November 09, 2005

	The Worldwide Source for Geospatial Technology November, 2005

Newsletter Archive | Advertise | Contact Us | Subscription

In This Issue Geographic Data - Being able to access existing data resources is critical in emergency situations - Marian de Vries discusses how standards are helping with this effort, and what gaps exist. Plus news from East View Cartographic, SpeedInfo, Tele Atlas and GfK Macon. Geocoding Data - MapInfo's Marilyn Otto discusses how the GDT and Tele Atlas North American databases were merged; plus news from NAC Geographic Products and NAVTEQ. Remote Sensing and Terrain Data - Howard Butler provides the inside story on the Hurricane Katrina Imagery Warehouse; plus news from BlueSky and Radarsat. Demographic Data - News from Simmons, SRC and Claritas. New Data from the US Census Bureau - The Census Bureau forms a 2010 Census Advisory Committee; plus news about a new daytime population database, and reports on Internet usage and state-by-state marriage/fertility as they relate to socioeconomic characteristics. Geographic Data   (Back to Contents) Recycling Geospatial Information in Emergency Situations: OGC Standards Play an Important Role, but More Work is Needed by Marian de Vries, Researcher, Delft University of Technology Recent natural disasters in the US, the Caribbean and Asia have shown what we already knew in theory: there is an enormous amount of geospatial data of all kinds and formats, but it is often hard to find the right data at the right moment by the people who need the information for rescue work and recovery operations. We have seen reports of successful data collection and data processing efforts in the aftermath of Katrina, for example. What is remarkable is that these were often bottom-up initiatives, by individuals or groups of committed geospatial professionals who used their already existing contacts in a collaborative effort to get as much raw (imagery) data processed and accessible to whoever could use it (see Howard Butler's article). Despite this and other positive news, the general feeling seems to be that access to useful geo-data during and after the crisis could have been much better. There should be better access to vector data, either by FTP (file transfer protocol, a standard) or by standards-based Web services that can be accessed from desktop GIS and CAD systems or lightweight Web clients. The question is: what can we do to prepare for these events? Others have already been pointed out that metadata registries (catalog services) and good quality metadata are of enormous importance. In this article I will look at some of the other challenges. Heterogeneous data Geospatial information plays an important role in crisis situations because of its inherent nature: it is information about 'where' (location), 'what' (buildings, roads, water masses, vehicles and other moving objects), 'how many' (people, livestock) and possibly even 'who' (people). This geospatial data can be: high-precision (building designs, underground infrastructure of pipelines, cables, sewers) or less detailed (topographic maps) vector or raster static (one moment in time) or dynamic (tracking information of moving objects, sensor information) 2D, 2.5D (terrain models) or 3D based on geometry (explicit coordinates) or topology (implied geometry), etc. ... Read more Geographic News Headlines Bird Flu Maps Available from East View Cartographic East View Cartographic announced the availability of a custom map collection intended to support the international community's efforts to control the spread of the H5N1 bird flu virus. The bird flu map collection is available in paper and digital versions in a variety of the most commonly used scales. The package includes coverage of Southeast Asian countries most directly affected including Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam. ... More SpeedInfo Licenses Traffic Speed Data SpeedInfo, a traffic data provider, announced that is has signed a license agreement to supply its San Francisco Bay Area traffic speed data to TrafficGauge Inc. Under the agreement, the handheld TrafficGauge Mobile Traffic Map product will be the first real-time traffic map to provide comprehensive traffic for the San Francisco Bay Area, with updates every four minutes during peak drive times. ... More Tele Atlas Taps 3DVU to Bring 3D Map Data to Life Tele Atlas is planning to release 3D landmarks of Berlin, Barcelona, Athens and Bern. They are the first in a series of 20 cities to be rolled out by Tele Atlas, with several more to come in 2005. ... More GfK MACON Produces the First Six-Digit Postcode Map of Romania GfK MACON has revised and completed the digital maps of Romania for its new expanded European map archive. The most important addition is the six-digit postcode map, the first of its kind. Simultaneously, on an administrative level, more than 3,100 communities have been re-digitized and their boundaries adjusted to reflect the 2005 territorial status. The Romania Edition has been supplemented to include numerous topographical map layers, from elevation to the transport network and infrastructure. ... More MapInfo Introduced CarrierInfo to Assess Competitive Positioning of Every Wireline and Wireless Operator in U.S. MapInfo introduced CarrierInfo to provide an overview of the local landline and wireless telecommunications landscape. CarrierInfo provides both a high-level view of operator coverage areas (by parent company name of each service type-LEC, CLEC and Wireless), as well as a medium-level view by carrier name or operating company number. CarrierInfo also includes newly available wireless carrier search capabilities, showing wireless carrier presence across the U.S. ... More headlines Advertisement

