will linked data be the new paradigm? - gis professionalgis/geospatial sales bounced back last year,...

Legal deposit libraries: a warning for mappers

Is it true what this book says about OS?

GIS and engineering in Syria

Choreographing a GIS for Sellafield

Fusion and the GEOINT multiplier

Europa’s open vision on data

plus News | People | Products & Services | Books | GiSPro’s columnists

issue 38 : February 2011

Will Linked Data be the new paradigm?

. . . joining the geography jigsaw

our mission. . .to help grow the business for the whole

GIS community by providing an effective,reliable and timely medium for news,

information and comment.

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read on. . .

Front cover: GIS relies on linking data.data.gov has freed up public sector data butcan we easily link it? Turn to page 10 to findout whether it is indeed the new paradigm.

Image © Dreamstime

Next Issue: APRIL 2011Copy dates Editorial: 7 March

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Don’t let it be the final solution, says our columnist.

p.26 Eurofile – GI is a tale of many cities, says Robin Waters.

p.28 AGI Column – Comprehensive plans for the AGI in 2011 are in place,explains Chris Holcroft.

For details of how to subscribeto GiSPro, turn to page 34.

contentsIssue No 38 February 2011

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p. 10

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Copyright and legal deposit librariesA timely reminder for those who publish maps, including digitally acrossthe web. Are you fulfilling your legal obligations?

Book reviews: hard hitting comments for OSGBWhy Where Matters is an important resource for those in GI. Itsconclusions for UK mapping will not be welcome by Ordnance Survey.

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Linked Data: a new paradigm?Concepts, limitations and the hype behind linked data are examinedby the authors.

The choreography of SellafieldA prize-winning GIS is at the heart of a 110-year plan for managingBritain’s top nuclear facility, explains Mike Cottrill.

The GEOINT multiplierGeo intelligence is a growing asset for the military and securitysector, reports Richard Groom from last month’s DGI conference.

GeoPlace to unravel Britain’s addressing muddleAfter more than a decade of friction across the public sector a newentity has been created. Our editorial team report.

GIS and engineeringIf you can persuade colleagues, there are opportunities for GIS inengineering and development, says Syria’s Muhammad Khaliq.

Europa’s open vision for dataData as a service and the freeing up of public sector data are at theheart of Warren Vick’s plans for Europa Technologies.

©

www.gisprofessional.co.uk

An each-way bet for GI as recession bites This issue has some interesting nuggets for those working in the UK geospatial industry; some good,others less so. First of all, our news story on the latest Daratech report reveals that globally geospatial ispoised to enjoy some good years after sluggish performance last year and a faltering 2009. Eight percent is predicted for 2011; but it’s difficult to see where numbers like that are going to come from in theUK except from the odd niche or two. Perhaps a new data corporation will help. More on that anon.

Daratech’s upbeat report points out that although geospatial accounts for a fraction of one per centof global GDP its influence and importance is growing. Investors too are starting to sit up as theyrealise just how pervasive geo has become across industry, the public sector and defence. We know it,now may be they do too. But just how many governments around the world get it?

We have to contrast this rosy outlook with the situation here in coalition UK. Some analysis byOrdnance Survey has revealed the changing face of the high street where estate agency and buildingsociety sites have tumbled; down a whacking 28% for the latter since 2008. On the brighter side, OSsay they have detected a 5% increase in betting offices since the recession. The survey was carried outusing address changes in OS Address Layer 2, which come from Royal Mail’s PAF coupled with infor-mation from the classifications within OS MasterMap Topography Layer. Clever what you can do withOS data, if you can afford it.

More worrying for UK plc and Ordnance Survey is a book published in Canada by Kim Geomatics (WhyWhere Matters), which asserts that OS “competition with the private sector explains why the UK, oncethe world’s leader in mapping, has declined to a position of importing almost all of its mapping tech-nology and even much base data”. The authors “contrast the USGS policy of not competing withindustry and providing low cost high quality geospatial data, which has made it a trusted data sourcewidely used by Americans and the world.” It seems rather disappointing that in an otherwise excel-lent textbook for global geo opportunities the authors attempt to compare chalk and cheese. Howmany cities rely on USGS for managing their real estate, road network and all public utilities? As ourreviewer says of this broadside, “Wow – discuss!”

This also raises the question, are we relying too much on the freeing up of government data to boostUK geo? The key to applying this data has to be in making it linkable to other sources. But that maynot be possible or too costly due the complexities involved, as our article on page 10 by Les Rackhamand Robin Waters reveals. The blogosphere has been busy on this topic with would-be developersclaiming the raw data is too poorly documented or uses unfamiliar formats rather than industry standardones. Outside of the immediate geo field potential users have also claimed that the data is prettyanodyne, “Yes Minister” stuff.

The new Government clearly believes they can help because the latest whiz idea is the Orwellian PublicData Corporation created to, in the words of the blurb, “. . . share best practice, drive efficiencies andcreate innovative public services for citizens and businesses.” The Public Data Corporation will alsoprovide real value for the taxpayer” they confidently conclude. One can just imagine it. Minister comesback from Cabinet enthused with freeing up data. Permanent Secretary suggests forming the PDC.‘Could be your triumph and lasting testament Minister.’ Result, lots of civil servants spared the axe.Remember, public does not equate to free.

Stephen Booth, editor

welcometo the February issue of GIS Professional. . .

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. . . competitionwith the privatesector explains

why the UK,once the world’sleader in map-

ping, hasdeclined. . .

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joining the geography jigsaw

from the editorIssue No 38 February 2011

Moving towards GeoPlaceOn the 3 December 2010, theDepartment of Communities andLocal Government (DCLG)announced the formation of a jointventure, GeoPlace, betweenOrdnance Survey and the LocalGovernment Group. The agreementaims to bring together addressinformation from OS and localauthorities to create a nationaladdress gazetteer database,providing one definitive source ofaccurate publicly-owned spatialaddress data for the public sector.The joint venture includes theacquisition of IntelligentAddressing, the company currentlyrunning the NLPG and NSG hubs onbehalf of local government. Thenational address gazetteer databasewill have product quality content byApril 2011, allowing customerengagement prior to productrelease between July andSeptember 2011. For a moredetailed report, refer to the Jan/Feb2011 issue of Geomatics World.

NLPG data conventionsupdate A new data entryconvention has been produced forthe UK’s National Land and PropertyGazetteer. The NLPG is maintained inaccordance with the data entryconventions (DEC) and best practicefor the NLPG, known as the DEC-NLPG. Version 3.1 clarifies andexpands on the guidance in theprevious v2.1 and brings it in linewith other updated documents likethe DEC-NSG version 3.5. It alsoanswers some common queriesraised by LLPG custodians, SNNofficers and users of NLPG data. It isanticipated that the changes will bein place by summer 2011. The newDEC-NLPG v3.1 reference manualcan be downloaded from the LocalGovernment Improvement andDevelopment website atwww.idea.gov.uk/idk/core/page.do?pageId=8035843.

Insurance sector opts for GIWith insurance fraud on the increasegeoinformation is increasingly beingused to track and uncover fraudulent

claims. According to research forOrdnance Survey, in 2010 there wasan 88% increase in the number ofinsurance fraud investigators (IFIs)using geographic information to buildup evidential cases for prosecution,with nearly four out of five now usinggeographic information. Also, 47%are now using GI to help withprosecutions compared to 25% in2009. Almost four in five (77%) IFIsare using geography to help with hotspot analysis, verify customerinformation and help detect fraud atclaim and policy inception stages.Sarah Adams, insurance and bankingsector manager at Ordnance Surveyadds: “Around half of insurance fraudinvestigators are now benefiting fromthe visualisation and story that mapsprovide to help build up evidentialcases for prosecution.”

Closing date for BCSawards The closing date for thenext British Cartographic Societyaward entries is 25 February 2011.The commercial award ceremonyforms part of the society’s annualsymposium, which will be held atShrigley Hall, Macclesfield, UK on 9June 2011. The four commercialaward categories comprise:Stanford’s award for printedmapping; Avenza award forelectronic mapping; John CBartholomew award for small scalemapping; and Ordnance SurveyMasterMap award for bettermapping. Further information,including entry details, is availableat www.cartography.org.uk/awards.

Draft regulation to limit GIIn the US, the national association ofprivate sector geospatial firms, MAPPS,has submitted comments to the FederalTrade Commission opposing regulatorylanguage that it believes would limitthe collection, sharing or use of“precise geolocation data”. Theassociation argues that the draftregulation, “Privacy in an Era of RapidChange”, threatens informationcollected by private and governmententities to perform tasks like emergencyresponse management, environmentalprotection and homeland security.

newsIssue No 38 February 2011

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www.gisprofessional.co.uk06 joining the geography jigsaw

Geospatialset for

growth

GIS/geospatial sales bounced back last year, according to a report bymarket analysts Daratech. After revenues shrunk by 2% in 2009, the marketis forecast to grow by more than 8.3% to almost US$5bn in 2011.Interestingly, the report notes that the influence and power of GIS andgeospatial technologies have largely gone unnoticed by investors and thegeneral public.

Many find it hard to accept that an industry with annual worldwidesales of less than one hundredth of one percent of global GDP can make adiscernable difference, yet we know that the technologies developed by theindustry contribute to an ever growing range of activities in all sectors ofthe world economy. This has not gone unnoticed by some fund managers,says Daratech’s CEO Charles Foundyller. They see the possibility of explosiveindustry growth within a relatively short time frame. ‘Growing awareness ofgeo-enabled software is good news for GIS/geospatial industry investorsand other stakeholders who, in some cases, have waited a long time for theknee in the J curve,’ says Foundyller.

According to the report, data is the fastest growing segment of thegeospatial business with a compound annual growth rate of 15.5% for thelast eight years – about twice the rate of that for software and services.‘Data sales, defence and security apps, mobile device apps, and web apps,will be the top business drivers,’ predicts Foundyller. Another segment towatch is engineering where CAD systems are typically not designed tointeroperate with GIS. Consequently, designers of buildings, roads, bridgesand other types of infrastructure don’t have an easy way to understandthe impact of their surroundings on their designs. This is changing as ourcase study on page 21 from Syria suggests. In future CAD systems and GISwill become far more closely linked, so that architects, developers andothers, will be able to easily see their designs, in situ, together with otherlocation-specific information related to their designs.

Globally, Daratech’s research indicates that the industry continues togrow faster in regions outside of Europe, North America and Asia Pacific.However, these regions account for only 8% of total industry sales and itmay be a while before they can make significant contributions to globaltotal. North America meanwhile accounts for almost half the industry’sannual sales and has enjoyed an 11% compounded annual growth rate forthe last 8 years, while Asia/Pacific with 8.7% is ahead of Europe’s 7.9%rate. For 2012 through 2015 Daratech is forecasting double-digitgeospatial industry revenue gains as the factors fuelling growth gainmore traction.

Daratech’s GIS/Geospatial Market Report is available for purchase onwww.daratech.com

CONTRACTS & PROJECTS

OS contract awarded1Spatial has won a contract toprovide software and services tosupport the delivery of the multiresolution data programme(MRDP). The Ordnance Survey’sMRDP aims to deliver newgeographic information dataproducts to meet the changingdemands of the market andcustomer needs and to driveinternal efficiencies through moreeffective management of datacontent from which products canbe created. Under the agreement,the company will provide expertisearound the development ofautomated generalisation software.The agreement will run for fouryears with an initial value of£595,000.

Survey deal for education Bluesky has signed an agreementwith Eduserv that will promote theuse of the latest aerial survey and3D height data in academia. Theagreement covers the company’saerial photography of England,Wales and parts of Scotland,together with accurate height data.The not-for-profit organisation willpromote the company’s data touniversities and colleges across theUK and Ireland.

Resolving property claimsForty-nine MobileMapper 6 GPS/GISfield terminals have been purchasedby the Kosovo Property Agency(KPA) and the Kosovo CadastreAgency (KCA) to map propertyboundaries and help resolve claims.According to Ashtech dealer,Lorenco & Co, the units wereselected for the easy-to-use mobilemapping software, integratedcamera, excellent price toperformance ratio, and the dealer’son-site product-training support.

HealthGIS Maps The AvonInformation Management andTechnology Consortium (AIMTC) haslaunched a new intranet mappingservice, HealthGIS Maps, to primarycare trust (PCT) clients in Avonusing Cadcorp’s GeognoSIS and SISMapModeller. The consortium worksalongside NHS staff to make surethat time, money, skills andequipment are used effectively toachieve better patient care. Theservice is available to all staff withaccess to the NHS network. It isanticipated that easy access togeographic information and theability for end users to create theirown bespoke maps will provide costsavings for staff who use GI forresource planning, servicedevelopment and performancemonitoring.

Rapid access TamworthBorough Council is aiming toimprove services to the public witha new system that gives access toinformation held in differentcouncil systems. The GGP Systems’NGz gazetteer managementsoftware links information togetherusing a centralised database of allproperties, land and streets. Thesoftware will be used to manage

the council’s local land andproperty gazetteer. ‘Frontline staffwill be able to look up and verifyaddresses and, followingintegration with a number ofexisting systems, access a wealthof property related informationwith just a few clicks of the mouseor a couple of key strokes,’ saysJon McDevitt, Tamworth’s corporateGIS manager.


