Refined Dimensions - High-definition Scanning Helps Redefine Oil Refinery Fabrication
Today's modern oil refinery is a huge, efficient industrial facility that takes crude petroleum pumped from deep within the earth and turns it into useful products such as gasoline, aviation fuel, lubricating oil, home heating oil, and more.
A Line Runs Through It - PLSC Supports New 40th Parallel Exhibit
The northern Front Range of what is now Colorado was a pristine wilderness well into the 1850s, trampled only by a small number of trappers and explorers, and by the light footprints of native peoples who had inhabited the area for over a millennium.

ASTM E57 - 3D Imaging Systems
In 2003, in response to a request from the scanner manufacturers and consumers of scan data, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) agreed to develop standards and specifications for both equipment and methods. Subsequently, the American Society for Testing and Material (ASTM) became involved.

A Teen's Lunar Quest
Operation E.A.G.L.E is not a military project. It is a scientific endeavor undertaken by 16-year-old Rebecca England, a sophomore at Demopolis High School in Alabama. While many teenage girls are focused on celebrity lifestyles, teen chat rooms...

Flying High
The technology to collect LiDAR data from aircraft has been commercially available since the mid-1990s. As this technology has become more widespread and more familiar, it has been increasingly used to measure topography and create digital elevation models. The last three years in particular have seen a substantial amount of growth in LiDAR applications. In an effort to identify the key trends, Cary and Associates in Longmont, Colo., conducted a study in which the firm surveyed more than 250 people associated with LiDAR technology and applications.

Positioned for Prominence
The role of surveyors in ancient Egypt was one of importance. Their duties covered a number of aspects, including boundary definition and building construction. Much of the need for surveying came about as a consequence of the civilized society in ancient Egypt and their pattern of government, which was largely created around the issues that arose due to the annual flooding of the Nile, the importance of the fertile land, and taxes that were imposed on the Egyptians according to their land and its yield.

Professional Topography: To Map or Not to Map
For some surveyors, mapping is a natural fit. For others, it’s like oil and water—or worse. When I present seminars to surveyors and ask whether they do mapping, I am constantly surprised by how few raise their hands. Very often, it is only about one-third of the audience. Yet mapping is part and parcel (no pun intended) of surveying. A map is broadly defined as a representation of the Earth's surface that shows how various elements are related to each other by distance, direction and size. I think most surveyors would agree that the representations of the work they create could fit this definition.

Convergence is still the key - Implementation leads the way!
This month's article is a continuation of my earlier article 'D&E - convergence is the key' (in January issue), which talked about...

3D has designs on urban modelling
The world is facing serious challenges including climate change, aging infrastructure, shrinking workforce and lagging productivity...

Integration - key to optimisation
We are entering increasingly difficult times - a depressed economy worldwide and the certainty of higher costs for materials and energy as our natural resources are depleted...

Future belongs to total solution
The survey engineering and construction industries are poised for dramatic, positive change. To keep up with overwhelming demand for new infrastructure in the face of a limited workforce, construction firms are tasked with making major changes...

Microstation V8i - Up close and personal
It is important to speak with users, go to user conferences, interact with users online and meet with prospective users before deciding what to include in a release, particularly a release as comprehensive as V8i. Bentley surveys the competition, talks to programmers and comes up with a matrix...

GPS + RFID: Another look inside
Most of the developed systems for pedestrian navigation, and guidance services rely on GNSS, sometimes in combination with other sensors and positioning methods. Our approach in the Ubiquitous Cartography for Pedestrian Navigation (UCPNAVI) project uses active radio-frequency identification (RFID) in combination with GNSS and inertial navigation systems (INS) to navigate areas such as urban canyons and indoors, where satellite positioning does not fulfill pedestrian requirements.

DGPS + UWB: Seamless Outdoor-to-Indoor Positioning
Ubiquitous location and navigation represents an ideal that many in industry and science pursue. That user expectation, however, remains currently unattainable due the difficulty of detecting GPS satellite signals indoors. Once it has been achieved, we will soon arrive at seamless outdoor-to-indoor pedestrian positioning and navigation.

Seen + Heard: It's Snow Easy to Use GPS
Cincinnati, Ohio, City Council is investigating a way for residents to track snowplows using GPS, so they know when snowplows will clear their streets, reported WCPO-TV. The city already tracks 48 of its 80 snowplows, which were installed with tracking devices in 2005. Under the plan, residents could go online and see, in real time, where the trucks are and when they plan to plow their street.

Innovation: Comb Filtering
Our world is inherently noisy. Of course, we are all familiar with the sounds that assault our ears when we're walking down a busy street or the vibration of a hotel air conditioner that might keep us awake on a hot summer evening. But the concept of noise can be extended to any process or activity if we think of it as something whose presence usually results in a less than ideal outcome.