Merging Two North American Street Databases by Marilyn Otto, Vice President of Data Development, MapInfo An example of the types of geometry updates performed. Over the last 20 years, Geographic Data Technology (GDT) has worked diligently to employ a sound business model for change detection, and refined their ISO-certified production processes to ensure consistent data delivery with the highest level of quality. With the Tele Atlas / GDT merger in 2004, the change detection and management process was refined and improved further by adding a field survey and validation team to the process. The combination of these two processes means more accurate data, and the release of a very comprehensive product. This is important to us at MapInfo because our users demand the very best street data. MapInfo StreetPro - Benefiting from a Powerful Synergy of Data Web services. Service oriented architecture. Business intelligence. Dashboards. All of these applications are designed to serve up data so that intelligent business decisions can be made. But they don't address one fact - that data is the key to the intelligent decision. No matter how informative the display, the decision is only as good as the data on which it is based. Combining Two Centerline Network Databases - What did it Entail? At the time of the acquisition, both data providers had comprehensive North American databases of street data based on years of data collection. Tele Atlas has spent more than a year merging the two databases into one. This required comparing the databases in detail and identifying and reconciling differences on a segment-by-segment basis. The process included the following: The process included the following: Tele Atlas and GDT each had about 4.8 million miles of streets with the same information (e.g., overlapping data that agreed completely) GDT had an additional 1.3 million miles of data not contained in the original Tele Atlas database; and Tele Atlas had an additional 600,000 miles of data not in the original GDT database. ... Read more Geocoding Data News Headlines Hong Kong, New Zealand, Singapore and Taiwan Have Been Digitized with Universal Addresses NAC Geographic Products announced that Hong Kong, New Zealand, Singapore and Taiwan have been added to the countries and areas digitized with Universal Addresses and Natural Area Codes, which brings the number of the Universal Address digitized countries and areas to 24. ... More NAVTEQ Releases Trucking Data Set NAVTEQ released a new data set, specifically tailored for the trucking industry, that provides truck access restriction and recommended truck route information linked to the NAVTEQ map of North America. This data enables transportation and logistics solution providers using NAVTEQ maps to enhance routing solutions, multi-vehicle optimization applications and truck navigation products. ... More Tele Atlas Delivers Detailed Point Addresses for its Nationwide Street Map Database Tele Atlas announced the availability of its new Point Address database - a data set that pinpoints street addresses to a physical building, site or parcel. More than 40 million address points are available today, including those in many major urban areas, and Tele Atlas plans to provide full coverage across the U.S. for more than 120 million addresses. ... More More headlines

