2006 March 16

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ESRI

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Editor's Introduction

This week I continue my coverage of upcoming geospatial conferences, focusing on the ACSM annual conference and a new conference on GIS for public safety. Over the weekend, I will update the calendar of conferences and tradeshows and extend it to cover July.

Please note the news item about the Open Source Geospatial Foundation, which I accidentally omitted from last week's issue. Also note my revised disclaimer at the beginning of the News Briefs.

Next week I will bring you complete coverage of an exciting demonstration project, involving hand-held devices and a mapping server, to answer queries about multi-modal transport options for the tens of thousands of people visiting Melbourne, Australia, for the 18th Commonwealth Games.

— Matteo

Cooperation Between Geospatial Organizations

The American Congress on Surveying and Mapping (ACSM), the Geospatial Information and Technology Association (GITA), the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association (URISA), the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS), and the Association of American Geographers (AAG) each maintain separate staffs, publications, websites, and conferences - despite their overlapping memberships and niches within the larger geospatial industry.

From 1988 to 1998, these five organizations, plus the American Public Works Association (APWA), held a joint GIS/LIS (land information systems) conference. Now there are signs of a new convergence: URISA's Florida chapter will present two workshops at the ACSM Annual Conference, April 21-26 in Orlando, Florida; ACSM will have a presence at URISA's annual conference, this fall in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada; URISA and the National Emergency Number Association (NENA) will hold their first joint Geospatial Integration for Public Safety Confere! nce (GIPSC, pronounced "gypsy"), April 10-12 in Nashville, Tennessee; and ACSM, GITA, URISA, and the Federation Internationale des Geometres (FIG) are discussing the possibility of a joint conference as early as 2008.

ACSM Annual Conference

I discussed the upcoming ACSM Annual Conference with Curtis Sumner, Executive Director of ACSM, and with Tim Kent, of the Oregon state office of the federal Bureau of Land Management, who is the conference's Workshop Coordinator.

"For the first time in several years," Sumner told me, "we have a collaboration with URISA in this conference. What's occurred [since the end of the GIS/LIS conferences], is that each one of us has gone our own way and, at least for URISA, ACSM, ASPRS, and GITA, we've all taken about a quarter of the number of people to conferences for which we've paid about the same amount of money we would have if we had all been there. So, we've been having discussions about how we may all come closer together. This collaboration — which consists of URISA providing some workshops into our program and promoting the conference to their local members — is the first step in that direction. We're currently talking with GITA about whether or not we might be able to have a joint full fledged conference with them in 2008, but that hasn't been decided yet. I'm just pleased that we are actually talking in that direction."

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Conference on GIS and Public Safety

As GIS becomes more pervasive and more integrated with other technologies, technical conferences and trade shows merge and change to follow these trends. For the past seven years, the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association (URISA) produced the GIS In Addressing Conference: Street Smart and Address Savvy. It was endorsed by the National Emergency Number Association (NENA), because addresses are so important as a layer for dispatching emergency responders. Meanwhile, NENA held its own GIS Critical Issues Forum, at which participants learned about GIS and what it means to triangulate a call or to have address pointers. However, many attendees at the URISA conference did not have a clear notion of what computer-aided dispatch is or what happens to an address when a phone company delivers it to a public safety answering point (PSAP) — and attendees at the NENA conf! erence increasingly required more in-depth training on GIS. This year, for the first time, these two communities are coming together, as NENA and URISA are jointly producing the First Geospatial Integration for Public Safety Conference — or GIPSC (pronounced "gypsy") 2006 — to be held April 10-12 in Nashville, Tennessee. The purpose is to provide greater emphasis on GIS for the primary "consumer" of addresses — GIS professionals, addressing coordinators, and 911 and emergency response specialists.

For newcomers to addressing, the conference's first track, Addressing Basics, is a tutorial on how addresses work, how they are assigned and managed, and how to coordinate addresses among multiple agencies and jurisdictions. The Emergency Response track will cover aspects of how addresses and other geospatial data are used in emergency services and 911 operations. The third track, Case Studies, will show how agencies put this material to use and what lessons they have learned. One of the pre-conference workshops focuses on Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP). As with cell phones a few years ago, the increasing popularity of this technology has created a whole new set of challenges for 911 centers and emergency services — regarding the traditional 911 model, caller location and identity, network infrastructure, and threat/risk assessment.

I discussed GIPSC with Kathrine Cargo, GIS/Mapping Coordinator for the Orleans Parish Communications District, New Orleans, Louisiana (New Orleans 911), who is the conference's associate chair; Phillip Stiefel, of Lexington Fayette County Government, Lexington, Kentucky, who is on the conference's program committee; and the keynote speaker, Jason Barbour, ENP, who is a NENA Second Vice President, the co-founder of North Carolina's Telecommunicator Emergency Response Taskforce (TERT), the 911 director for Johnston County, North Carolina, and a firefighter in Clayton, North Carolina.