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A computer-generated 3D map of Manchester’s urban trees hasbeen created to help authorities understand the impact of treeson the environment, public health and the aesthetic qualities ofthe region. A consortium of organisations commissioned Blueskyafter learning about the company’s ProximiTREE software.Derived from aerial photography, the system generates anaccurate map detailing the precise location and extent of treesand their proximity to buildings and other landscape features.

Mappingurban trees

e n v i r o n m e n t i n f o r m a t i o n a t y o u r f i n g e r t i p s

BS0065AD

/GIS

PRO

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Solar Panel Mapping

Thermal Imagery

3D Building Models

ProximiTREE™

LiDAR

Aerial Photography

www.bluesky-world.com/gp

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Incident support for JerseyJersey Fire and Rescue Service hasselected an incident support mappingsystem (ISMS) for deployment in itscommand support unit. The servicechose Cadcorp’s ISMS as it didn’twant a complex system that requireda trained specialist to manage butone that could be used by allpersonnel, from station manager topart-time support staff. ‘We have alimited number of fire fighters on theisland,’ says Will Stewart, informationservices manager, ‘. . . in order tomake the most of our limitedresources, we need to know whereour teams are at all times. We needto see the big picture – immediatelyand always’.

GIS offers big picture MISActive Management Systems hasselected Cadcorp to providemapping and geographic informationprocessing capabilities for itsmodular housing managementproduct, ActiveH. The benefits ofadding geography to housing

management systems are recognisedby MIS’ housing associationcustomers like Cottsway Housing.‘We have gone from a situation inwhich GIS was the preserve of a fewspecialist staff, to one in which allActiveH users have access togeographic information,’ says NickHarris, head of ICT at CottswayHousing. ‘By using GIS to mapbusiness intelligence data linked toour housing management system,we can all see the big picture’.

Addressing propertyvacancies Ashfield District Councilhas introduced a revised refusecollection programme to reduce costsand minimise the environmentalimpact. The project is supported by anonline web application andunderpinned by the National Landand Property Gazetteer, according toIntelligent Addressing. The new routeswere mapped and addresses for eachof the 30,000 affected householdsextracted from the gazetteer for aninitial mailshot.

Geospatial for defencePitney Bowes Business Insight hasannounced its involvement in aproject commissioned by the UK’sMinistry of Defence (MOD) andmanaged by Lockheed Martin UKIS&S. The project aims to establish acoherent geospatial capability forUK Defence by developingstandardised tools and commongeospatial services that seamlesslywork with civilian/emergencyservices data. PBBI has supportedthe common geospatial tool set(CGTS) research project deliveryteam since 2008.

The global insurer, RSA, is the firstcommercial customer to takeadvantage of OS VectorMap Localafter signing a deal with OrdnanceSurvey. The new mapping willallow the insurer to implementcustomised applications in supportof activities such as riskassessment, accumulationassessment and major incidentmanagement.


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RapidEye has signed a one-yearframework contract with theinstitutions and bodies of theEuropean Union through the JointResearch Centre (JRC) for thesupply of satellite remote sensingdata products and services. Thecontract was signed in December2010 and replaces the formercontract, which expired in thesame month.

The municipality of Groningen inHolland has chosen VicreaSolutions’ Neuron PropertyRegistration System (BAG), basedon Cadcorp web mapping and GIStechnology. The system will be usedto comply with the “NederlandseOverheid Referentie Architectuur”(NORA), the Dutch governmentreference architecture.

Somerset County Council has gonelive with a highways managementsystem based on Confirm, PitneyBowes Business Insight’sinfrastructure asset maintenanceand management system. Thecouncil’s system enables mobile-enabled management of highwaydefects between Somerset’shighway inspectors and its highwaycontractor, Atkins.

Balfour Beatty WorkPlace hasmoved to Confirm OnDemandto support its £100 millionhighways services partnershipwith Southampton CityCouncil. The on-demandenvironment of Pitney BowesBusiness Insight’sinfrastructure assetmaintenance and managementsystem has reduced hardware,implementation andmanagement costs.

The US National GeospatialIntelligence Agency (NGA) hassigned a five-year contract renewalwith Erdas. The agreement includessupport and upgrades for NGA’sexisting software holdings andpreferred buying arrangements foradditional products, licences andsoftware maintenance renewals.

www.gisprofessional.co.uk joining the geography jigsaw

GIS live at NorthernIreland WaterA new corporate web-based GIS system hasgone live at Northern Ireland Water based onCartology.NET web GIS software fromInnogistic, which has recently been awardedMicrosoft gold certified partner status. Thesystem is available to all NI Water staff viatheir corporate intranet and provides real-time access to the corporate asset register(CAR), the water authority’s Oracle 10g basedgeospatial warehouse.

The machine wins. . .In a study of over 300 manually planned routes, PostcodeAnywhere’s route planning software, Route Optimiser, hasoutperformed manual routing. The study took the form of a“find the fastest route” competition and involved entrantsvisiting 20 waypoints and meeting two timeslot deadlines.A prize of £250 was awarded to Mr Gabhin Hill for thefastest route plotted by hand. However, over a third ofentrants failed to deliver to both timeslots punctually andthose that did ended up with routes that took, on average,eight hours and 17 minutes to complete – almost an hourand twenty minutes over the optimal answer!

GGP Systems’ new website(www.ggpsystems.co.uk) nowincludes customer case studies,white papers and videos, andbusiness and technical blogs,plus product literature,company information and GISand gazetteer managementnews and events.

Edge-Pro for Information Systems isnow the official distributor for theErdas Apollo suite of products inEgypt, providing sales and technicalsupport, product training andcustomisation and consulting.

Weihai Municipal Government haswon the 2010 China Cityinformation application award forits implementation of Intergraph’sincident management product forits emergency operations centre(EOC) at the recent 2010 ChinaDevelopment Forum on CityInformatisation held in Suzhou,China.

Infotech Enterprises has announcedthat its existing UTG (utilities,telecom and government) businessis being re-branded as the “networkand content engineering” divisionor “N&CE” for short.

Shibboleth open source softwarecan be used to set up securegeospatial services that complywith the Inspire directive, accordingto an Open Geospatial Consortiuminteroperability experiment built onESDIN best practice. Theexperiment aimed to advance bestpractices for implementing

PEOPLE

New recruits Cadcorp hasexpanded its sales and developmentteams with four new appointments.Ian Robinson has previously workedin GIS sales to the civil engineeringand business mapping sectors whileChris Rose has experience in bothdirect and channel sales in theemergency services, local authoritiesand public sector markets. Both jointhe company’s UK sales team. Also,Kishor Bodduwho joins the coredevelopment team from a UK supplierof aerial photography as well as ChuHoang, an experienced gamingsoftware developer. Bodduwho andHoang will be focusing on applicationdevelopment and web mapping.

New presidents appointedTodd Oseth has joined IntermapTechnologies as its president and chiefexecutive officer. Oseth’s 30 years ofleadership at technology companies hasencompassed product management,sales, marketing, engineering andoperations in the network, computingand data storage industries. He replacesHoward Nellor, a member of the boardof directors, who has been interim CEOsince August 2010.

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Wednesdays”, members of the publicsector can watch, hear and interactwith presentations on gazetteerproducts free of charge.

Ordnance Survey has now movedto its new head office at AdanacPark on the outskirts ofSouthampton. The new address isAdanac Drive, Southampton, Hants,SO16 0AS. The customer servicecentre number remains the sameat 08456 05 05 05 and currentemail addresses are retained.

As of January 2011, satellite imageryand geo-information company, SpotImage, and Infoterra, subsidiaries ofAstrium Services, have combined toform a new geo-informationbusiness division of Astrium.

The first call for papers has beenissued for the Remote Sensing andPhotogrammetry Society annualconference: Earth observation in achanging world, taking place on13-15 September 2011 atBournemouth University, UK.Abstract submission opened on 31January and the deadline forsubmission is 31 March. For moreinformation, email Dr Ross Hill [email protected] orvisit www.rspsoc2011.org.

ARVAtec SRL, which specialises inGIS systems for GIS point andborder determination uses, is nowthe distributor for Ashtech GISmapping products in Italy.

VIASAT GeoTechnologies hasjoined RapidEye’s Canadianteam of distributors. Foundedin 1991, the distributordelivers consulting andsoftware engineering servicesthat harness geoinformationtechnology.

MapMechanics has acquired therights to the TruckStops vehiclerouting and scheduling optimisationsystem and OptiSite, an associatednetwork modelling system from US-based systems developer,MicroAnalytics.

In a USD $804,518 contract with thenational mapping agency of France,the Institut Géographique National(IGN), Intermap Technologies willsupply IGN with digital terrainmodels for portions of southeasternFrance and the island of Corsica toimprove its altimetric database inthese regions.

Geosystems Hellas S.A, an Erdasdistributor, is collaborating with theMediterranean Agronomic Instituteof Chania (MAICh) and e-GEOS on athree-month project, which willevaluate the ability to remotelysense the Greek island of Crete. Thecompany’s products will be used fordata processing and results analysisfor the project. In addition, ErdasApollo is being used to support localplanning initiatives for the state ofKarnataka in southern India. Erdaswas also used last year to assist inthe clean-up of storm damage aftera tornado swept through the forestsin the state of Saxony in Germany.

Intermap Technologies has receiveda USD $12.4m contract to provide3D digital elevation models andorthorectified radar images as partof a national spatial datainfrastructure programme to updatethe client’s current 1:50,000-scalebase map. The geospatial data willbe used for topographic mapproduction to manage sustainableforestry projects and to supportother local infrastructure needs.

BRIEFS

Bluesky has signed up to theESRI (UK) partners and allianceprogramme as a data partner.The partnership aims tomaximise the potential of eachcompany’s knowledge andmarket position to developdata solutions and products.

Aligned Assets has announced that,from January through to March, everyWednesday, WebEx demonstrationswill be available both morning andafternoon. Through “WebEx

joining the geography jigsaw www.gisprofessional.co.uk

New BCS presidentThe British Cartographic Society (BCS)has elected Peter Jolly (pictured),cartographic consultant for Esri, as itspresident. Also, Rob Sharpe, industrymanager of Esri UK’s technicalsolutions group, has been elected tothe BCS council. Both appointmentswill bring with them in-depth GISknowledge and experience to helpinspire new approaches to cartography.

standards on federated security intransactions involving geospatialdata and services.

Snowflake Software’s new customerportal (support.snowflakesoftware.com) has now gone live,providing an improved level ofmanagement and ownership.

Issue No 38 February 2011


Linked Dataenables an

application witha suitable linkeddata browser tostart with one

data source andthen movethrough apotentially

endless web ofdata sources. . .

“

““Easier data sharing will help us

to maximise the reuse of data,increase the success rate for newinitiatives, reduce duplication of

activity and save on costs. LinkedData is seen as the only practical

way of achieving this.”UK Location Programme,Linking information and

location

THE CONCEPT OF associating data items or objects bylocation is one with which we are all familiar. Bycreating such links we are able to derive informationabout locations and the relationships between objectssharing common locations. For example, by linkingsocio-economic data from various sources to addressesin a land and property gazetteer, it is possible toidentify areas of social deprivation in a way that wouldnot be possible if location was not used in the analysis.

These sorts of spatial relationships can be established“on the fly” using GIS tools to create a snapshot intime or can be established and maintained using someform of cross-referencing – often in a database.

Sir Tim Burners-Lee’s passionate advocacy of freedata is based on the new idea (for the web) of LinkedData and is part of the more elegantly phrased SemanticWeb. It is presented as a novel mechanism forestablishing and exploiting resources on the web thatare capable of being automatically linked. So machineswill understand the semantics of these resources. This,we are told, will enable us to “leverage” informationfrom hitherto inaccessible sources.

These two articles will try to explain some of thekey concepts and separate the reality from the spinand relate the new terminology to what we’veunderstood before. Today information technology issufficiently mature that many concepts have beenaround for a long time. However, in time-honouredtradition, inventing new ways of describing themmakes them more “sexy” and encourages users topay for them! Here we examine whether Linked Datais really something “new” and whether it is “theonly practical way of achieving” easier data sharingwhen using location as the common denominator.And if it is, are there any limitations on its use?

UK Government is promoting the publication ofLinked Data on its website data.gov.uk1 and a numberof information resources are available on the web.

Some location data is now available in Linked Dataform from Ordnance Survey2; from Transport Direct;and a number of agencies such as British GeologicalSurvey are setting up pilots with location data.

Linked Data – some basic concepts3 Linked Datauses the concepts of (i) publishing structured data that ismachine readable and (ii) establishing links betweendisparate data resources so that machines can navigatethe links and treat the web as a single database. LinkedData refers to mechanisms for exposing, sharing, andconnecting pieces of data, information, and knowledgeusing Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) and theResource Description Framework (RDF). Currently mostdata on the web is presented to users in humanreadable form as HTML encoded documents.