Obama from on High
Yes we can! Barack Obama used this one-liner as a personal war-cry during his election campaign. Yes we can! replied technicians when questioned about the possibility of taking an image of the inauguration. And, yes, we can almost count the people at the ceremony thanks to the sub-0,50 metre resolution, colour satellite image of the inaugural celebration. This spectacular photo shows the National Mall in Washington DC on January 20, 2009, at 11:19 am (EST). It was taken by the GeoEye-1, the world's highest-resolution commercial Earth-imaging satellite. Weighing 2 000 kilograms the satellite was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, on September 6, 2008.

Data Integration for Coastal Surveying
One of the biggest issues in coastline survey is the accurate combination of terrestrial and marine data. This problem is caused by several issues. Different data sources have different image resolution and accuracy. In addition, integrating data retrieved from different sensors at different times introduces problems with georeferencing. Codevintec Italiana and its partners have overcome these problems by merging terrestrial Lidar and bathymetric data in order to obtain a high-resolution three-dimensional (3D) model of the coast (see survey of Livorno Castle and harbour, GIM International, March 2007).

Laser Scanning in Deformation Measurements
Terrestrial laser scanning is a state-of-the-art remote sensing technology that can rapidly acquire accurate three-dimensional (3D) spatial data. The primary engineering applications include architectural surveying, mining volume analysis and measuring complex mechanical systems for modelling. We discuss the potential of laser scanning in engineering geodesy, i.e. displacement and deformation measurement. The technological capabilities are validated by laboratory measurements including comparative analysis. The outdoor potential of laser scanning is shown by load test measurements of two Danube bridges. The results demonstrate the potential of terrestrial laser scanning in such engineering projects.

Workflow of Oblique Imagery
The Blom Group saw tremendous potential in the oblique technology of Pictometry International of Rochester, NY, and to date the license covers 26 countries in western and central Europe. The licensing included the purchase of 15 camera systems including software for handling every phase from flight planning, data storage and retrieval to processing and delivery. Two processing facilities were established, one in England and one in Italy, and images were collected of hundreds of cities and towns; amounting to 3 million in one year alone. While some municipalities were being imaged on speculation, many commercial orders were received, including a major contract from Microsoft that created a tremendous demand for fast delivery of end products.

Hyder consulting taps xplore PCs
With over 150 years experience, Hyder Consulting has grown from a Welsh engineering business into a multinational company with more than 4,800 employees globally. In Australia, Hyder has seen tremendous growth in the last five years, making it a major force in Australian engineering. With Hyder’s growing reputation and track record in rail and road, traffic and transport planning, ecology, property, and tall building expertise, (Hyder was the Primary Supervision Consultant for the world’s tallest man-made structure The Burj, Dubai), Hyder needed to review its field operations to cope with demand.

Mobile Mapping For The Arabian Canal
Limitless, a Dubai World business unit, is a global integrated real estate developer, specializing in master-planning of large scale mixeduse projects and conceptualization and execution of waterfront developments. The Arabian Canal, one of its current projects, is one of the largest developments of its kind in the world and perhaps the most complex civil engineering project in the Middle East. It will become a globally recognized landmark destination for Dubai’s visitors and residents. The man-made waterway will flow inland from the north, near Palm Jumairah, to Dubai Waterfront at Jebel Ali, and will feature a range of mixed-use developments by some of the region’s top developers. Limitless is proud to be managing the design and construction of the canal to ensure the project’s success, and to be master developing an area in excess of 10,000 hectares through which the canal will flow

Digital Terrain Modeling With 3d Visualisation
Namibia is one of the semi arid countries in southern Africa with an average rainfall of 200mm to 250mm per annum in central areas except for the extreme north and north-east, that is, Ohangwena and Kavango, and Caprivi regions (respectively) that have higher average rainfall of more than 600mm per annum (Mendelsohn, J et al, 2002). The country borders Angola in the north, Zambia and Zimbabwe in the north-east, Botswana in the east and South Africa in the south. The cold Atlantic Ocean (due to the Cold Benguela Current) borders it in the west.

A Team Approach To Gis Asset Inventory
Like many large utilities, East Central Energy (ECE), a memberowned electric cooperative serving more than 57,000 homes, farms and businesses in rural east central Minnesota and northwestern Wisconsin, is an amalgam of merged distribution cooperatives. In recent years, ECE has gone through multiple software upgrades and conversions, which have affected the integrity of their mapping, outage management system, and property records. The time appeared right for ECE to examine the need for a full GIS inventory of its hundreds of thousands of assets. Before fully committing to the project, ECE staff collected and analyzed cost data from...

