Category Archives: Spatial IT/GIS

Global Shipping Needs Geospatial Technology

Response to Covid-19 and its ripple effects on trade may be accelerating maritime industries’ adoption of geospatial technology Where global shipping is concerned, the Covid-19 pandemic is changing everything from navigation pathways, to crew and ship safety, to demand for commodities, and forcing the shipping industry to adapt, in part through new uses of geospatial...

Let’s talk about MapOps

 I’m not going to lie, I’m slowly mutating into one of those GIS high-level manager types who work less on real day to day map work and more about concepts and frameworks…even, at points strategizing. I hate it, give me some kriging interpolation or some hardcore viewshed analysis any day, but one thing is becoming...

Using QGIS in the Cloud with Amazon Web Services (AWS)

It’s easy to run a popular open-source geospatial suite on this hosted cloud platform: AWS. QGIS is a great piece of software, and I would really recommend you try it out if you are currently working with ArcGIS, MapInfo or any other piece of GIS software. However, if you don’t have admin rights on your...

Just Say No

This article appeared in xyHt‘s e-newsletter, Field Notes. We email it once a month, and it covers a variety of land surveying topics in a conversational tone. You’re welcome to subscribe to the e-newsletter here. (You’ll also receive the Pangaea newsletter with your subscription.) As I have aged and learned, I have worked diligently to improve myself, whether through...

The Early Days of 3D Scanning

When I first came across Cyra Technologies Inc., a start-up that was developing 3D laser scanning, I was working at Trimble Navigation in Sunnyvale, California, in the heart of the San Francisco Bay area’s “Silicon Valley.” I consider myself lucky. I had the good fortune to be deeply involved in the very beginning of 3D...

What is ETL…

and How Can it Turn You into a Geospatial Rock Star? Imagine a world where there was only one data type for 3D, 2D and point clouds. Wouldn’t it be bliss? I have to confess that about 30 percent of my time, when I work in GIS, is spent working between different data formats…a DWG...