Geospatial Big Data Webinar Focuses on Mobility

GCS, based in Montana, USA, has announced that mobile platforms and applications will be the second webinar topic in its Geospatial Big Data series. The free webinar will feature three GCS Big Data solutions that use real-time location data in distinctly different applications – land parcel identification for economic development, geofencing for retail marketing, and augmented reality for geospatial visualisation.

Organisations that gather, maintain and serve geospatial data face a crucial Big Data challenge in making location-specific information accessible anytime, anywhere to their employees and customers, said GCS founder and president Alex Philp, PhD. The webinar will zoom in on how mobile technologies address the big data access challenges of specific vertical markets, including real estate, economic development, retail sales, law enforcement, utilities, tourism, defence/intelligence and GIS.

Entitled 'Moving to Mobility: Leveraging Location Analytics', the one-hour webinar will be broadcast live at 3 pm (U.S. Eastern Daylight Time) on Thursday 15 August 2013. Registration is now open through the GCS website at www.YourDataSmarter.com. A live Q&A session with the audience will be included.

Attendees from public and private sector organisations will learn how they can leverage the GPS-enabled devices most of us already carry to transform business processes for everyone’s benefit.

Applications

GCS has developed numerous mobile applications as part of larger big data solutions for organisations that need to collect, disseminate, share and communicate location-specific data with field crews, remote personnel, consumers, and target audiences. The webinar will discuss how to devise a framework, architecture and strategy for building a mobile solution that helps an enterprise operate more effectively and efficiently. Delivering spatial functionality to a handheld device, choosing an operating system, and selecting suitable mobile platforms will be discussed.

The webinar will feature discussions and demonstrations of three mobile applications developed as part of larger big data solutions:

• Montana Parcel App – Simply by standing on a property or tapping on a parcel shown on the map screen, the user instantly accesses land ownership, valuation and other data from multiple Montana state databases. Created for economic development officers, this app is used by Realtors, emergency responders, hunters, and the public. Funded by the state, it has driven economic development by facilitating land transactions.

• Geo-fencing App – Now under development for a national retail chain, this app defines a geographic perimeter around each physical store location. When a potential customer enters the ‘geo-fenced’ area, the app pushes an advertisement out to that person’s smartphone or tablet, complete with turn-by-turn directions to reach the store on foot or by car. Becoming highly customised, geofencing is revolutionising the concept of one-to-one real-time marketing.

• Augmented Reality App – In this mobile application under development, the user views a real-life scene through the camera lens of their smartphone or tablet, and the app overlays additional information – such as GIS data layers or historical photographs – on the scene in the correct geographic orientation. The demonstrated app will show how utility field crews can work more quickly by visualizing buried infrastructure beneath the ground without excavation.

GCS launched the Geospatial Big Data webinars with a focus on developing solutions to the unique big data challenges of geographic information by leveraging location analytics, mobile platforms, and cloud technologies. The first webinar, 'Building, Deploying and Managing Applications in the Cloud', was recorded in June 2013 and can be viewed at www.YourDataSmarter.com.