The single “database” is spread across the webbut requires relationships between resources andindividual data items. These relationships are quitearbitrary and not hierarchical or relational – no one

resource has any greater importance than any other.Linked Data enables an application with a suitable

linked data browser to start with one data source andthen move through a potentially endless web of datasources connected by RDF links. By following theselinks, the user can navigate from one informationsource to another, e.g. from administrative area nameto population statistics to economic activity to afootball team and so on. This is analogous to crawlingthe web by following hypertext links on HTMLdocuments. But, by following RDF links and usingquery capabilities enabled by Linked Data, it ispossible to return machine readable datasets ratherthan just HTML documents.

The standard framework for modelling resourcesfor Linked Data is RDF which uses statements aboutresources in scope expressed as subject-predicate-object. These expressions are known as “triples” inRDF terminology. The subject denotes a resource, thepredicate denotes properties of the resource and alsoexpresses a relationship between the subject and theobject – another resource. For example, one way torepresent the idea “The Thames flows throughOxford” in RDF is as the triple:

Subject: “Thames”, Predicate: “flows through”, Object: “Oxford”. RDF can be written in a number of formats, e.g. XML

Linked data: the new paradigm forgeographic information? In the first of a two-parter, Les Rackham,

ConsultingWhere and Robin Waters, RSW Geomatics, look at the reality and the spin ofLinked Data. Is it really something new? What are the key concepts? Are there any

limitations to its use? And can the GI community afford to ignore it?

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linked data part one



The potentialfor much

greater use ofGI is obvious aslong as we candeliver Linked

Data that isrelevant to a

wide range ofapplications.

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and the details will be covered in Part II of this articlein the next edition of GIS Professional.

For now it should be understood that Subjects,Predicates and Objects need to be catalogued orregistered unambiguously – at least within a particular“scope” so that machines can make the links.

So what is involved in creating Linked Data?• Resources in scope – identify items in our domain

of interest – the Subjects and Objects which arepotentially linkable. These are “resources” and,following the example above would be databasesof Rivers and Towns.

• Information and non-information things – on theweb, documents, images, and other media files, areinformation resources. But many of the things –subjects and objects – about which we want toshare data are not.: they are real people, realphysical products, real locations, concepts, etc.. All“real-world objects” outside the web are non-information resources. A house in the real-world is anon-information resource but images of the house,its land title, a plan of the house and other recordsabout the house are information resources.

• URIs – resources are identified using UniformResource Identifiers (URIs).

• Representations – information resources can berepresented in several different formats (e.g.RDF/XML), qualities or languages, just asgeographic features can be represented indifferent ways (e.g. names, co-ordinate strings,geometric primitives).

• Vocabularies – well-known vocabularies shouldbe used wherever possible. New terms shouldonly be defined where there are no terms inexisting vocabularies. Unfortunately, locationdata is not currently well served by suchvocabularies in terms of feature types orgeographical features themselves. Place-namesare notoriously ambiguous – especially withrespect to “extent”. Does “Oxford” relate to theadministrative area “City of Oxford”; to a built-up area generally described as “Oxford”; or tothe area with an “OX” postcode? Locality names,e.g. “Cowley” are even less well defined.

• Linking to other data sources – By definition linksrequire two or more data resources. Links – RDFtriples – can be created manually or automatically.Both require knowledge of the target datasets andthat they are in a suitable form – e.g. on data.gov.ukor the OS website. Anyone familiar with the variousgeographies of the UK – place names, addresses,various administrative boundaries for example – willimmediately understand the limitations ofautomatic, or even manual, linking.

• Sustainable links – Links must also becontinuously maintained. If location is involvedthen the features or spatial things need to havedefined life-histories and some form of

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versioning must be adopted.• Publishing Linked Data – “things” must be

identified with HTTP URIs and data sources mustreturn an RDF/XML description of the resource. Ifthe URIs identify non-information resources thenthere has to be redirection to informationresources describing them. There must also befurther links to other resources to provide thedatabase on which queries can be performed.

Current developments? In the UK, two primesources of Linked Data are data.gov.uk and OrdnanceSurvey. The Linked Data page on the data.gov.ukwebsite (http://data.gov.uk/linked-data) providesaccess to a number of resources from public bodies inthe transport, legislative, educational and financialsectors. Ordnance Survey provides a number of LinkedData resources (http://data.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/).These include the 1:50 000 Scale Gazetteer; Code-Point Open (geocoded unit postcodes); and BoundaryLine, the administrative geography for Great Britain.

The UK Location Programme is promoting LinkedData and has issued some guidance. It is also designingURI sets for locations (http://location.defra.gov.uk/).

Both the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) andthe International Standards Organisation (TechnicalCommittee ISO/TC 211) have established workinggroups on Linked Data.

Discussion Linked Data as a concept is here to stayand clearly has a future. It could be argued that GIStechnology is entirely based on linking – if only at thelevel of a common coordinate space. Latterly wehave seen the growth of structured GI databases thatprovide unique identifiers (at least within a particularsystem) that can be used for linking geographic andnon-geographic objects and information.

Linked Data is a bandwagon onto which we havethe opportunity to jump! The potential for much greateruse of GI is obvious as long as we can deliver LinkedData that is relevant to a wide range of applications.

However, there are some major technical issuesto be confronted:• Linkable and linked4 – there is a world of



. . . much of thepush for LinkedData seems to

have come fromusers. . . of themany datasetsbeing providedon data.gov.ukwith location

now being seenas a prime

linkage.

“

“difference between an information resource thatis linkable (published as structured data withclear subjects and objects with URIs) and datathat has been linked (published with explicit RDFtriples). Turning linkable data into Linked Data isnot trivial and, although there are some toolsthat can help, they cannot remove the need tocreate the linkage in the first place. We believethat there are many GIS tools that could help thisprocess. In fact, much GIS analysis is based onimplicit links (from the location of things)whereas links are, by definition, explicit.

• Translation of the information resource into RDF –this may be relatively easy if the data is wellmodelled in a standard conceptual schemalanguage such as UML. There is a danger thatturning a current data resource into Linked Datamay be resource intensive and could be used asan excuse for not making the data availablequickly. Government priority is to make dataavailable in existing formats before devotingeffort to creating real Linked Data.

• Authorities – recognised authorities are needed ifLinked Data is going to be useful. There are clearauthorities for the names and boundaries ofadministrative areas and census output areas inUK. But who are the authorities for locality namesand boundaries? Unfortunately, the world doesnot divide into neat atomic units that can be usedas building bricks for all types of geography. Eventhe semantics of geographical features differ fromdomain to domain. Think for example, of thediffering concepts inherent in the use of thegeography of rivers for environmental applicationsas compared to navigation. This does not meanthat linkages cannot be established but that therewill be some real limitations on the value of thelinkages and the quality of the results fromquerying Linked Data.

• Real world, abstraction and representation – forboth experienced and inexperienced users of GI,there is often confusion between the “thing” inthe real world (the actual house), its abstraction(how it is modelled) and its representation in adataset (by address, coordinate pair, polygon orimage). What does the URI really identify andwhat type of object is being linked?

• Vagaries of location – Linked Data is only nowbeing seriously adopted for location orgeographical data, often by those that have notworked with this type of data before. Thelocation “thing” comes in many guisesdepending on the viewpoint and application – italso has many representations. The use ofpostcodes for non-postal purposes has becomevery common but great care must be taken withtheir geography – there is, for example, nodefinitive set of postcode polygons.

• Maintenance – subjects and objects change over

time. They have life cycles. They are created; can bechanged in terms of their location, extent,relationships to other geographical things; and theycan be destroyed. These life-cycles can be verycomplex, not least because of the number ofproperties that can change whilst the real worldobject appears to remain the same. Maintenance oflinkages may prove to be a considerable overhead.This is however no different, at least conceptually tothe maintenance of conventional databases.

Beyond these technical issues, there is the question ofleadership. There is currently agreement between theCabinet Office (for data.gov.uk); Defra (responsible forthe UK Location Programme and meeting the EU’sINSPIRE Directive); and Ordnance Survey (technicalaspects of INSPIRE and a major reference datasupplier). But, arguably, much of the push for LinkedData seems to have come from users and potentialusers of the many datasets being provided ondata.gov.uk with location now being seen as a primelinkage. There is a real possibility that commercialinterests may produce de-facto or proprietarystandards that may not be ideal for the long term.

Conclusions Is the hype surrounding Linked Datajustified? The jury is still out. There is not yet enoughpractical experience of providing or using LinkedData – geographical or otherwise. Should it thereforebe promoted by government as the ultimatesolution? Might it not actually slow down andincrease the cost of opening government data in theshort term?

In creating a business case for developing LinkedData, the benefits may not be at all obvious at theoutset whereas the costs of creating and maintainingthe links may be all too real. In so many cases, thecosts are undeniably internal and very specific; butthe benefits are external and diffuse.

But Linked Data is a bandwagon that the GIcommunity cannot ignore and which desperatelyneeds our collective expertise to ensure that itcontinues in the right direction at a sensible speed.

• In the second article the authors look at someof the more detailed technical aspects of LinkedData and provide examples of how RDF can becreated and used with existing datasets – rightdown to the SPARQL endpoints!

Footnotes:1) http://data.gov.uk/linked-data2) http://data.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/3) http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/pub/

LinkedDataTutorial/#intro4) Oi Sir Tim; hands off my spreadsheet, Ian Painter,

AGI GeoCommunity 2010 http://www.agi.org.uk/past-events/2010/9/30/agi-geocommunity-2010-day-2.html

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columnist adena schutzberg

Adena Schutzberg isPrincipal of ABS

Consulting Group Inc.and Executive Editor

of DirectionsMagazine,

www.directionsmag.com

www.gisprofessional.co.ukjoining the geography jigsaw

Every issue Iread reinforcesmy evaluationat this point:the lack of

humaninterventionmeans a very“hit or miss”experience.

“

“

IN MY EARLY DAYS of GIS I was asked to make a mapthat showed the fish habitats with a fish symbol andthe bird habitats with a bird symbol. My supervisorshowed me how to do it using two queries. ‘First youdo one for the fish,’ he explained, ‘then you do onefor the birds’. That didn’t sound right to me. Ithought you should be able to do it in one step. Infact, there should be a way to tell the software whichsymbol to use based on whether the location wascoded fish or bird in the database. I didn’t know it atthe time but I’d “invented” a “look-up table.” (A

friend from college “invented” multiplication whenhe was in grade school. He works at Google now.)So, I pored over the manuals to find how to do thismagical thing. And, I was jazzed to find it was notthat hard at all! When I told my supervisor, heinstructed me to do two queries.

And, to be fair, we did work for a consulting firmwhere clients could have any two of the following intheir deliverable: quick turnaround, low cost, highquality. He was aiming for “quick turnaround” andmy learning more about GIS was clearly not apriority. While I loved the company, I left that job notlong after this conversation.

I was thinking of that incident recently as Idiscussed authoritative Web content and searchengines with graduate students in my current class. I’dasked them how good were they at search, what toolsthey used and if they used “advanced search.” Theresponses were all the same: “I’m good at searchbecause I find what I need. I use Google and I don’t use“advanced search.” That’s what I feared. My students,like my supervisor all those years ago, had a “goodenough” solution. Their view of the world might besummarized this way: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

And, that’s a good rule if the return on exploringa better solution is expected to be low and the riskof doing so is high. Apparently, my supervisor andstudents had those expectations.

How then do those creating these new tools (andperhaps selling them!) make a compelling case to

these busy people to even look at the new options?A few stories.

Years ago I read an article in the Wall StreetJournal (WSJ) about a new anti-spam tool. Thereview basically said it was the best thing since slicedbread. And, it had a two-week trial. I tried it. Afterthe effort of getting it to work (around my threee-mail addresses and anti-virus software), it workedas promised. I bought it and used it until I leftWindows behind.

More recently I worked with my instructional

designer at Penn State University to help me find atool to enable a “graduate seminar” in our onlineenvironment. I wanted my students, all over thecountry, who logged in at different times, to “talk toone another.” She came back with a suggestion. Ispent a few hours exploring the tool calledVoiceThread, which has since been licenseduniversity-wide.

In the last few months I’ve been exploringPaper.li, a tool that creates a daily online “paper”from links found in selected Twitter feeds. Every issueI read reinforces my evaluation at this point: the lackof human intervention means a very “hit or miss”experience. I’m not bothering reading any moreissues, or contemplating using this technology.

What then needs to happen to push someonefrom their “good enough solution” to even try adifferent one? Here are my suggestions:

– a recommendation from a trusted source(e.g. WSJ or colleague

– easy (virtually no effort) access to theproduct/website for evaluation

– reproducible results (good or bad)

No, we can’t let the “good enough” solution bethe final solution! Be brave! Try something new

today!

