Between the Poles: Major project to improve accessibility to OpenStreetMap data initiated

Geoff Zeiss

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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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October 10, 2012

Major project to improve accessibility to OpenStreetMap data initiated

I have blogged on several occasions about OpenStreetMap (OSM), which is the world's largest volunteered, crowd-sourced database of geospatial information. Apparently, August 9^th 2004 was the day that the first user registered the domain and started the project. The first time I blogged about OSM was just shortly after March 16th 2009 the day that the 100 000^th user registered on OpenStreetMap. Since then the amount of data and the number of registered users has continued to increase exponentially. Currently OSM has about 750,000 registered users.

April 1 of this year OpenStreetMap moved to a new license. The ODbL license is comprised of an Open Database License (ODbL), a Database Contents License (DbCL) covering the database itself and its contents, and a set of upgraded Contributor Terms covering submissions to the database.

One of the challenges for the OSM community is that although there are 750,000 registered users, only about 24,000 of these are active mappers who regularly create maps using OSM data, Today on an Eclipse Foundation Locationtech teleconference, Alex Barth of MapBox presented an overview of a major project awarded to Development Seed and MapBox by the Knight Foundation that is designed to improve accessibility to OSM data. The focus of the project is to improve the core infrastructure of OpenStreetMap to make

it easier to add data to OpenStreetMap
OpenStreetMap.org more social to support the community as it continues its rapid growth
it easier for people to access OpenStreetMap data to make their own maps.

The intention is that all of these tools will be open source, with open licensing, built transparently on open development platforms like GitHub, and worked on collaboratively with the larger OpenStreetMap community. The technical priorities as outlined by Alex include

Data API for editors and data consumers (Javascript API) and supporting libraries
Improved editors using the new API including browser-based editors
More social OpenStreetMap,org site

The project will begin ramping up over the next weeks and Alex is asking for as much community participation as possible. The best place to follow the project as it unfolds is the MapBox blog.

Posted at 06:08 PM in Geospatial Open Source, Mapping Applications, Open Data, Open Source Geospatial, Sharing Spatial Data, Spatial Data | Permalink

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Between the Poles

Geoff Zeiss

March 2023

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October 10, 2012

Major project to improve accessibility to OpenStreetMap data initiated

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