Success for Blue Marble Users Conference

Blue Marble Geographics (USA) held its second annual Users Conference at the Hilton Westchase Houston, TX on 28th October. The conference was well attended by users, developers, and geodesists from a variety of industries and companies from around the world. The attendees learned the ins and outs of the Blue Marble toolkit and met with other Blue Marble users to learn new ways of making use of Blue Marble software.

Patrick Cunningham, Blue Marble president, presented opening remarks and kicked off the day by outlining Blue Marble's unique value as geomatic software experts and the agenda for the day. Following Cunningham was Blue Marble Product Manager, Sam Knight, who gave a live demonstration of the most current version of the Blue Marble Desktop 2.2, including Digital Elevation Models and vertical datum transformations, Alberta Township System conversion tools, new streamlined batch interfaces, and vector georeferencing tools.

The day continued with demonstrations from both Blue Marble Desktop application users and developers. The attendees broke into two sessions and reconvened after lunch. The list of guest speakers was extensive and well received by all attendees. Victor Minor, Blue Marble CTO, and Ilya Varaev of Avenza Systems gave presentations with a developer focus. Minor spoke on the convenience of the Blue Marble toolkit for development and implementation. Varaev illustrated Avenza's implementation of GeoCore in their Mapublisher and Geographic imager products. Mark Romano, CTO of Earth Eye, followed by Shell employees Martin Rayson and Scott McCulloch, gave the desktop application track presentations.

Romano demonstrated re-projecting and managing Lidar image and survey data components within the Blue Marble Desktop. The data was collected from a large area project in the San Francisco Bay region that proved to be a challenging environment. The Shell discussion covered the larger geodetic framework implemented at the company and how Blue Marble Geographic Calculator is tied in.

The user track sessions were followed by featured talks from David Doyle, chief geodetic surveyor of the National Geodetic Survey, and Noel Zinn of Hydrometronics. Doyle drew a contour of the history, goals, and future plans of the elements within the United States National Spatial Reference Systems. Zinn summarised how the ellipsoidal orthographic projection and 3D topocentric coordinates provide an easy transition from 2D cartography to Earth-Centered Earth-Fixed (ECEF), the coordinate system in which GPS operates. The conference ended with a lively feedback session driven by customer questions and suggestions.