The “Good Enough” Solution Just what is it that drives us totry something new, when most of us go for “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”? Be brave, says

Adena Schutzberg, try something new or you could be stuck with the birds and thefishes and twice the workload!



THE RESTORATION WORK being conducted on theSellafield nuclear site in west Cumbria is part of awork programme spanning the next 110 years – theLifetime Plan. Although the site occupies only asmall geographical area (about one square mile) it ishome to one of the most complex nuclear licensedsites in the world.

The cost of delivering the Lifetime Plan isestimated at £42bn and will involve many physicalchanges to the site landscape including large-scalebuilding and decommissioning works being carriedout alongside current and new operating facilities.The spatial and temporal planning of these activitiesis critical in order for efficient, effective and safedelivery of the work programme.

To meet the challenge of planning this workSellafield Ltd, the organisation responsible fordecommissioning the site, is using a GIS to visualizethe ‘choreography’ of the site over the 110-yearperiod. The solution provides visualisation of thecomplex interaction of all aspects of the programme,including spatial animation of programme timelines,which enable efficient and effective site planningand asset management, producing expected multi-million pound savings.

The use of GIS in this context relies on the basicprinciple of being able to join spatial information or‘geo-data’ depicting the location of current and

future assets on the site, with temporal informationrelating to the associated project timescales (Fig. 1).Sellafield’s Lifetime Plan GIS has been created usingESRI’s ArcGIS software, together with the TrackingAnalyst extension, to bring both visualisation andtime-awareness to the solution. For the first time, thespatial evolution of the Sellafield site can bevisualised and explored on an interactive map.

By far the biggest challenge for the GIS team increating and developing the system has, andcontinues to be, the acquisition, organisation andrefinement of data.

Acquiring the geo-data Much of the data relatingto current features on the site resides within as-builtdesign drawings held in CAD format. Someinformation still resides on paper drawings, however,much of these are now accessible electronically butonly in a scanned-in image format. The compatibilityassociated with the data held in CAD format wasn’ttoo difficult to deal with; for example, theinformation depicting the current buildings, roadsand rail on the site was well captured in the CADsystem and, therefore, easy to import into the GIS.

The information relating to future building anddecommissioning projects, however, was a little moredifficult to obtain. Although the various projectswere listed in the Lifetime Plan, the information was

The choreography of Sellafield A prize-winning GIS is at theheart of a 110-year plan to manage Britain’s leading nuclear facility, explains Mike Cottrill.

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GIS for site management: sellafield


Figure 1: Components of the SiteDevelopment GIS.



high-level and without any real detail or informationregarding location on the Sellafield site. So a smallteam within the Strategy & Programs directorate wastasked with collating detailed information regardingthese future projects by contacting the 70+operating units within the business.

The end-product was a spatial dataset containinginformation on new-build projects spanning theLifetime Plan. In cases where the on-site locationwas known, this information was captured in theGIS; in cases where the on-site location had not beenidentified yet, a series of ‘marker’ features werecreated in the GIS and located in a ‘holding area’outside the Sellafield site. As these projects evolveand the sites are determined, the features are thengiven a correct on-site location and ultimatelyshape/topology, thus building upthe accuracy of the map.

Acquiring the temporal dataFor the temporal information, aseparate non-spatial databasesystem called the Sellafield SiteRemediation Model (SSRM) was thesource of data for timingsassociated with each of thestrategic buildings (future andcurrent) on the site. This systemhad been set up by a separatedepartment within the businesswhere location-enablement wasnot a requirement. A simple exportfrom this system was required toobtain the data.

Further work was also carriedout to determine the varioustransport requirements of theLifetime Plan; in this case geo-data for roads and rail is joined with temporalinformation relating to the year-on-year fluctuationsin traffic volumes on these transport routes.

Joining, Visualisation and Animation After adegree of data manipulation, to allow the joining ofthe temporal data to the geo-data, it is possible tomap out and visualise the evolution of buildings,year-on-year, throughout the Lifetime Plan. In thecase of transport moves it is possible to depict thevolume of traffic expected on the site’s road and railnetwork year-on-year. Figure 2 shows examples fromthe system depicting the building layout in 2010,2050 and 2100. This type of interactive map allowsthe business to visualise the location and timing ofprojects in the Lifetime Plan. The benefits associatedwith this are now being realised.

Benefits The system has provided the ability toquickly and effectively visualise temporal dataspanning the entire Lifetime Plan, e.g. when and

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where buildings are being constructed anddecommissioned, and when and where transportroutes across the site are being most heavily used. Insimple terms, it provides a more effective and



Figure 2: Three mapstaken from the

Lifetime Plan GIS. Themaps depict the

layout of buildings in2010, 2050 and 2100;the different colours

representing thedifferent phases of a

nuclear facility.

Please note, in order to meet securityrestrictions the full map legends andannotations used in conjunction withthese maps cannot be displayed.



As the uptakefor GIS has

grown the needfor appropriate

controls andprocedures tomanage the

data, hardwareand softwarehave been put

in place and GISis fast becomingcorporate/enter

prise. . .

“

“

interactive way of communicating the complex workprogramme.

In the area of strategic or long-term planning ofthe site the system has made it much easier to revealany development conflicts between the manydifferent projects that are underway and scheduledfor the future. It is now possible for the strategyteam to develop a fully considered site plan takingtime to analyse the best location for a given project.The benefit in this case is improved efficiency duringthe siting phase of all construction projects.

For near-term and current project work thesystem acts as a communication tool allowing anyproject team to quickly understand where and whenother work on the site is taking place. It providesprojects with a mechanism to understand what their‘neighbour’ is going to be doing and plan-ahead.The benefit in this case is the avoidance of anyclashes such as availability of space or demand onthe road/rail network. Furthermore, efficienciesassociated with sharing of common resources acrossmultiple projects are possible.

In the area of Stakeholder and Regulatorcommunications, the system has provided animproved means for demonstrating sitedevelopment. To this end, it has been usedeffectively to help resolve planning issues with localauthorities; assist with regulator communicationsand presentations; support the NuclearDecommissioning Authority in the planning of newnuclear sites within the county; and provideassistance during the Cumbrian floods of last year.

In addition to direct benefits, the system has alsoled to a number of unexpected spin-offs for thewider organisation. Off the back of the Lifetime Planwork a central GIS repository has been developed;this is now being made available to all directorates inthe business. For example, the information is beingused to a greater/lesser extent by the followingteams: Engineering, Environmental Health Safety andQuality (EHS&Q), Land Quality, Operations Support,Emergency Response/Planning and Finance.

In some areas this extended use of the system

has led to an improvement in the quantity andquality of the data held. As the uptake for GIS hasgrown the need for appropriate controls andprocedures to manage the data, hardware andsoftware have been put in place and GIS is fastbecoming corporate/enterprise (for want of a betterdefinition!) in scope.

Summary / Future Although the geographicalfootprint of Sellafield is relatively small in area, the siteis considered to be one of the world’s most complexand hazardous industrial sites. The safe managementand decommissioning of the site is thereforeparamount, which is why the government arespending billions of pounds delivering the restorationprogramme. Combine this with the changing politicallandscape surrounding nuclear development,including the immediate adjacency of a proposednuclear reactor site at Braystones (north of Sellafield),it is fair to say the area will continue to be one ofremarkable change for many years into the future.

To allow these physical changes in the landscapeto take place in a safe and sustainable manner theneed for innovative solutions that provide benefit tothe work will be in demand. The opportunity to usegeographic information and associated technologyto aid the planning process and subsequent workdelivery is inevitable, which is why Sellafield Ltd haschosen to formalise the development of its GIScapability.

The Lifetime Plan GIS work described in thisarticle won ‘highly commended’ at the 2010 AGIAwards (Fig. 3), 1st prize at the ESRI UK Conferenceand gained ‘Excellent’ at Sellafield’s internal BusinessExcellence Awards. Looking to the future, thechallenge for the team now is to grow the GIScapability in new areas in a way that will bringfurther benefits to the business.

About the Author

Mike Cottrill (BSc, MA) has occupied the role ofsenior technical advisor on GIS at Sellafield Ltdfor three years. Previous experience in the GIspace includes postings with MWH, working onwater utilities projects; GDC, working on localgovernment projects; and Natural England,working on the ‘Open Access’ mapping project.He also sits on the committee for AGI NorthernGroup (www.agi.org.uk/north) Contact:[email protected]

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Figure 3: The Sellafield Ltd GIS team receive ‘highly commended’in the category of Innovation & Best Practice (Private Sector) atthe AGI Awards 2010. From left to right (Mike Cottrill, KarenPegler, Ray Buckingham, John Robison).



. . . there arecurrently more

than 1000buildings on the

site, twohundred ofwhich are

nuclearfacilities.

“

“

ESTABLISHED IN THE 1940s, Sellafield spans the entirehistory of the UK’s civil nuclear industry. The site startedlife as a Second World War Royal Ordnance factory butshortly after the war in 1947 the construction ofnuclear facilities began; firstly to produce materials fornuclear weapons and later to provide commercialenergy to the grid. The Calder Hall plant at Sellafieldwas the world's first civil nuclear power station capableof delivering electricity in commercial quantities.Powered by four Magnox reactors, Calder Hall beganoperations in 1956 and remained in operation 47 years.During this time many more nuclear facilities wereconstructed on the site, the emphasis being not only onthe production of nuclear energy but also thereprocessing and storage of nuclear material associatedwith Sellafield’s own activities and other national andinternational nuclear contracts.

Current site operations include Mixed Oxide (MOX)fuel manufacturing; reprocessing of fuels produced bynuclear power stations; storage of nuclear material andradioactive wastes; and decommissioning of the earlierlegacy plants. All these activities are managed byspecialist operating units and assisted by a vast numberof support services. To put this in context there arecurrently more than 1000 buildings on the site, twohundred of which are nuclear facilities. There is a largenetwork of electric, steam, water, drainage andchemical distribution lines, many of which areinterdependent. There are approximately 8000 staffwho work on-site with a huge range of skills andprocedures being delivered side-by-side to achievesafe, round-the-clock operations.

The challenge facing the company is to plan therestoration of the Sellafield site taking intoconsideration the following aspects:

Previous land use: – The site was used in the 1940s for armament

production resulting in ground contamination

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and associated legacy infrastructure.– Other nuclear facilities including waste stores,

which have previously been fully or partlyremoved.

Existing congested site arrangement:– Within its 262ha, the site contains:– 1400 buildings – 200 nuclear facilities– 40km roads– 15km rail routes

Complex network of existing and plannedutilities:– 110 km underground drains– 168 km water distribution pipework– 48 km high voltage cables– 30km steam distribution pipework– 21km active effluent pipework– 14 km chemical distribution pipework

Concurrent adjacent activities:– Nuclear chemical process plant operations– Nuclear material storage– New facility construction– Decommissioning– Demolition– 150 decommissioning and major projects

underway this year

Contamination– Radiological and chemotoxic contamination of

ground and groundwater exists due to previoususes of the site.

Interdependent facilities and processes– 60% of facilities on the site are considered shared

service facilities, i.e. their continued operation relieson upstream and downstream facilities.



The Sellafieldnuclear site inwest Cumbria.



THE DEFENCE GEOSPATIAL INTELLIGENCE conference isan annual event, which again took place at the QueenElizabeth II Conference Centre in Westminster at theend of January. This was my third DGI and, despite hardtimes for all, over 650 delegates had registered.Although this is an impressive figure, it was perhapsmore significant that the MoDs or defence forces from

forty-two countries were represented at this year’sevent. I did however feel that, although militarynumbers had held up, perhaps there were fewerdelegates from civilian government departments.

DGI means business DGI is special because onereally feels that it has an impact. Each year the issuesof the day are aired and one gets the impression thatthe participants listen and act, so that the followingyear measurable progress has been made on thatbatch of problems, leaving the speakers anddelegates to set and get stuck in to a new agenda forthe following year. The conference means businessand a lot is crammed into two very busy days.

The pattern of the conference was a morning ofplenary sessions, whichincluded three paneldiscussions followed byspecialist streams in theafternoon. The first panelsession was rather adisappointment because thepanelists had got togetherbeforehand and agreed acommuniqué that wasdelivered by the discussionmoderator. This was thenfollowed by speeches by eachmember of the panel, whichleft precious little time for

‘discussion’.The highlight of the first day was a keynote talk

by Air Marshall Sir Stuart Peach, currently Chief ofJoint Operations at the UK MoD, but formerlyDirector General of Defence Intelligence between2003 and 2006. His plea was to “keep it simple”,which he demonstrated by drastically shortening the

length of the title for his talk to “Geography onOperations”. He has seen too many cluttered mapsand urged the delegates to think of their audience:advice that would go down well anywhere.

Geography enables understanding Sir Stuart’sremarks reflected those of many others. “Create once,use often”, the “Perfection dilemma”, the “Share –Protect balance” and “Geography enablesUnderstanding” are mantras which sum up his viewsand concerns. By the “Perfection dilemma” he meansthat commanders need 80% solutions to be provided intime rather than 100% solutions late. He, and otherspeakers, saw this as a pragmatic solution to fundingcuts. But from the providers’ side came the commentthat the same commanders will criticise if they find flawsin the product. Something to work on, chaps!

