There’s not too much science involved in dropping all the spatial@gov conference presentation titles into Wordle, but it does give a quick insight into the evolving language of the spatial industry and the marketing of presentations that are designed to draw us in.
The “Big” mover in the past 12 months across IT has been the promotion of “Big Data” as the next challenge of the sector. Of course, spatial data is no different and has been historically “Big” as well as small, depending who you talk to.
I look forward to learning about the classification of “Big” spatial data and whether it will change the way we all do business.
A collegue was recently looking through some of our Melbourne street imagery captured with the Earthmine technology and noticed that we caught a traffic accident on camera as we sat at the traffic lights.
Of course I am not suggesting that the driver of the colliding car at the rear was distracted by the presence of our capture vehicle as I am sure that there are so many other distractions on the roads (and in the cars) these days.
So be careful out there on the roads over the Christmas holiday season and focus on the stationary vehicles ahead of you.
The spatial@gov conference is now in its third year and has proven to be the one annual event in Australia that draws all the spatial software and solutions players from across the country. Each year, both before and after the event, I attempt to assess the value of the event using any criterion I can find. This year I have decided to focus on attending as many speaker presentations as possible, prompting the creation of a word cloud based on the presentation titles. Using wordle I return the following:
Of course, a presentation title on its own should never be the basis of the decision to attend a session, and the general wording in the title can often understate the true content. However, what the word cloud does provide is a clear indication of the general focus of the conference itself (and the language adopted by the industry). The true value of the word cloud may be to invert its purpose and seek the least-used words and identify those presentators that operate on the fringe of the industry and challenge the norm.
Recently they drove the rail network of Tasmania with a specially fitted hy-rail vehicle. The imagery is clear, crisp and provides a 360-degree view at all points due to the small footprint of the vehicle.
The hy-rail vehicle fitted with the earthmine camera system.
Front facing view from the earthmine camera system.
For more information on how the earthmine system is being used on both roads, rails and everywhere in between contact enquiry@geomatic.com.au or visit www.geomatic.com.au
The imagery was captured on Thursday 6th October 2011, processed and made available online in less than a week, just in time for the last two weeks of the finals.
Eden Park
The high resolution street level imagery was captured using the earthmine camera and processing system which uses a combination of high-resolution digital cameras and cloud technology to rapidly acquire, process and publish the imagery. The camera system is car-mounted as shown and allows the imagery to be acquired at normal travel speeds.
The camera system was lucky to get a sneak peak of the inside of Eden Park prior to the fans arriving.
I will be speaking at the 2011 Australian Sharepoint Conference being held in Sydney, March 8th and 9th. My presentation is entitled “How map-based visualisation can enhance your use of SharePoint.” and I am looking forward to talking to a new audience about the use of mapping tools within SharePoint. My talk will be centred on the use of Visual Fusion by IDV Solutions and where we have deployed it to great effect in bridging the gaps between GIS and corporate document management.
I expect there will be great interest in how easy it now is to create mapping content without the need for GIS and how this data can be shared back to the business and other applications from the Sharepoint environment.
This year’s spatial@gov conference proved to be a greater spectacle than last year, with over 500 delegates attending. Normally I plan to attend at least 4 sessions a day but this time around we had trouble tearing ourselves away from the booth, thanks to a constant stream of people wanting to get their hands on the Microsoft Surface application we had built. Just when we thought we would be able to catch our breath, the conference organisers would bring a VIP delegation over for a look (and a play).
The application was built by our talented development team at GT, who love a challenge, especially when it involves cool technology like the surface, and we made the deliberate decision not to build a GIS on a touch table. Using the surface’s object recognition capabilities, we were able to create a collaborate environment where everyone gets their own map to play with and to share data such as photos, videos and lots of government (and community generated) mapping information. The application was built to use the power of Bing Maps for the maps and imagery and GT’s own spatial web services platform, MARS, which was integrated to provide meaning to geotagged photos and to provide spatial analysis capabilities.
Getting hands on with Surface (Source: CeBIT Australia)
We were honoured to have a number of senior government representitives stop by our booth and experience the application which contained Australia data feeds and imagery. Visitors included Martin Ferguson, MP and Dr Michael Winter, Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany. (see photo above)
Some people have asked about the technology. Well, aside from the Surface itself and some clever programming in .NET, the only other device was the digitial camera. After an exhaustive search for a camera with Bluetooth, GPS, Compass, and decent optics, we selected the Ricoh Caplio 500SE. This device comes in a ruggedised format as well, which makes it handy for lugging around in a laptop bag.
Given that Microsoft Surface is best experienced by getting hands-on, the video below gives a feel for what most people were doing once they were able to get their turn.
We will be back at spatial@gov next year so the search has begun for the next non-GIS innovation.
Microsoft Surface has been around for a couple of years but customer demands and innovations in server-side geospatial technologies have driven us to port our GT VEPlus solution to the touch-table platform.
Designed as a data collaboration tool across agencies, GT VEPlus on the Surface provides for:
multiple user experience
direct interaction
object recognition
multi-touch
data integration
The solution leverages our GT VEPlus solution which is also available for rich mashup solutions for websites.
A map by any other name 