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News Briefs

Please note: I have culled the following news items from press releases and have not independently verified them. I have, however, carefully selected them from the much larger number I receive each week and edited them to exclude, to the best of my ability, self-serving, poorly written, or irrelevant material.

CONTRACTS & COLLABORATIONS

Los Angeles County, in conjunction with the Los Angeles Region Imagery Acquisition Consortium (LAR-IAC), has extended its license agreement for new oblique, digital aerial imagery and software from Pictometry International Corp. …Read more …

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Satellite and Information Services Division has asked Global Marketing Insights Inc. to expand the recently completed International Remote Sensing Survey to focus on Asia. …Read more …

Encom Technology and Perth, Australia-based Meridian GIS have announced their intention to merge. …Read more …

Sherburne County, Minnesota, has selected www.sanborn.com to provide digital orthophotography and base map updates. …Read more …

The Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) has selected GeoDecisions, a provider of geospatial information technology solutions for the transportation industry, to upgrade its straight-line diagramming process with an Integrated RouteLog Application (IRA). …Read more …

Atlas for GIS and Surveying Systems Co. Ltd., a former user of ESRI products, is now ESRI's distributor for GIS software in Iraq. …Read more …

Benefon is using the Rich Map Engine (RME) software made by Telcontar, a supplier of software platforms and services for the location-based services (LBS) industry, to location-enable its newly introduced TWIG Discovery GPS/GSM handset. …Read more …

PRODUCTS

At the Tenth Annual Conference for Professionals in Assessment, Appraisal, Assessment Administration, and Information Technology, MultiVision introduced its expanded 3D modeling capability, which allows users to see and analyze the impact of changes on city landscapes due to natural disasters (such as floods, hurricanes, and earthquakes) and man-made events. …Read more …

GeoSpatial Training & Consulting, LLC, a provider of virtual and instructor-led GIS training courses, has released its latest virtual training course, entitled "Geocoding and Address Matching with ArcGIS." …Read more …

Applanix has introduced POSTrack, the first fully integrated, real-time direct georeferencing and flight management system designed to support aerial remote sensing solutions. …Read more …

Trimble has introduced its new Copernicus GPS receiver — a thumbnail-sized, surface-mount, low power module ideal for adding GPS capabilities to Bluetooth appliances, sport accessories, personal navigators or cameras, computer and communication peripherals as well as vehicle tracking, navigation, and security products.

A new book from ESRI Press illustrates how to use spatial analysis as a tool to solve real-world problems facing social scientists and students of public policy. …Read more …

PEOPLE

EarthData International has appointed Maxime Elbaz as chief operating officer. …Read more …

CONFERENCES

The Geospatial Information & Technology Association (GITA) will feature nine pre-conference Knowledge Immersion Seminars for its Annual Conference 29, slated for April 23-26 in Tampa, Florida. …Read more …

Introduction to ArcGIS Schematics, a new live training seminar from ESRI, explores the capabilities of the ArcGIS Schematics extension and the tools it provides for a range of industries, from transportation and telecommunications to electric and gas and homeland security. The Web seminar will be presented on March 23, at 9:00 a.m., 11:00 a.m., and 3:00 p.m. Pacific time. …Read more …

URISA is now accepting abstract submissions for its Third Caribbean GIS Conference, which will take place October 29 to November 2 at the Atlantis Resort in the Bahamas. …Read more …

OTHER

[N.B.: Due to a production error, I failed to include this item in last week's issue. — Matteo]

On March 6, the open source geospatial community announced the formation of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGEO), a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to support and promote the collaborative development of open geospatial technologies and data. The foundation was formed in February to provide financial, organizational, and legal support to the broader open source geospatial community. It will also serve as an independent legal entity to which community members can contribute code, funding, and other resources, secure in the knowledge that their contributions will be maintained for public benefit. …Read more …

Tempe, Arizona-based aerial imagery provider Aerials Express recently celebrated the first image acquisition from its new Cessna 421 equipped with a Leica ADS40 Digital Airborne Sensor. The new digital aerial camera and plane brings with it a significant increase to the company's image collection capabilities. …Read more …

URISA's GISCorps volunteers recently began six new missions as a result of the organization's partnership with the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure (GSDI) Association. …Read more …

The GeoData Alliance has published Geospatial Digital Rights Management, which describes the progress that has been made in efforts to adapt the tools of digital rights management (DRM) for use in the geospatial arena. …Read more …

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