The “Share – Protect balance” is in the spotlightfollowing Wikileaks. Several speakers picked up onthis and stressed the importance of establishing clearrules and communities of interest. However, as SirStuart said, there will always be a need to protectsome information. He urged the conference toremember that, “Geography enables Understanding”.

The military are affected by spending cuts andhave been making plans to deal with them. StuartHaynes, Director of the Defence Geographic Centre,Intelligence Collection Group has clearly beenputting some considerable thought into this. Hisproactive approach to the challenges and

Fusion: the GEOINT multiplier Geo intelligence is a growingasset for the military and security sector despite tough economic constraints for many

countries. Richard Groom attended the sector’s annual conference in London and foundplenty for the wider geo community to ponder on.

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report DGI 2011


‘Everything happenssomewhere, for areason’, was the mantrainside the conferencehall but things werehappening too in theexhibition area.

Problems ofnon-

interoperabilityare widespread

and severalorganisationshave decided

to develop‘defence’. . .

SDIs. . .

“

“


opportunities ahead was a breath of fresh air.Something his civilian counterparts could learn from.

Another well-worn phrase received a minormakeover at DGI. “Everything happens somewhere”became “Everything happens somewhere, for areason”. The purpose of Geo Intelligence (GEOINT) is,of course, to find the reason. The exhibition was largerthan last year’s and, as usual, there were plenty ofinteresting stands. The power of fusion wasdemonstrated graphically by two particular exhibitors.

GEOINT from AIS John Allan from “exactEarth”brought with him a system for tracking shipping inthe Gulf of Aden – or anywhere else for that matter.Nowadays all ships over 300 tonnes are obligedunder international law to have installed anAutomatic Identification System (AIS) transponder.The objective is to enable ports and national securityorganisations to track shipping. It is however onlydesigned to work within about 40 nautical miles ofthe coast as a collision avoidance tool.

The company has devised a method of trackingships anywhere by using two satellites in polar orbitto pick up the signals from all shipping – even in theopen ocean. They have solved the technical problemsassociated with differentiating the signals and areable to plot the position, heading, speed and identityof each vessel. Put this data into a GIS, and itbecomes possible to look at trajectories and observepatterns of behaviour. The data can be analysed todetect departures from expected behaviour, whichcan then be investigated.

Social networking Another company, i2 Group, hasbeen around for a couple of decades. Their specialismis social network analysis. Nothing to do with Facebook,I was assured. The data is more likely to come frommobile phone traffic records and emails. The idea is toobserve who communicates with whom, when andhow. From that, the system can build up a network ofsocial (or business) contacts. One can imagine this sortof technology in use for analysing contacts withinsuspected terrorist cells but it could equally well be usedto look at anyone’s network. This does have rather awhiff of ‘big brother’ but one can also see applicationsfor analysing how people in businesses communicate.An interesting application is to compare how peopleactually communicate at work as opposed to how they

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are supposed to communicate.Astonishingly, social networking hasbeen carried out without geographyuntil August 2010 when i2 teamed upwith ESRI. Put the topology of socialnetworking together with geographyand the value of the tool is multipliedmany times.

Interoperability This was aconference with plenty of ‘wow’, butback down on earth another major problem for themilitary is standardisation. Several speakers related theirexperiences. Lora Muchmore is Director for BusinessEnterprise Integration, Deputy Under Secretary OfDefense (Installations & Environment) at the USDepartment of Defense. Her lengthy job title involvesthe equally big business of looking after US militaryfacilities worldwide. When she took up the job, shefound that there were 300 different managementsystems in use to maintain military installations and thatnone were interoperable. The solution was the fairlyobvious: introduce a real property unique identifier.

Problems of non-interoperability are widespreadand several organisations have decided to develop‘defence’ spatial data infrastructures (SDIs) as ameans of control. The Australian GovernmentDepartment of Defence appears to be the mostadvanced although representatives from the EU andBritain also expressed enthusiasm for the idea. Therewas a discussion panel on the subject of standardsduring which the panelists did actually debate theirpoints. There was also talk about the extent to whichmilitary and civilian bodies need to be interoperableand the need for standard procedures as well asdata. This question of military and civilian co-operation was of particular importance to the EU asmost of their missions are actually humanitarian.

So, what of the future? Sir Stuart expects morefusion with clearer direction and more sharing ofdata with clearer balance between openness andprotection. And some words of advice: he urged theaudience to learn from others, integrate, address thecustomer’s needs and make complexity simple. Oh…and come again next year!

• For more information, visithttp://www.wbresearch.com/dgieurope/home.aspx



report DGI 2011

A busy exhibitionwas also a chance

for old friendsand acquaintances

to catch up.



The initiativesupports the UK

LocationStrategy’s

concept of a“Core ReferenceGeography”. . .

“

“FOR MOST PEOPLE an address is a label attached tothe places where they live, work or perhaps shop.Somewhere with a letterbox or at least a recognisedentrance. As GI people we have always concernedourselves with location, although often at differingaccuracies depending on the application! But withthe rise of GIS and GPS-controlled delivery andemergency services, the lines between address andposition have become fuzzier. Location has becomethe ‘buzz’ word, usually meaning a place that youwill recognise when you get there.

In the UK, whilst many find postcodes (withassociated geocodes) reliable enough it is not alwaysaccurate or suitable for locating those features – suchas individual buildings – that are recorded on large-scale mapping like OS MasterMap. Ordnance Surveytherefore developed the Addresspoint and AddressLayer 2 products, which assign accurate coordinates toindividual addresses. This geo-coding of addresses isthe fuel that drives many GIS applications.

Meanwhile, the Local Government Group (LGG)contracted Intelligent Addressing to manage thecreation of the National Land and Property Gazetteer(NLPG) from individual local authority gazetteers,which have proved very effective for local authoritiesown use and for the emergency services. Geocodingof these gazetteers relied on a mixture of OSprovided information; derived data from OSmapping; and new GPS positioning. Repeatedattempts to bring these two competing datasetstogether have foundered – primarily due to a lack ofgovernment will and the need for competing publicsector agencies to make “profits”.

Sorting out this very British muddle has at lastmoved a step closer. In December 2011 the Departmentof Communities and Local Government (DCLG)announced the formation of a joint venture,“GeoPlace™”, between Ordnance Survey and LGG.Geoplace will develop a single definitive set of addressdata for England and Wales. This should finally resolvedifficulties arising from non-interoperability of Britain’stwo national address gazetteers. Geoplace will acquireIntelligent Addressing and all its intellectual propertyrights in the NLPG and the National Street Gazetteer. Itis understood that Intelligent Addressing’s managementteam will transfer to the new company except for thedirectors Michael Nicholson and Tony Black.

The move has been widely welcomed. Describing itas ‘an important step forward’, the Association forGeographic Information (AGI) believes the move is‘providing one definitive source of accurate publicly-

owned spatial address data, for the whole of the publicsector.’ Tim Maxwell, managing director of GGPSystems, a supplier of GIS software to the public sectorand utilities, adds, ‘This is a really positive move for allconnected to the GIS industry.’ Michael Nicholson, MDof Intelligent Addressing, says: ‘Commercialcompetition over the nation’s addressing has been quitea feature of the UK’s geographic information scene forabout ten years. The joint venture approach issomething we first proposed in 2000 to resolve themuddle and again in 2001 but perhaps conditions werenot right then. Now, changes at Ordnance Survey, thesuccess of the NLPG and the new focus on efficiency ingovernment have created conditions where resolutionis both more achievable and more urgent.’

Subject to approval from the Office of Fair Trading,GeoPlace will combine the NLPG and NSG withOrdnance Survey’s OS MasterMap Address Layer 2.However the NSG will continue to be managedseparately, as it is at present. The initiative supports the

UK Location Strategy’s concept of a “Core ReferenceGeography” and the key principles of the Inspiredirective, including that data should only be collectedonce and kept where it can be maintained mosteffectively. Existing products and their customers willcontinue to be supported for awhile. New products willintegrate the currency and consistency of existingaddress products and enable organisations to readilyexchange address based information with each other,thereby streamlining government services, reducingduplication, and facilitating partnership working. Thisshould deliver significant efficiency savings andimprovements for both the public and commercialsectors. The first cut of the new national addressgazetteer database will be developed by April 2011,allowing customer engagement prior to productrelease between July and September. It will be free atthe point of use for all government bodies via thePublic Sector Mapping Agreement. Commercialcustomers will be able to license it in the same way asthey currently license OS and NLPG products. It isenvisaged that over time all customers will migrate tothe products created from the unified gazetteer.

GeoPlace: one address database The UK has long struggledwith having two address databases, causing problems and friction between those that relyon location. The new Coalition Government has now moved to merge two of them, report

Richard Groom, Robin Waters and Stephen Booth.

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addressing sorted!


STOP PRESS!: The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) is dueto reach a decision on the formation of GeoPlace, theanticipated joint venture between Ordnance Survey andLocal Government Improvement and Development,and the proposed provision of addressing products,on February 15/16th 2011.

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21joining the geography jigsaw

Spatial analysisalso helped us

to identifysuitable

locations andsizes of sub-

stations, watertanks andsewage

treatmentplants.

“

“

THERE IS A GENERAL IMPRESSION in theMiddle East that GIS cannot help inengineering works. We have managed tochange this perception through aninfrastructure project north of Damascus inSyria. For the Dimas housing developmentproject, with a population of 25 to 30thousand people, our task was to designthe infrastructure with a brief of plenty ofwalkable tracks and cycle paths, wherechildren can walk or cycle safely to schools,shops, playgrounds and sports fields.

The first challenge was to persuade and

motivate colleagues to use new technology. Wefound that people like to work in traditional ways forplanning and design, using AutoCAD andspreadsheets. It seems hard to get them to adopt GISsoftware in their planning and delivery despite thebenefits. We noticed the reasons behind thisbehaviour – lack of knowledge of GIS, fear of tryingnew technology, fear of integration with existingtraditional systems.

DWGs and spreadsheets Somehow we managed topersuade our client to use GIS in our scope of services,which is the planning and design of utilities for thewhole development. For this purpose, we receivedplanning information from the master planner in DWGfiles and spreadsheet formats, which looks great interms of hachuring, colouring and layout setting butprovides a challenge for us to integrate into a GIS witherror-free data from our design work.

We converted the CAD and tabular data into ourgeo-database. Spatial analysis helped us to identify gapsin the data provided by the planner. These gaps includedduplicate parcel numbers assigned to more than oneplot and the wrong association of development phasing

in spreadsheets, e.g. parcel number xxx falls withinboundary of phase 4 in AutoCAD but the Excel versionsays it belongs in Phase 3!

After resolving all these issues, the next step wasto calculate demand/load for individual plots for allutilities including: potable water, irrigation,

sewerage, storm water, electrical andtelecommunications. To achieve this we addedcolumns in the spreadsheet, one for each utility andcalculated the load/demand based on rates as perthe standards set by local authorities.

Spatial analysis also helped us to identify suitablelocations and sizes of sub-stations, water tanks andsewerage treatment plants. Now we are in the finalstages of presenting our results. We have produced aseries of maps and queries by simply re-linking amodified spreadsheet to planning in ArcGIS. We useannotation to show our design demand/load forindividual plots and apply different symbologies toenhance the presentation.

Softwares used: ArcGIS version 9.2Microsoft ExcelAdobe Acrobat Professional

About the authorWith 13 years of experience, Muhammad Khaliq is aGIS specialist working with a multidisciplineengineering consulting company based in Sharjah,UAE. [email protected]

GIS and engineering – good practice The integration ofGIS with traditional design and spreadsheet software for the development and planning of

projects is still in its infancy in many parts of the world. Muhammad Khaliq reports onhow he convinced colleagues to use GIS for a Syrian infrastructure project.

Syria: gis & engineering



There is now alot of good

quality data onthe market andcommercial dataproviders needto differentiatetheir products.

“

“

EUROPA TECHNOLOGIES provides global data to thetelecom and insurance industries and more recently itsmaps have been used for the delivery of Google Earth.Although winning a number of awards for itstechnology, including supplying Fortune 500 customers,the world of location data does not stand still andEuropa is now starting on an evolutionary process tofulfil its growth plans. Two major trends are the growing

market interest in ‘Data as a Service’ (DaaS) and thegreater openness in the provision of public sector data.The company’s vision may be ambitious but leadingthese trends will only be achieved by some significantchanges in direction.

Is content really king? A good starting point is tolook at how the data business is changing. Most dataproviders have grown up with the philosophy that“content is king”. Data providers were seen to be themarket drivers and their success came with the qualityand usefulness of their products. But, in any market,there are always disruptors that come along and turnthe existing world upside down. In the geospatialworld, the entry of Google has done just that. Fewwould have predicted that its impact could have beenso swift or far-reaching. But established public sectordata providers can also shift the market. In 2010,Ordnance Survey OpenData was launched – arguablythe most significant development since it first movedinto digital mapping over 30 years ago. The messageis quite clear: data providers really have to add valueto compete. There is now a lot of good quality data onthe market and commercial data providers need todifferentiate their products.