Katrina Imagery Warehouse: The Inside Story by Howard Butler, HoBu, Inc. NOAA Applanix imagery footprints being pulled into the USGS National Map via WMS. Ed. Note:  This article originally appeared in Directions Magazine on Oct. 27. Katrina Democratizes Geospatial Technology The Katrina event brought GIS and spatial technologies into the forefront of many people's minds. After the evacuation, tens of thousands of people were grasping for any information they could find about their homes and businesses. Familiarity with geo-viewing tools like Google Earth, Google Maps, NASA WorldWind, and Microsoft Virtual Earth and access to the Internet gave people the means to investigate their own personal situations from afar - utilizing tools similar to those geospatial practitioners have used for years. A mass democratization of geospatial technologies took place in the country's time of crisis. There are two sides to the geospatial coin, however. First are the tools and interfaces, of which many in the geospatial community are well aware. Second are the data, the critical currency that provides timeliness, accuracy and relevance. This article will discuss the group of open source GIS developers, academics and private industry folks who developed and deployed the Katrina Imagery Warehouse to aggregate and provide access to Katrina disaster data in real-time, as the situation unfolded. A Heterogeneous Group Responds This story starts a few days after the hurricane when the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released its Applanix/Emerge-collected imagery for the affected areas. While NOAA has the capabilities to generate ortho photography, it made the decision to continue to focus its efforts on mass data collection and providing image trajectories, and left the job of ortho-rectifying and mosaicking the imagery to others. One individual quickly saw that this job needed to be done and decided he had the resources to do it - an email client, a Web browser, an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) connection and the network. That individual was Norman Vine, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the University of New Hampshire. ... Read more Remotely Sensed & Terrain Data News Headlines BlueSky Releases 2012 Olympics Imagery As London prepares to host the 2012 Olympics aerial UK photo-mapping company BlueSky has launched a high resolution, up to date bird's eye view of the Thames Gateway. This area will form the heart of London's future development, as it is the only area of the Capital able to sustain the growth in housing and jobs required. The aerial imagery created by BlueSky in partnership with ZMapping was flown earlier this year and covers over 200 square kilometres extending for 40 miles along the River Thames from the London Docklands to Southend in Essex and Sheerness in Kent. ... More RADARSAT-1 is 10  Canada's RADARSAT-1 satellite celebrates its tenth anniversary in space. It was the world's first commercial Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite. Over the 10-year period, RADARSAT-1 data has been used to advance numerous applications such as ice, agriculture, oil and gas exploration, cartography and coastal monitoring. ... More More headlines Demographic Data   (Back to Contents) Demographic Data News Headlines Simmons Introduced Gay and Lesbian Consumer Study Simmons announced that it has released the Gay and Lesbian Consumer Study, a study of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) population in the United States. Simmons uses a national probability sample survey that provides information about the size, characteristics, and behaviors of the GLBT population. ... More SRC Launcheds UK Version of the DemographicsNow Business Intelligence Web Site SRC announced the launch of www.DemographicsNowUK.com. The Web site provides global companies with the ability to conduct simple and complex consumer and market analyses for making more informed and confident business decisions within the U.K. ... More Claritas Introduced PRIZM TV Profiles Claritas announced the introduction of PRIZM TV Profiles, a new information product that combines data from the PRIZM NE lifestyle segmentation system with the Nielsen Media Research television ratings to create a wide-ranging set of profiles on viewing behavior by PRIZM segment. PRIZM NE categorizes the population into 66 segments and ranks them on a socio-economic level. ...More More headlines New Data from the US Census Bureau   (Back to Contents) Census Data News Headlines Commerce Secretary Announces Formation of 2010 Census Advisory Group Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez has named 20 organizations to the 2010 Census Advisory Committee, which will advise the U.S. Census Bureau on topics ranging from data usage to technology for the 2010 Census. The advisory committee includes data users, general governmental entities, technology-based organizations and entities with expertise in the statutory and constitutional uses of decennial census data ... More Census Bureau Releases First-Ever Data On Daytime Populations for Cities and Counties If it seems a little crowded on weekdays in cities like Washington, D.C.; Irvine, Calif.; Salt Lake City, Utah; or Orlando, Fla.; it's not your imagination. Among cities with 100,000 or more people, these four show the highest percentage increases in population during the day as opposed to their resident population.  ... More New report on Internet Usage A new report from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that 40 percent of adults used the Internet to obtain news, weather or sports information in 2003, a sharp increase from only 7 percent six years earlier. In a measure of how interpersonal communications are changing, more than half of adults (55 percent) used e-mail or instant messaging in 2003, a dramatic increase from the 12 percent who did so in 1997. ... More New Analysis Offers First-Ever State-by-State Look at Links Between Marriage, Fertility and Other Socioeconomic Characteristics A new analysis looking at links between marriage, fertility and other socioeconomic characteristics was released by the U.S. Census Bureau, providing the first-ever state-by-state analysis of median age at first marriage. The analysis of the multi-year marriage and fertility data from the American Community Survey (ACS) also shows how socioeconomic characteristics such as mother’s income, age, work status and language spoken at home are correlated with birth rates. ... More The Census Bureau continues to release numerous documents related to the 2002 Economic Census. Other products and documents related to data products that have been released in the last month include the following. 2004 American Housing Surveys Current Housing Reports, Market Absorption of Apartments First Quarter 2005 Absorptions [PDF] Nonemployer Statistics: 2003 [PDF] Current Housing Reports, American Housing Survey for the New Orleans Metropolitan Area: 2004 [PDF] Other Data Sources   (Back to Contents) Check out Directions Magazine's Data Product Buyer's Guide for a listing of data sources. If you don't see your company's offerings listed, please add them to the Guide. Thanks for reading Directions on Data, and be sure to tell a friend. DirectionsMag.com  |  Newsletter Archive  |  Advertise  |  Contact Us  |  Subscription © 1998-2005 Directions Media. All Rights Reserved.

<--Previous

Next-->