Reviving Digital Projects
What do you do when you are in charge of assessing and reviving an abandoned digital project you had no part in creating or implementing? This article will talk about the unique challenges and issues involved in such a project, drawing from a specific example at the University of Michigan Library. We contended with unfamiliar software, limited technical documentation, proprietary file formats and platform migration, and will discuss how we approached each of these specific technical issues. After reviving our project and reflecting on our process, we put together a list of guidelines that we feel will help assist others who may find themselves in similar situations.
Geospatial One-Stop Update: More Filters, Formats and Figures
The United States Geological Survey (USGS) this week announced (press release) an update to Geospatial One-Stop (GOS), the federal government portal for geographic data, services and more. This is the first time the site has been in the news for some time. The update provides an opportunity for those in the geospatial community to revisit the site, see what's new and see how the portal can help in day-to-day work. The update reflects changes in data querying, query results and how they are delivered, and further information about the services the site indexes.

Geospatial: An Open Source Microcosm
Man is a microcosm, or a little world, because he is an extract from all the stars and planets of the whole firmament, from the earth and the elements; and so he is their quintessence." Philipus Aureolus Paracelsus Open source has seen great success in general information processing, but does it have a future in vertical markets? In this article, we examine how geospatial open source provides an example of the market challenges of a mid-sized vertical market.

Open Source and Decision Makers
General purpose open source software (OSS) has been on the radar of decision makers for almost a decade. Big projects like Linux, Apache, Firefox and Open Office are supported by Fortune 500 companies like IBM and Sun. Everyone knows about open source, it is in their plans, books have been written. In general information technology (IT), there is little more to say about open source.

NSGIC Mid-Year Theme: Communication
While I only stayed at the NSGIC Mid-Year in Annapolis, MD for a day and a half, I had a grasp on the theme midway through day one: communication. On the second day, NSGIC President Learon Dalby provided further evidence when he reframed his "Issues Briefing"� as an "Opportunities Briefing." The central theme there, I'd argue, was communication. Before recapping some of his points, let me share some of the communication issues/challenges that I saw during the meeting. Discussions of "Imagery/Transportation/Parcels/Elevation for the Nation" (NSGIC's vision for national level, multipurpose datasets) had to include the caveat that in reality only the first two are "real" in the sense of their being NSGIC documents (in very different states). The others have lives of their own. A national cadastre has been in discussion for many years, so it's easy to hang a "for the nation" on it.

Towards Flood Resilient Cities
The year 2007 marks a turning point in history: half of the world population lives in cities (UN-Habitat, 2007). Moreover, the trend of rapid urban growth through the mid-20th century in the developed world has now shifted to the developing regions of Asia and Africa. Urbanisation has led to an increase of economic and social wealth in some places, but also to continuing poverty of others. The urban population is expected to double from two to four billion over the next 30 to 35 years (United Nations, 2006). These growth rates imply that, every week, a city of one million inhabitants will be built for the next four decades. Unintended side effects of the concentration of the number of people exposed to floods are also increasing. Floods are much more frequent, wider and devastating than in former times, where societies...

The European Urban Atlas - Supporting City Habitability
Consumption of natural land for settlements, industry and transport infrastructure proceeds with an alarming pace in Europe and disagrees with the stagnating population. Every three years we lose a surface area equivalent to the size of Luxemburg. Structural Funds of the EU have been held partially responsible for the ill-development. In order to obtain an objective and independent monitoring tool for this and many other purposes, the EU has now launched the “Urban Atlas”, a harmonised map of current land-use/land-cover and their changes over time.

How Does a Digital City Model Compare to a Digital Rural Model?
Digital city models are much better known than digital rural models. While buildings and infrastructure are likely to be modeled within cities, land and associated land operations and environmental parameters are more likely candidates for modeling the digital pathways stretching across rural and remote areas. They are not two disconnected parts though. They interface each other and are complimentary to each other. In fact, the effectiveness of each requires an understanding and appreciation of both to enable regional, national and international planning.

What are some areas of market growth for the geospatial industry?
While it may be hard to think about innovation given the current business climate, there’s a increasing cry for greater creativity as a means to compete in the global economy. My previous Perspectives column focused on the technological frontiers for GIS advancement, and this is a related post that takes a look at ongoing problems that geospatial tools can help solve. All of the areas of growth that I’ll explore will require an expansion of the current geospatial toolset, and will likely involve new players. Given the focus of Vector1 Media on sustainability, I’ll look primarily at areas that stand to gain greatly by balancing the needs of the economy, the environment and society.