Between the Poles: Do you really need a GIS to do spatial analytics ?

Geoff Zeiss

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Lidar News
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 22, 2017

Do you really need a GIS to do spatial analytics ?

Geospatial technology - spatial data management and analytics - is being used in many industries outside of the traditional GIS sector. Analysts and IT folks in these industries may be surprised to find that the spatial analytics and data management they require is already available from their database management system whether it is Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, or SQLite

At the GIS in the Rockies conference in Denver Dave Murray from the City of Westminster reminded us how powerful the spatial analytics in modern relational database systems are.

In the late 1980s the first implementations supporting spatial data in a relational database were Vision* on Oracle RDBMS developed by Geovision and GFIS on Db2 by IBM. Subsequently the Open Geospatial Consortium defined a simple feature specification for spatial SQL. First Oracle and then Microsoft and the open source community have added spatial SQL based on the OGC standard to relational databases. Oracle Spatial, PostGIS+PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and Spatialite+SQLite all support spatial SQL.

Folks wishing to employ geospatial techniques may find that they don't need a traditional GIS product and all the complexity involved in integrating a GIS with their database management system. They very likely will find that they can do all the geospatial processing they require using spatial extensions to standard SQL on their existing database. Finding the number of automobile accidents along a stretch of road, the census tracts a road passes through, or the burglaries in a neighbourhood are straightforward spatial SQL queries. The results can be visualized using Oracle's own visualization tools or open source applications like QGIS sitting on top of Oracle, SQL Server or PostGIS+PostgreSQL. Dave mentioned spatial SQL courses on Udemy for those interested in learning more about spatial SQL. Gordon Luckett's web site has a wealth of information about spatial queries, especially for integration with AutoCAD and Esri ArcMap. Gordon also has developed courses on Lynda such as Using SQL Server with AutoCAD and Learning QGIS.

Posted at 01:30 PM in Geomatics, Geospatial IT, Geospatial Standards, Open Standards, Spatial analytics, Spatial Data, Spatial Databases | Permalink

Comments

Thx 4 jogging my meory on Vision* from ye good ole days in Cal-gree... and back to the future there's the question when you should use lat/long data in the 1st place - stay tuned for a Geocomm2017 lighting talk in London late next month

Posted by: Azolnai | September 26, 2017 at 03:13 AM

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Between the Poles

Geoff Zeiss

March 2023

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September 22, 2017

Do you really need a GIS to do spatial analytics ?

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