As global economies emerge from recession,

albeit that many face other challenges like the after-effects of spiralling government borrowing, it is atime to think smart. It is no longer just a case ofbeing good at being a data provider – it is aboutbeing good as a data service provider. It is not justabout creating and publishing your own data butalso about how to apply the skills gained in doing soto help others work with their own data.

A foot in the open world Europa Technologieshas always seen itself as a good product creationcompany as well as a commercial company with afoot in the “open” world. Spanning the commercialand open spaces is not without its challenges. Somecompanies from the open world have tried to dabblein the commercial world without success. Othershave remained blinkered to the needs of thecommercial world and so have refused to work withanything other than open source software and data.

However, Europa has been able to extend itsexperience and best practice with new ideas. One ofthese is the recently launched viaEuropa – a hostedservice delivering pre-rendered tiles of raster mapdata to desktop GIS and web-mapping applications.

The viaEuropa model grew out of changes in theglobal data market and the need to find a better wayto deliver global data. However, the growth in web-based applications meant that tile delivery was betterable to support emerging Internet and Intranetapplications. Delivering data for the web needsgreater intelligence in the rendering process tooptimise display speeds within the application.

So what does it take to make a service like this successful?Warren Vick, director and founder, thinks the key

An open vision on data Europa Technologies is a small companywith big plans for the data distribution business. GiSPro takes a look at their offering and

talks to founder Warren Vick about how he sees the future for data as a service.

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open data service


Above: Screenshotstaken from viaEuropa’sweb browser withinArcInfo.

Processing istime consuming

and needs toreflect that eachdataset has its

own personality– unique

datasets needuniquelyadapted

processing.

“

“


ingredients are simple: quality, price and delivery.‘The starting point has to be good qualitycartography. It is all about delivering high qualitymaps to a user’s desktop or mobile device and thismeans the data has to look good,’ argues Vick.

And the other elements?‘Delivery must be based on a reliable and predictablehosting service – while the price cannot lose sight ofthe importance of value for money in the currenteconomic climate,’ says Vick.

To help entice users to try out the technology, aviaEuropa Open free service is being promoted. AsVick points out, ‘there are a growing number of openservices out there but viaEuropa Open is not justdelivering sample data – in Great Britain it deliversnational coverage using OS OpenData supplementedwith some of Europa Technologies’ own global data’.

The open service will not be suitable for all and, as hasbeen widely recognised, it is difficult to make money outof free data. Europa sees the open service as enablingusers to try out the service in a risk-free way beforestepping up to the commercial service - viaEuropa Plus.

Why the need for a premium service?Users can only use the free service in certain ways and can’tdeploy the data over the Internet, explains Vick. Once thefree service proves its worth, it is anticipated that users willneed more capacity, better quality of service and betterguarantees of availability that come with the premiumservice.

So, not losing sight of the fact that people can stilladopt a DIY approach – where does Europa Technologiessee its added value?A customer could take the raw data but there is ahuge chasm between this and consuming a finishedmapping product. Over the years, Europa has used itsexperience to build its own in-house proprietarytoolset, coupled with the use of best-of-breedcommercial and open source tools. Even with thesetools, not all datasets are equally ready fortransformation and delivery via a service. A significantpart of the work in data preparation is the pre-processing of datasets before the tiles are renderedincluding, for example, label placement. Processing istime consuming and needs to reflect that eachdataset has its own personality – unique datasetsneed uniquely adapted processing.

Another area of the company’s expertise is increating consistency across datasets, which thenenable a user to zoom seamlessly across them. Lastly,there is a growing need for Europa to use itsexpertise to adapt maps for those users with colourblindness, now more correctly known as ColourVision Deficiency (CVD).

The DaaS model is also well suited to public sectorusers. Although its global data has been used mainly bythe private sector, Europa believes it will have a growing

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relevance to the public sector. Although it does notseem like great timing for a move into the public sectormarket, the forthcoming Public Sector MappingAgreement (PSMA) represents a significant milestone inthe use of location data in over 800 organisations acrossthe sector. The viaEuropa approach fits with theprinciples of austerity planning because each publicsector organisation does not need to waste time andeffort on handling its own base map data. As an OSpartner, Europa has been working closely with OrdnanceSurvey with the PSMA in mind. The agreement opensaccess to national (GB) coverage for nearly all OSdatasets and allows the public sector to focus on its owndata and not worry about the base map. As manydifferent scale products are covered by the agreement, itmeans that viaEuropa can offer a seamless transitionbetween mid scales found in OS OpenData and thelarger scale commercially licensed products.

Where does Europa see scope for future developments?The viaEuropa service still has room to be extendedto even higher availability applications – especiallywhere a Service Level Agreement (SLA) is needed.There will also still be a need for custom work toenable user’s own datasets to be deployed in theservice – an example being to style the tiles to aspecific customer need. Some websites have adominant colour palette or a corporate colourscheme that means the tiles need to be rendered inspecific colours but can still be delivered through theonline service or delivered to the customer as a tileset for them to manage themselves.

Because it is an open platform and can work with datafrom other sources, viaEuropa can provide an open, multi-provider service that encourages others to get involved. Themessage to data providers is simple – why bother to buildyour own service if you can deliver your data throughexisting services? A philosophy which Europa Technologieshope will lead to benefits and being recognised as a spatialdata technology leader in Europe.



open data service

Below: a recent upgradeto Europa’s Cresta

allows insurers to zonein on areas and includes

a gazetteer of over850,000 locations

pre-coded with zonesand sub-zones. Thegazetteer supports

place names in English,French, German, Spanish,

Italian, Dutch,Portuguese, Japanese,

standard Arabic andsimplified Chinese.



These acts coverprinted andelectronic

publications,though

legislation isnot yet in placefor the latter.

“

“

IN RECENT YEARS, a growing proportion of mapsand atlases, published or distributed in the UnitedKingdom, have not been received by the LegalDeposit Libraries. This may be due to uncertaintyover the legislation, over what constitutes apublication, or to whom publications should be sent(following the move of the Agency for the LegalDeposit Libraries last year). We are very keen to try toaddress this problem by explaining these issuesbelow.

The principle of legal deposit has been wellestablished for nearly four centuries and hasadvantages for cartographers and publishers.Publications deposited with the legal depositlibraries:

• Become part of the national heritage• Become an archive of publishers’ output• Are catalogued and preserved for the benefit of

future generations • Act as a shop-window for publishers,

encouraging people to buy items

What is included? All published items come withinthe scope of legal deposit. A work is said to be

published when copies of it are issued to the public.The place of publication or printing, the nature ofthe imprint, and the price or the size of distributionare immaterial. It is therefore the act of issuing ordistributing to the public in the United Kingdom orthe Republic of Ireland, which renders a work liableto deposit. Items originally published elsewhere butdistributed in the United Kingdom and in Ireland arealso liable for deposit.

Publishers’ legal obligation Publishers areobliged to send one copy of each of theirpublications to the British Library, free of charge,within one month of the date of publication. Theother five libraries have the right to request thedeposit of publications, free of charge, within a yearof the date of publication. In practice manypublishers deposit their publications with all sixlibraries without waiting for a claim to be made,which is greatly appreciated. The Legal DepositLibraries are very keen to protect publishers’copyright, and are strict over controlling any requestsfor copies in line with copyright legislation.

UK and Irish legislation The Legal Deposit

Libraries Act 2003 (UK) and the Copyright andRelated Rights Act 2000 (Ireland) make it obligatoryfor publishers and distributors in the UnitedKingdom and Ireland to deposit their publications.These acts cover printed and electronic publications,though legislation is not yet in place for the latter. Inthe meantime, a code of practice exists in the UnitedKingdom for the voluntary deposit of electronicpublications, and also for microform and other non-printed publications. In Ireland, the Copyright andRelated Rights Act 2000 proposes to extend legaldeposit to electronic formats.

Where should publications be sent? Publicationsdestined for the British Library (with the exception ofnewspapers and pure electronic content) should besent to:

The Legal Deposit Office The British Library Boston Spa, Wetherby West Yorkshire LS23 7BY T +44 (0)1937 546268 [email protected]

Calling all map publishers... send us yourpublications! With changes in the pipeline, the British Library has issued atimely reminder to map publishers in the UK and Ireland of their responsibilities under

legal deposit and copyright legislation.

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legal copyright & deposit libraries



In Ireland, theCopyright andRelated Rights

Act 2000proposes toextend legaldeposit toelectronicformats.

“

“

Enquiries about the deposit of pure electroniccontent should be sent to:

The Digital Acquisitions Co-ordinator The British Library Boston Spa, Wetherby West Yorkshire LS23 7BQ www.bl.uk T +44 (0)1937 546535 [email protected]

Other Legal Deposit Libraries The Agency forthe Legal Deposit Libraries is authorised to collectpublications on behalf of the other five legal depositlibraries. Publications and enquiries should beaddressed to:

The Agent Agency for the Legal Deposit Libraries 161 Causewayside Edinburgh EH9 1PH Tel: +44 (0)131 623 4680 Fax: +44 (0)131 623 4681 http://www.legaldeposit.org.uk/Email: [email protected]

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Irish publishers should send material destined for theBritish Library to them directly, and publicationsdestined for the five Legal Deposit Libraries to:

Irish Copyright Agency c/o Trinity College Library College Street Dublin 2 T +353 (0) 896 1021F +353 (0) 1671 9003www.tcd.ie/Library/Email: [email protected]

Issued on behalf of the map librarians in the six LegalDeposit Libraries:

• The British Library • The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford • Cambridge University Library • The National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh • The Library of Trinity College, Dublin • The National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth

More information athttp://www.bl.uk/aboutus/stratpolprog/legaldep/index.html

legal copyright & deposit libraries



EUROPHILES WILL KNOW THAT it is Hungary’s turn tohold the Presidency of the EU. This role has lesssignificance since the creation of a permanentPresident of the Council of Ministers but it stillenables each country in turn to set the agenda for sixmonths and to ensure that its own priorities arerecognised. Spain, Belgium and Hungary have alsoformed a unique “trio” to agree a common agendathrough the whole of the 18 months of theirsuccessive presidencies. In fact, not surprisingly inview of its location, Hungary is prioritisingcooperation along the Danube and also the accessionnegotiations for its neighbour, Croatia. And if you are

in Brussels then do visit the Council’s Justus Lipsiusbuilding and walk all over the Hungarian exhibit – ahuge 200 square metre carpet depicting Hungarianculture from Arpad’s crossing of the Carpathiansmore than a thousand years ago!

Conferences, Galileo and the loss of agricultureSo Budapest is setting the scene in 2011. It willalso host the June conference of the PermanentCommittee on Cadastre in the EU, which will bechaired by Hungary this year. Appropriately, anEnglish version of the country’s geoinformation

portal (http://en.foldhivatal.hu/) has just beenlaunched with access to mapping and landinformation products – not least TakarNet, whichwas the main focus of your correspondent’s workin the Ministry of Agriculture in 1996. This nowprovides access to land registration and cadastreinformation across the whole country.

But the Ministry of Agriculture is no more!After a period as MARD (Ministry of Agricultureand Rural Development), it has now dropped theAgriculture and is simply for Rural Development.This is of course in the best British tradition – ourMAF long ago morphed into Defra – though the

Hungarians do still have a separate environmentministry. The Department of Land Administrationhas also lost the word ‘GeoInformation’ from itstitle – though clearly not the substance judging bythe contents of their portal.

Galileo is of course the link between Pragueand those Italian centres of the renaissance. Theyall have good reason to be thankful to him. GalileoGalilei was born in Pisa, educated in Pisa andFlorence and flourished as a scientist in theuniversity at Padua. These cities are no doubtproud of this heritage – and are perhaps even a

A Tale of Many Cities What do the cities of Prague, Pisa, Florence andPadua have in common? Why might you want to be in Edinburgh and Cambridge but not at

the same time? Why is Budapest in the news? For the answers, read what our observer,Robin Waters has to say on this and other geo matters as Hungary assumes the EU presidency.

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eurofile

Right: The handoverof the Permanent

Commission onCadastre in the EU

from Belgium toHungary.

Represented by Mrs.Pierrette Fraisse

(Première attachéedes Finances chargéede la Direction de la

Cellule de Géomatiquepatrimoniale,

Documentationpatrimoniale,SPF

Finances) and PiroskaZalaba (Senior

Councillor, Dept ofLand Administration,

Ministry of RuralDevelopment).

