Category Archives: Spatial IT/GIS

Infrastructure Gets a C from COGO

Former governor says U.S. spatial data leadership has slipped. The nation’s spatial data infrastructure gets a barely passing grade of “C” indicating it “requires attention,” former Governor Jim Geringer (R-WY) reported on February 23. Speaking at a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington, Geringer said the national spatial data infrastructure (NSDI), a...

Navigating Without Addresses

New codes aim to bring billions of people into the geospatial market. When we mail a letter to an address in an industrialized country or navigate to that location, we rely, without giving it much thought, on a centuries-old system of street names and numbers, augmented in the case of mail by the later invention...

Incomes Move Across Sydney

Between 2006 and 2011 a little fewer than 400,000 households (around a quarter of the total) moved at least once within the Sydney metropolitan area. While this figure is an under-count of total moves (many households may have moved more than once, and those moving into the city from elsewhere are not presented), mapping this...

Using Google Earth to Make 3D Models

No, I haven’t gone crazy; in fact quite the opposite. I was sent a visualisation of a wind farm from a company this week, and the back of my mind was niggling at me, telling me that I could do better at little or no cost. My first few attempts were involving QGIS2Threejs (QGIS 3D...

Internet of Things

Above: IoT has gone open-source: the Spark Core is an affordable ($39) device that lets anyone connect nearly any device via WiFi to the internet. All components and developer software are open-source. Innovative Power for Sensors, Richer Data It has been a great year for the tech industry and especially for the Internet of Things (IoT),...

3D GIS

Breaking the Wall between Consumer and Professional, the Appearance of Disappearance, Versioning An Interview with Lawrie Jordon Contrary to what the current buzz might indicate, GIS and CAD have been 3D-rich from their start (although sometimes with elevation as an attribute, not necessarily part of the core spatial definition). Even in the 1990s era of...