underground infrastructure is essential for powering our future planet
I thought it would be worth while to include here a talk I gave at GEOGRAPHY 2050 Powering Our Future Planet at Columbia University in New York about the importance of accurate location information about underground infrastructure for the future development of the energy grid. With some notable exceptions accurately recording the location of subsurface infrastructure including oil, gas, electric power and other energy infrastructure is ignored - perhaps this is a case of out-of-sight is indeed out-of-mind. The reality is that knowing the location of underground energy infrastructure is critical for national security, for disaster planning and management, for public safety and for economic efficiency. Everyone is aware of at least one disaster resulting from or exacerbated by not knowing where our energy infrastructure is - the explosions in San Bruno in California (2010) and Belgium (2004) immediately come to mind.
Deep learning enables automated extraction of building footprints and road networks from satellite imagery
Automated feature extraction from satellite imagery has made major progress in the last year. Accurate building footprints extracted from high resolution satellite imagery are becoming available from companies such as Ecopia, which has just announced a partnership with DigitalGlobe, whose satellites are capable of 30 cm (approximately one foot) resolution. Also NVIDIA has demonstrated the ability to automate detection of many road networks using sophisticated algorithms and multi-spectral high resolution imagery.
BIM + geospatial interoperability would avoid another CAD + GIS quagmire
A specific challenge currently facing the AEC and geospatial industries is integrating building information models (BIM) and geospatial infrastructure and building models. There are parallels between what happened in the 1990s in unsuccessfully addressing CAD+GIS interoperability and the current challenge of BIM+geospatial interoperability. But there are also important differences which provide grounds for optimism that the availability of both BIM and geospatial standards, a vibrant open source geospatial community, and a new willingness on the part of major software players in the BIM and geospatial industries will make it possible to successfully address the latest interoperability challenge facing the AEC (architecture, engineering and construction) and geospatial industries.
BVLOS drones improve power line inspections amid increasing fire and storm risks for utilities | Utility Dive
Transmission line inspections for vegetation management and other purposes are essential in ensuring grid reliability and resilience. We saw the devastating effect of vegetation encroachment in the recent California fires, which in part have been blamed on failure to maintain properly cleared transmission lines. With drones that can cover great distances in a single flight and provide detailed and accurate aerial imagery of transmission lines and other infrastructure, it is now possible to almost completely automate this expensive process. Automating transmission line inspections for vegetation management using BVLOS drones not only saves money, but also could improve the resiliency and reliability of the transmission grid.

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September 14, 2011

FOSS4G: Open source geospatial newcomer event attracts a full house

Yesterday at the FOSS4G conference in Denver, one of the workshops that was new this year was a newcomer event targetted on folks who were new to FOSS4G and new to open source geospatial. I've seen attendee counts that suggest tha attendance this year at FOSS4G will be around 900, an all time high for FOSS4G. Of these an estimated 100+, according to a tweet I've seen from Arnulf Christl, president of OSGEO, attended the newcomer event, which suggests that a significant number of FOSS4G attendees are new to FOSS4G and new to open source geospatial.

The newcomer event was moderated by Brian Timoney who besides moderating provided background on open source, open standards, and open data. Peter Batty, chair of FOSS4G this year, gave the perspective of someone with an extensive background in proprietary, closed source software (Peter has worked at IBM, Smallworld, and Intergraph), who has found significant benefits in using open source software in his current role at Ubisense.

I talked about why Autodesk saw an important role for open source in the area of interoperability, specificially for an Autodesk developed technology called Feature Data Object (FDO) API which is designed to allow designers to directly access geospatial data without making copies. As a concommittant, Autodesk supported the development of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGEO) back in 2006. Coincidentally, I was able to announce that just that morning Autodesk had released Revit Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) exporter as open source. I tend to use utility industry examples, and I was surprised to find that there was at least one utility person in the audience, from Xcel Energy. I suspect that this is just the beginning of a trend and that in future FOSS4G events more folks from industries outside of government will be attending and discovering the role that open source has to play in their organizations.

Michael Byrne, GIO of the FCC and who used to be GIO of California, and Juan Marin also of the FCC gave a fascinating technical and business prespective on the development of the National Broadband Map, which was developed in seven months from a standing start and got half a million hits in the first ten hours it was up. Major business objectives mandated by Congress included searchability, interactivity and on-line. His number one priority was the tight development timeline, 7 months, and his second priority was user response time. Seven months is an incredibly tight development timeline for any eneterprise system. Early in the development cycle, the team, which was only eight people, decided that a RESTful architecture (see GeoREST for an example) and open source geospatial software were the only way they were going to make this timeline. They decided they needed to communicate directly with developers to be able to resolve problems in days, not months. After deciding on the software stack, the system was developed in four and a half months and survived a deluge of traffic in its first hours and days.