The logo in thebackground ofthe main imageis of the Belgianpresidency (ofEU as a whole).The Hungarianlogo is the sameshape butdifferent coloursas shown in theinset picture.


little richer from the tourists on the Galileo trail. Now Prague will also have a greater fondness

for Galileo as the headquarters of the EuropeanGNSS Supervisory Authority, which has a variety ofroles with respect to the Galileo navigation satellitesystem – although ultimate responsibility rests withthe European Space Agency and the technicalcontrol is exercised from back home in Italy atFucino. Apparently, this will be the CzechRepublic’s first European ‘institution’ – paid forfrom our European taxes of course. So we justhope that our satnav systems don’t start spittingout all those Czech accented words! Caution:Although reportedly confirmed by GSA officials,there is no formal announcement of this move onthe GSA website at the time of writing.www.gsa.europa.eu

Conflict of conferences? So what about theBritish cities? Yes, they do all have universities butotherwise have quite contrasting histories andtopographies. However, we are more likely to beinterested in their conference facilities.

Back in June 2010 there was an announcementin Krakow that the next INSPIRE conference wouldbe held in Edinburgh. Then silence. It was not until

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December that we were informed that theconference will indeed be in the EdinburghInternational Conference Centre at the end of Junethis year. If you are quick you can still submit apaper – closing date is 24th February.http://inspire.jrc.ec.europa.eu/events/conferences/ inspire_2011/

Unfortunately, the Cambridge Conference – ‘aforum for debate about geographical informationfor tomorrow, for the world’ – organised by theOrdnance Survey – is also scheduled for the sameweek. Although this is being held in Southamptonthis year, and is for heads of national mappingagencies by invitation only, the clash is unfortunateand could affect sponsorship for both events aswell as meaning that some national mappingagency bigwigs will have to make a difficult choiceor perhaps book their north-south flights as soonas possible!

• Robin Waters is an independent consultant.He is also chair of the AGI’s INSPIRE ActionWorking Group and secretary of the BSi IST36Standards Committee for GeographicInformation.

eurofile

. . . the nextINSPIRE

conference. . .will indeed be

in theEdinburgh

InternationalConference

Centre at theend of June. . .

“

“This “excellent book” (Journal of Geodesy) – is now even better!

Datums and Map Projections is the key textbook for students andprofessionals around the world who need a practical guide tocoordinate reference systems. With clear presentation, the authorsassume no prior knowledge and adopt a problem-solving approachwith practical examples and the combination of GPS-derived datawith data from other sources.

Copies from PV Publications, price £40 + £2.95 p&p within the UK and+£4.95 overseas. Order online at www.pvpubs.com or call 01438 352617.

Latest edition features:• improved structure• greater scope of coordinate systems• more examples• ISO 19111 terminology adopted• Full colour throughout

Order onlinenow from:pvpubs.com



. . . AGI. . .will beengaging

shortly in theconsultation

process for therecently

announcedPublic Data

Corporation.

“

“Association all the facilities and services needed tohost and deliver AGI GeoCommunity ’11 and AGIW3G. This means enhanced space for our sponsorswho exhibit, as well as new delegate cost savings tominimise barriers to entry in this ‘age of austerity’.Announcements about AGI GeoCommunity ’11 havealready been made (see www.agigeocommunity.com/).Registration and sponsorship packages will be madeavailable in February and the Call for Papers willfollow soon. The new conference committee ischaired by Dr Jeremy Morley, an AGI conferenceveteran who will be working closely with the AGIstaff on delivering another excellent conference in2011.

The AGI will also continue to evaluate and launchnew services with a view to widening its revenuebase. Why do this? The AGI is a private not-for-profitorganisation. It receives no public subsidy and relieson member’s discretionary spend. Income frommembership fees does not cover operational costsand never has. Extra income is therefore essential.Readers may already know that just before Christmas2010, the Association opened an online GI bookstore

(general texts and leisure books are also sold). AGIwill look to other opportunities in 2011, includingthose related to services supporting ContinuingProfessional Development (CPD) which is a vitalplank in our activity and cooperation with the RoyalGeographic Society.

Influencing Public Policy – the Association hasdeveloped an excellent platform to advance itsinforming and influencing mission throughmembership of various national bodies andcommittees covering geographic informationmatters. AGI will continue to engage seniorcommercial and public sector figures on variouspublic policy issues of interest to members and thebroader GI community. Already this year AGI hasresponded twice to the Office of Fair Trading on thesubject of GeoPlace LLP and it will be engagingshortly in the consultation process for the recentlyannounced Public Data Corporation.

Outreach - based on the initiatives developed in2010, where the AGI signed memoranda ofunderstanding with the Institute of Marine EngineersScientists and Technologists (ImarEST) and the BritishCartographic Society (BCS), the AGI will continue tobuild and strengthen relationships with other

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2010 ENDED WITH the AGI in better shape thaninitially anticipated. The economic woes of thenation, the pending General Election and theuncertainty surrounding both made budgeting forthe year quite tough, particularly when bearing inmind our reliance on member’s discretionaryexpenditure for subscription renewals, eventsattendance, CPD activity and so on. AGI is also highlyexposed to the public sector and thus theimplications of pubic sector cuts.

It was down to the support of AGI membershipand those members who selflessly volunteer tocontribute to the activities of the Association, plusthe professionalism of the AGI staff that made 2010a more successful year despite the broader nationaldifficulties. Reassuringly, AGI made no financialdeficit and was able to top-up its financial reserves –vital assets for the longer term viability of theAssociation and its ongoing services to members. It isimportant to now thank all who have been involvedwith the AGI throughout 2010. Our members, thecontribution and the support they give, make theAGI what it is. This keeps the Association in step with

the evolution and needs of the geographicinformation community.

Looking to 2011, we now how a new Chairman,Andrew Trigg (Chief Geographic InformationOfficer, Land Registry) and new AGI Council officebearers. An AGI operational plan for 2011 is alreadyin place and approved. Overall plans are morecomprehensive than what follows; the idea is to givereaders a flavour of some of the activities andobjectives being pursued in 2011.

Membership – following on from the initiatives of2010, the Association’s focus will be to retainexisting and attract new members and offer relevantservices and benefits. New initiatives will include, forexample, a scheme for members to recommend afriend or colleague to the AGI.

Services – the AGI will continue to enhance itsevents programme and continue to spread it moreevenly throughout the year. Events tackling topicalsubjects, both policy and technology related, arebeing planned to add to the vibrancy of the eventsprogramme.

The flagship conference, AGI GeoCommunity ’11,will take its well proven formula to a new venue in2011. East Midlands Conference Centre will give the

Keeping in step with the geographiccommunity Despite tough trading conditions in 2010, AGI emerged in a

stronger state than expected, says AGI Director and CEO Chris Holcroft. For 2011,there is an enhanced events programme, new services and outreach programmes,

AGI column

Chris Holcroft is Directorand CEO of the AGI.


representative membership bodies both within andwithout its current areas of activity and influence.This is an important plank in achieving retention andgrowth in membership along with lending furtherweight to the AGI mission.

Communications – to increase awareness of thework of the AGI within the membership, thegeographic information market and wider publicsector and business community, AGI will continue todevelop and exploit the widest range of mediaavailable. Such activity is considered vital to conveynew messages about the AGI vision, focus on futuremarket and user needs and how the AGI’s influencecan help its members. Recently AGI added a furtherLinkedIn group to its line-up – a generic AGI group –which has swiftly attracted members.

This year will be full of activity and commitment toaddress the challenges and opportunities in a periodwhen the nation is still gripped by economic gloom.The AGI mission and services cannot simply stop. TheAGI Team – the staff working in the London office –will be at the heart of the conference, eventsprogramme, CPD, outreach and much more. Theteam strives to be close to AGI members andvolunteers. The AGI mission remains as relevant

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today as it was back in 1989 when the Associationwas established. Members can be confident, 22years on that they have a dedicated association thatis working hard on their behalf.

AGI column

The AGI exists to“maximise the use ofgeographic information(GI) for the benefit ofthe citizen, goodgovernance andcommerce”.Membershipdetails are availablefrom [email protected] by calling: +44 (0)207036 0430

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• Flexible entry requirements

• Specialist pathways in GIS, GI Science, GIS & Management and GIS & Environment

• Course modules supported by keytextbooks, software and on-line resources

• Flexible study options - full distance learning or distance learning plus residential workshops

• No examinations - full continuousassessment, plus credit for prior learning or experience

• Networking with an internationalcommunity of GIS professionals

UNIGIS is a partnership between Huddersfield, Manchester Metropolitan andSalford universities that delivers postgraduate GIS courses by distance learning.With twenty year's experience, and as a founder member of the prestigious UNIGISInternational network, we provide high quality courses that meet the requirementsof busy GI professionals and of those seeking to enter the GIS industry.

Our courses can be completed entirely by distance learning, although we also offer optional residential workshops. Assessment is by coursework only - there areno examinations. We support you with personal tutors, online help and adedicated UNIGIS office.

The AGI missionremains as

relevant todayas it was back in1989 when the

Association wasestablished.

“

“

Why “Where” Matters

By Dr Bob Ryerson and Dr StanAronoffPublished by Kim GeomaticsCorporation 2010 ISBN 978-0-9866376-0-5

Why “Where” Matters is subtitled“Understanding and Profiting fromGPS, GIS and Remote Sensing” andaims to offer “Practical advice forindividuals, communities,companies and countries”. Clearlythe authors are not short ofambition! Over nearly 400 pagesthis book is a tour de force ofgeospatial technology, applicationsand policies with a wealth ofreferences and a good index.

Dr Ryerson is the president andowner of Kim GeomaticsCorporation (based in Ontario,Canada and also the publishers)and was also director general of theCanada Centre for Remote Sensingfor three years. Dr Aranoff is asenior associate of the sameconsulting company.

The world is apparently at thebeginning of a new economic era –the GeoEconomy. The authorsbelieve that some governments,companies and organisations ‘get it’and may therefore prosper; whereasthose that don’t will fail. However, inthe first chapter – “GeoSpatialKnowledge” – there is enoughhistory (and some good examples) toshow that all civilisations haverequired geographical information toexpand and survive. There is then –without apparent logic – an attackon the Ordnance Survey’s pricingpolicy as compared to that of the US

Geological Survey. For Brits there is akey quote “In our opinion the quasi-public Ordnance Survey’scompetition with the private sectorexplains why the UK, a nation thatwas once the world’s leader inmapping, has declined to a positionof importing almost all of theirmapping technology and even muchof their base data. By contrast theUSGS policy of not competing withindustry and providing low cost highquality geospatial data has made ita trusted data source widely used byAmericans and the world.” Wow!Discuss – or dispute?

The conclusion of the secondsection hammers at the same policytheme – with many valid argumentsand with the benefit of the authors’experience of worldwide costbenefit studies. Arguably the tidehas turned on “cost recovery”policies in the UK and some otherjurisdictions with the advent ofINSPIRE for the EU; the PublicService Mapping Agreement inEngland & Wales; OS OpenData inGreat Britain; and, not least, theintervention of Sir Tim Berners Leeand co in the more general opengovernment debate.

Section 3 “NOW!”, covers thetechnologies that are driving thegeo-economy and which policies arehelping or hindering. It is aneclectic mix of descriptions ofgeospatial and related technologies;an explanation of the datasetsthereby created; the policies beingapplied; and the overwhelmingneed for these datasets in manyapplications.

Sections 4 and 5 cover the“convergence and societal” impactsof GI in the present and the future.We are all experiencing theconvergence of technologies anddatasets – just look at your latestmobile phone and its multifunctionality. As I write we are toldthat a standard mobile phone is tobe trialled as an on-board controllerfor a complete remote sensingsatellite! But are we able to keepup with the technology and ensure

that appropriate, effective andefficient use is made of geospatialdata in our daily business? Clearlynot, judging by some of theexamples quoted. Why?Information or decision makingoverloads are factors; so isdeliberate blindness on the part ofdecision makers. A company directormight argue that ignorance is abetter defence than trying towithhold unflattering informationabout land or property. Politiciansare renowned for not wanting to beconfused with the facts! The bookhas several specific examples in thetext and the references.

One of the authors onceobserved that there was at one pointa negative correlation between thehealth of the economy and the useof satellite imagery. Has this beenrepeated in the last few years? Is theopening up of government data anexample in practice?

The penultimate chapter isentitled “Gaining the Geo-Advantage”. Anyone in the industrywill recognise most of the examplesquoted – whether in theory or inpractice. One intriguing exampleconcerns our own careers! Theauthors have identified 25 cities (seeTable 1) across the world that areclusters of geospatial expertise andare “poised to reap the rewards ofthe GeoEconomy”. This research isbased on over forty factors includingexisting business, research capability

and government policy. One suspectsthe list will soon be outdated withthe rapid advances of China andIndia. For those of us in the UK thefuture is bleak – no clusters at all.But we have a right to work inEnschede, Wageningen, Munich, orMontpelier. And, if you have enoughpoints on the immigration ladder,head for Melbourne or Perth!

The book concludes, naturally,that the use of appropriategeospatial information is beneficialto individuals, companies andgovernments: “If we leave onemessage, it is that very often onecan see that the reasons for thesuccesses – and the failures – ineverything from our environmentalprotection to our economicdecisions, are directly tied to howwell we use geospatial orgeographic information. . . . .thosewho ‘get it’. . . do well. Those whodo not depend on ‘geo-luck’.

