GIS Development News Update 01st April 2004

Applications

While climate may be impacted by carbon dioxide emissions, aerosols and other factors, a new study offers further evidence land surface changes may also play a significant role. The study of summer climate in the United States reported changes in land cover, particularly vegetation, have impacted regional temperatures and precipitation. Researchers relied on several computer models. These included the Ecosystem Demography model, which incorporates data from NASA's International Satellite Land Surface Climatology Project.

The use of digital data has other serious implications also. By February next year, the Halifax County tax office in U.S. will have new aerial photography images of the county. The images will be used by several county offices, including the tax and register of deeds offices. They will also be available to the public. When the project is complete, it will be used in conjunction with the new E-911 system. The county is also moving toward Internet maps.

Another important announcement was that the GIS data collected by Dubai Municipality will be made available to the public in the next three months, said Manal Al Shamlan, Head of GIS Development Unit in the Geographical Information Centre of the municipality. In India, the "Save Yamuna" campaign seems all set to go high-tech. Satellite imagery is likely to be used for studying the quality of the river’s surface water and the quality of water in ponds in its flood plain.

Another amazing application was that engineers at the German-US car giant Daimler Chrysler have devised a vibrating accelerator pedal that tells drivers when to slow down, potentially saving hundreds of euros a year in fuel bills!! The vibration is triggered by a computer, which assesses data from the GPS to determine where the car is on the road layout, as well as gradients, speed limits and the tightness of curves.

Key listing:

Back to Top

Business News

An important occurrence was the recent blow to Space Imaging, where the plug on negotiations to award the spy satellite company, a contract worth potentially $500 million was taken off. The unexpected collapse in the secret talks between Space Imaging and a Pentagon spy agency immediately raised questions about the Thornton company's future.

Interestingly enough, this was followed by the news of a Pentagon spy agency planning to seek commercial bids for a new contract worth about $500 million to provide high-resolution satellite photos. The so-called NextView contract could attract bids from two metro-area spy satellite companies: DigitalGlobe in Longmont and Space Imaging in Thornton.

Some important initiatives dotted the Asian region too.

High-resolution remote sensing company DigitalGlobe is to form a new company, DigitalGlobe Asia. The decision was announced to business partners during a meeting in Singapore recently. In a change to their Asian distribution strategy, DigitalGlobe and Hitachi Software, DigitalGlobe's distributor in Asia, have agreed to allow DigitalGlobe Asia non-exclusive distribution throughout Asia.

The region of Asia also saw MapInfo Corporation, announcing a number of significant appointments in the region to meet customer demand and further cement its strong position in Asia Pacific. Definiens Imaging and Bejing Hyundai Space Eye Imaging have signed an agreement, which allows Space Eye to distribute Definiens Imaging's image analysis and feature extraction software, eCognition to markets in China, Hong Kong, and Macau.

Recently also, Kenneth J. Osborn (51), chief, U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Southwest Geographic Science Team in Sacramento, California, passed away from complications resulting from a recent heart attack and stroke. Osborn had been with USGS since 1975. Among his most notable achievements, Osborn was directly responsible for authoring an historic aerial photography and mapping agreement with Mexico, as the Department of the Interior and USGS Representative for Mapping during the 1996 Bi-National Committee Meetings. In recognition of this endeavor, he received a Special Achievement Award from U.S. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt.

Key listing:

Back to Top

Products

Unnoticed by mainstream media forums, a thousand volunteer groups recently put together a major mapping survey of the state of health services available in India. More than 2,000 people from all over India came to Kolkata for the National Health Assembly (NHA), to be followed by the global meeting in Bangladesh. The campaign conducted hundreds of district-level public inquiries into the state of people's health and the availability and quality of health services, to develop area profiles on people's health problems.

Mapping firm Terralink International has begun the largest segment of a plan to get high-resolution digital imagery of the entire country of New Zealand. Two planes are to fly 42,000 kilometres from Kaikoura to McKenzie Basin, taking 2500 photos to produce 5500 "orthophoto tiles" at a resolution of 75 centimetres.

DigitalGlobe unveiled details of the company’s next-generation imaging satellite, WorldView. The new satellite, set to launch no later than 2006, will be the world’s highest resolution commercial imaging satellite. Once launched, WorldView will be the world’s only half-meter resolution commercial imaging satellite, capable of collecting images with 50-centimeter panchromatic resolution and 2.0-meter multispectral resolution.

Telemorphic, in geospatial technologies, announced MultiViewer, an extension to ESRI’s ArcGIS software. In US, a GPS satellite built by Lockheed Martin for the U.S. Air Force was successfully launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station this fortnight. This launch represented the 50th GPS mission for the nation.

Other key product related news are,

Key listing:

Back to Top

Miscellaneous

A week back, scientists saw the completion of a record-breaking 31-day experiment on the International Space Station (ISS), called PromISS-3. It is the longest duration experiment ever conducted inside the Microgravity Science Glovebox - built by engineers and scientists at the European Space Agency in collaboration with NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, US.

This fortnight revealed a new (probable) member at the periphery of our solar system. NASA-funded researchers discovered Sedna, the most distant object orbiting the sun. It's a mysterious planet-like body three times farther from Earth than Pluto. Other notable features of Sedna include its size and reddish color. After Mars, it is the second reddest object in the solar system.

NASA had two more important contributions. Three weeks ago, NASA presented the first direct evidence that rocks the rovers found on Mars had been shaped by water. But as new clues emerged, NASA scientists revised their theories about the amount of water. Peer reviewers reached the same conclusion: It's reasonable to interpret that the rocks at Meridiani Planum, Opportunity's landing spot, were formed in water, perhaps a shallow, salty sea. Raytheon's Miniature Thermal Emission Spectrometers are playing a key role in NASA's ongoing Mars Exploration Rover Project by examining the mineral composition of the Mars environment.

A NASA-funded study found some climate models might be overestimating the amount of water vapor entering the atmosphere as the Earth warms. Since water vapor is the most important heat-trapping greenhouse gas in our atmosphere, some climate forecasts may be overestimating future temperature increases.

The World Meteorological Day was on 23rd March and the Meteorological Office of Malta joined the other 184 members of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) in celebrating this annual day.

Key listing:

Back to Top

Other e-zines from GISdevelopment.net

This ezine is distributed to about 7000 subscribers globally. We would appreciate any efforts to recommend someone to be a part of this growing network. Thank you.

Publication Ezine- A monthly ezine, covering latest updates of papers and research articles published in Magazines and Journals in the field of GIS, GPS and Remote Sensing across the world. It traverses about 50 such publications and brings you the gist. Subscribe

Site Update - A monthly ezine, which brings you the cream of the main changes and updates of the GIS development website (www.gisdevelopment.net). An array of research papers, featured articles, interviews, proceedings, events alert and many other sections are presented. Subscribe

Tender / RFQ Alert - An email alert on tenders / RFQ / RRF floated in the geo-spatial market.

Career Alert - An email alert on job openings. We send specific alerts for US, Canada, UK, Australia and India.

Back to Top