This book is a wonderfulresource for anyone looking forexamples of technologies,applications and policies in thegeospatial arena – almost any pagewill provide a pithy quote or a greatexample of the use of geographicinformation. It might even helpconvince your boss that you areworth your salary whatever thestate of the geo-economy! Itcertainly achieves its aims.

Reviewer: Robin Waters

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books

Table 1 Geospatial Cities?

a wonderful resource with many practical examples that are driving the geo economy,but with some hard-hitting criticisms for Brits and Ordnance Survey.

www.gisprofessional.co.uk joining the geography jigsaw

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a well written and enlightening memoir that stands out from the rest – invitingreaders to keep turning the page.

If Maps Could Speak

By Richard KirwanPublished by Londubh Books, Dublineuros 14.99/£12.99

This is an extemely well written and vividaccount by the author of his life fromchildhood to leadership of Ireland’smapping agency, Ordnance SurveyIreland; all set against a backdrop ofIreland’s history and culture. Dick Kirwanoffers fascinating insight into hischildhood in Waterford where a map ofthe district first sparked his interest. Oncebegun on his career with OrdnanceSurvey, he sets his surveying travels

around the country against theextraordinary history of Ireland as well asthe characters he worked with andencountered on the road. In my ownexperience Ireland remains one of thoseplaces where you can meet people withtime to chat and wonder upon theworld. Kirwan captures this well withtales of questions asked on the bestpath to a summit only to get acommentary on the habits and beauty ofthe swallows in the hedgerow nearby.

Many readers may not realise thatIreland was the first country in theworld to be fully mapped at large scale(6 inches to the mile) by the thenBritish Ordnance Survey’s sappers underThomas Colby. Kirwan reflects on thestruggles the English soldiers had innaming places as the locals eithermispronounced place names, usedvarious different forms or deliberatelymisled them. This ubiquitous problem of

mapping is amusingly dealt with in Irishwriter Brian Friel’s play, Translations. Heexplains how they eventually had toemploy Irish language scholars to guidethem; all of this before the terriblefamine that engulfed the country andprobably did more than anything elseto set the Irish on a determined pathfor independence.

When Kirwan joined OrdnanceSurvey Ireland in the early 1970s it wasindeed a backwater amongst mappingagencies. All employees, apart from thedirector general’s secretary, came fromthe military and the mapping wasstruggling to keep up with new roadsand estates as the economy began toburgeon. To meet the need for up-to-date mapping Kirwan and hispredecessor took the bold decision in theearly 1980s to opt for aerialphotography and computerisedmapping. The latter an expensive process

at that time. Despite many trials andchallenges, visits to far-flung parts of theglobe to visit suppliers, the move paid offwith Ireland being a world leader in thistype of mapping and Kirwan in demandworldwide as a consultant since hisretirement in 2006.

Over the years I have read manybiographical accounts by those inmapping and surveying but nonestand out like this one. It really is anenlightening memoir that invites thereader to carry on turning the page tothe end. The author gives a candidaccount too of the vice too many inhis position succumb too: overwork.His personal story, its effect on hisfamily and the path it eventually tookhim is revelatory. Wisely, Kirwanundertook a writing course before hebegan the work. I think he should tryhis hand at a novel next.Reviewer: Stephen Booth

AVAILABLE FROMPV Publications Ltd, 2B North Road, Stevenage, Hertfordshire SG1 4AT

Call 01438 352617 or visit www.pvpubs.com

VRS Now in Benelux Trimblehas announced the launch of itsVRS Now RTK correction dataservices for Belgium, theNetherlands and Luxembourg. Inaddition, new service plans allowusers to perform precisepositioning with centimetre-levelaccuracy in all VRS Now networks

across Europe, simplifying accessto high-precision GNSS corrections.Trimble has also announced amobile GIS developer communitywebsite providing a selection ofdeveloper tools and services. Theonline community providesmembers with access to softwaretools and services as well as

documentation, a developer forum,knowledge base and supportresources. The softwaredevelopment kits (SDKs) availableto members include the GPSpathfinder field toolkit and themobile GNSS field and office tools.Members pay an annual feecovering software maintenance anddeveloper support and also paylicence fees when they deployapplications to their customers.

Optimised routing PostcodeAnywhere’s latest satnav servicegoes beyond A-to-B route planningto re-order multiple waypoints intoan optimised itinerary. The featureadds satnav integration to theonline routing service,RouteOptimiser.com and enablescommercial vehicle drivers to takeoptimised routes with them insatnavs using TomTom’s HOMEsoftware.

Promap services extendedFollowing the recent OrdnanceSurvey licensing changes,Landmark Promap is extending itsservices to offer larger areas ofmapping to its customers. Themodifications will allow customersto access and order mapping dataup to GB size (over 200km²mapping data), as well as accessto new datasets, like the integratedtransport network (ITN) layer andVectorMap Local, through abespoke online ordering process.

BRIEFS

The latest version of Leica’sMobileMatriX software fullyintegrates the company’s Vivatotal stations and Viva GNSSreceivers. With the imagingsupport of the TS15 and TS11,users can take an image with thetotal station and store it directlyin a GIS database. The imageassisted documentation enablesusers to supplement their GISarchive with detailed informationabout the situation on-site. Withthis latest version, the import ofRINEX data has also beenimproved.

The mobile ArcGIS API for theWindows Phone is available from theEsri’s ArcGIS resource centre. The APIcan be used to create interactiveapplications that combine mappingresources such as maps with thephone technologies and frameworks,such as the application bar, controlsand location. The company has alsoupdated its ArcGIS for iOS app sousers can collect and update GISinformation from their iPhone, iPad oriPod touch devices.

The English edition of Semiology ofGraphics by Jacques Bertin (ISBN:978-1-58948-261-6, 460 pages,$79.95) is now available onlinefrom Esri Press. The book is basedon the author’s experience as acartographer and is an attempt tosynthesize the principles of graphiccommunication with the logic ofstandard rules applied to writingand topography.

Europa Technologies has launcheda map service harnessing its maprendering technology. A freeversion, viaEuropa Open, isavailable as well as a paid-forversion with dedicated hosting,viaEuropa Plus. For more details onthis service, turn to page 22.

Getmapping has launched a WFSservice to stream Ordnance SurveyMasterMap over the Internet. WFSis a standard protocol from the

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With a new thermal sensor fitted to its aircraft, Bluesky is capturingmeasurements of heat loss from buildings. The results of the night-timethermal surveys will provide local authorities, energy providers andhouseholders with intelligence to tackle energy inefficiency and fuelpoverty across Britain’s towns and cities. The “microbolometer” thermalcamera has been specifically designed for airborne surveying and is idealfor use in aircraft flying at night.

Heat loss from homes

Producing city modelsTridicon 3D software enables users toproduce 3D city models in level ofdetail 2. The 3D buildings generatedwith the software can be exported incommon data formats like CityGML,3D Shape, KML, OBJ, 3DS or VRML. Thesoftware from German company GTAGeoinformatik, delivers high-qualitymodels from stereo aerial imagery,plus lidar data and stereo satelliteimagery, which are also suitable datasources. Depending on the type ofsource data and the targeted qualityof the results, different softwaresuites are available.

Open Geospatial Consortium forstreaming georeferenced vectormapping data over the Internet toweb-based applications, GIS andCAD software.

Envitia has released a spatial datamanagement suite (SDMS) thatprovides support for over 200 dataformats specialised for the defenceand security domain. It is fullyintegrated with both thecompany’s MapLink Pro productand its GI web services.

A new start-up package willenable UK social housing providersto take advantage of freeOrdnance Survey digital mapping.GGP Housing is an off-the-shelfsoftware package includinglicences of GGP Systems’ GIStogether with a completeinstallation, training and supportprogramme. The package alsoincludes a strategic review of anorganisation’s existing software,hardware and data.

Bing Maps AJAX Control 7.0 letsdevelopers build mappingapplications that render multiplepoints nearly three times fasterthan version 6.3. This latest versionalso delivers the new “bird’s eye”:a 45-degree perspective, viewablefrom all four compass directionswith smooth zooming, life-likebuilding models in urban centresand 3D-like terrain features.

Erdas 2011 software has beenreleased and includes Imagine,

LPS, Apollo, Extensions for ArcGIS10 and other desktop and serverproducts. Portfolio-wide changesinclude: ability to localise thecompany’s products for a globalaudience; integrated support forBing Maps base imagery and mapdata; distributed processingthroughout the desktop offerings;and the new Erdas Engine.

GAF AG, a geo-informationtechnology and consultingcompany, has released a free trialversion of GeoRover mobilegeological mapping software. Thesoftware integrates GPS navigation,GIS functionality and spatial rasterdata management in one tool.

GeoSpatial Experts has introducedthree new GPS camera bundlesdesigned for geotagging andmapping digital photographs. Thecompany offers its GPS-Photo Link5.0 photo-mapping software withthe Ricoh G700SE, Sony A55 and

Casio EX-H20G GPS cameras. Thesoftware enables photographers tomap the locations of photos takenwith a standard digital camera andhandheld GPS receiver or with anintegrated GPS camera like thoseoffered in the bundles.

Following the release of theArcSquirrel API, exeGesIS has nowreleased ArcSquirrel for ArcGIS 10,which transforms ArcView into anediting client for Microsoft SQLserver without the need foradditional middleware or licensing.

Blue Marble Geographics hasannounced an enhanced areacalculation tool withinGeographic Calculator v7.5. BlueMarble Desktop 2.2 now featuresthe area calculation tool, whichallows users to calculate areabased on user defined boundarydefinitions. By entering points todescribe a polygon, the user cancontrol the methods used for

defining each segment betweenthe points and calculate the areaon a geodetic or grid model.

Pointools Ltd has licensed PointoolsVortex point cloud software platform toSafe Software to help GIS professionalsand organisations streamline pointcloud data transformation and deliveryand overcome point cloudinteroperability challenges.

Geomod’s MITHRA-REMapplication for predicting publicexposure to electromagneticwaves generated by mobileantennae, based on Cadcorp SIStechnology, is now used by fourmain mobile telecommunicationsoperators in the Brussels region.

RapidEye has announced that itsfirst large-scale mosaic is nowavailable for purchase. Consisting of750 tiles, covering 25 x 25 km²areas, this contiguous satellite imagecovers Germany in its entirety.


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Delivering dataThe new Trimble TSC3 controller allows geospatialprofessionals to collect, share and deliver data for improvedaccuracy and productivity between the field and office.Optimised for use with the company’s Access field software,the controller includes: a digital camera, integratedcommunications and a GPS navigator, compass andaccelerometer. The controller also features: a 4.2 inch, high-resolution, sunlight-readable touch-screen display;integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless capabilities;ruggedised bumpers; a long battery life; and optionalQWERTY or alphanumeric keyboards.

eCognition supports 64-bitThe eCognition version 8.64 image analysis softwaresuite for geospatial applications aims to set a newstandard for native 64-bit object-based imageanalysis. Production workflows can benefit from theadditional random access memory offered by 64-bitoperating systems. Trimble’s software suite enablesusers to automatically segment and classify largedatasets, generating billions of image objects withoutbeing limited by operating system restrictions. Thesoftware assists data providers, value adders,scientists and end users in integrating earthobservation and remote sensing data to generateaccurate GIS-ready information.

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Esri DeveloperHub Conference 2011:Getting the most out of your ArcGIS2 March, Hilton Birmingham Metropole Hotel, Birmingham, UK.More information:www.esriuk.com/trainingevents/events/dev_conference11/

GEO-11: World of Geomatics and GIS Innovations6-7 April, Holiday Inn, Elstree, UK.More information: Email, [email protected] orwww.pvpubs.com/events.php

GITA's 2011 Geospatial Solutions Conference10-13 April, Grapevine (Dallas), Texas, USA.More information: www.gitaservices.org/websites/gita2011

Emergency Services Gazetteer Best Practice Day11 May, Sheffield Hallam University, South Yorkshire, UK.More information: www.aligned-assets.co.uk/events/GBPD_110511/gazetteer_best_practice_day.html

Esri UK Annual Conference 201116-17 May, London Hilton Metropole, London, UK.More information: http://eukac.esriuk.com/

The British Cartographic Society Annual Symposium8-10 June, Shrigley Hall, Nr. Macclesfield, Cheshire UK.More information: www.cartography.org.uk

Third Open Source GIS Conference (OSGIS) 201121-22 June, University of Nottingham, UK.More information: http://cgs.nottingham.ac.uk/~osgis11/os_home.html

INSPIRE Conference 2011 27 June – 1 July, Edinburgh, Scotland.More information:http://inspire.jrc.ec.europa.eu/events/conferences/inspire_2011/

11th International Conference on GeoComputation20th – 22nd July, University College London, UK.More information: http://standard.cege.ucl.ac.uk/workshops/Geocomputation/index.html

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will linked data be the new paradigm? - gis professionalgis/geospatial sales bounced back last year,...

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