Linking Space Technology and User Needs

GIM International interviews Carlo des Dorides, Executive Director, GSA

Space technology has a big influence on the transformation of the way we live, work and play. The core mission of the European Global Navigation Satellite Systems Agency (GSA) is to ensure that European Union citizens get the most out of Europe’s satellite navigation programmes. In this in-depth interview GSA’s executive director, Mr Carlo des Dorides, talks about Galileo, EGNOS, Copernicus, UAVs, location-based services and much more. The developments in the GNSS industry are continuing at a steady pace. Where do we stand now? As our GNSS Market Report shows, the global GNSS market remains dynamic. GNSS is used around... (read more)

2017-02-06 10:32:07

Galileo: Commercial Hopes Unrealistic

GIM Interviews Owen M. Goodman, Chief Operating Officer, Fugro N.V.

It is likely to be 2012 before the Galileo system itself is fully operational on a stand-alone basis, says this month’s interviewee Owen Goodman, and Galileo will never be a commercially viable service as long as GPS and Glonass are free. Given current plans, Galileo is heading inevitably towards a funding crisis. National security and defence agencies could make a substantial financial contribution, but this at the expense of Galileo’s status as a civilian system. The EU should leave the fulfilment of specialist civilian needs to commercial GNSS augmentation service providers and the makers of ‘RTK-type’ GNSS equipment, so that... (read more)

2006-02-23 12:00:00

Bringing Geography into Everything

GIM International Interviews Ed Parsons

As Google’s geospatial technologist, Ed Parsons is responsible for evangelising Google’s mission to organise the world’s information using geography. GIM International caught up with this ‘man with a mission’ in Barcelona during one of his countless foreign trips. (By Wim van Wegen, GIM International) You’re the geospatial technologist at Google, responsible for evangelising Google’s mission to organise the world’s information using geography. Can you describe that mission? In many ways it’s quite a unique role since the number of people within Google that are really focused on outside the organisation is quite limited. A key aspect of the role is... (read more)

2015-08-20 11:21:42

Galileo: Commercial Hopes Unrealistic

GIM Interviews Owen M. Goodman, Chief Operating Officer, Fugro N.V.

It is likely to be 2012 before the Galileo system itself is fully operational on a stand-alone basis, says this month’s interviewee Owen Goodman, and Galileo will never be a commercially viable service as long as GPS and Glonass are free. Given current plans, Galileo is heading inevitably towards a funding crisis. National security and defence agencies could make a substantial financial contribution, but this at the expense of Galileo’s status as a civilian system. The EU should leave the fulfilment of specialist civilian needs to commercial GNSS augmentation service providers and the makers of ‘RTK-type’ GNSS equipment, so that... (read more)

2006-02-23 12:00:00

Highlighting Spatial Planning and Development at FIG2020

Contributions to the Working Week from FIG commission 8

Spatial planning – the focus of commission 8 – is logically much related to the subtheme ‘integrated land and water management’ of the FIG Working Week 2020. From a planners’ perspective it is key to optimize the spatial allocation of various land use types. This applies to both land-based and water-based functions and activities. As such, spatial planning aims to balance the interests of various policy domains and stakeholders in pursue of an overall sustainable development. As land and water are a limited and often scarce resource, those interests may clash, and sometimes hard decisions have to be made. Based... (read more)

2020-05-12 10:08:59

Contribution of Hydrography towards Sustainable Water Management

FIG Commission 4: Hydrography

The 2019-2020 year has been a busy one with the Working Groups of Commission 4 focussing on representing FIG at a number of events and forum to gain insight to develops generally and also to deliver and present on the work of FIG. Through all its Working Group, Commission 4 has been actively involved in implementing its policy by working in close cooperation with relevant organisations and institutions. Altogether there are four (4) Working Groups for Commission 4 as listed below: WG 4.1 – Standards and Guidelines for Hydrography WG 4.2 – Blue Growth & UN Sustainable Development Goal 14... (read more)

2020-05-11 10:41:18

Downtown Dublin as a Lidar Point Cloud

A Highly Accurate, Diverse and Dense Annotated Laser Scanning Dataset of a City Centre

The advance of Lidar data acquisition technologies is substantially increasing the amount of spatial data obtained and it is becoming cost-prohibitive to process it manually. Artificial intelligence (AI) has now started to offer cost-effective solutions to analyse and utilize those big datasets. AI can be employed for scene understanding, accurately detecting objects and classifying 3D assets. These are the significant fundamentals of several applications including autonomous navigation, intelligent robotics, urban planning, emergency management and even forest monitoring. The most popular types of 3D spatial information for such applications are Lidar and imagery data. This article describes the dense annotated ground-truth... (read more)

2019-11-27 10:05:38

Geospatial Data in Support of 3D Cadastre

Zooming in on Recent Technical Developments

The urbanization trend is leading to an increasing number of people living in cities, thus also placing new demands on cadastral registration. To be able to register the complex infrastructures and built-up areas properly, the cadastre will need to consider the third spatial dimension. The 3D cadastre is based on 3D parcels (spatial units) which are single volumes (or multiple volumes) of space. Although the technology offers numerous possibilities for implementation of the 3D cadastre, there are still some open issues, as this article explains. We live in a three-dimensional world. Over the past decades, there have been an increasing... (read more)

2019-05-22 08:21:03

Integrating GIS and Earth Viewers

GIM International Interviews Johannes Kebeck, Technology Specialist, Microsoft Virtual Earth Business Unit

Microsoft's MapPoint Business Unit was formed in 1995. The Virtual Earth platform was launched in 2005 as an integrated set of services combining imagery with mapping, location and search functionality. In May 2006 the company acquired photogrammetric firm Vexcel. This month's interviewee, Johannes Kebeck, talks about Microsoft's aims and ambitions in the field of geomatics. â€œThere will still be a need for traditional GIS [â€¦] we will likely see tight integration between the traditional GIS and so-called Earth Viewers. How big is the geospatial division of Microsoft in terms of number of employees and share in turnover? What sort of... (read more)

2007-09-19 12:00:00

Lidar, Imagery and InSAR for Digital Forestry

GIM International interviews Benoît St-Onge

Benoît St-Onge is a professor at the University of Quebec in Montreal, Canada. He works at the Department of Geography with a major research interest in 3D remote sensing for forest analysis. 'GIM International' recently interviewed Professor St-Onge to gain a better understanding of the challenges and innovations in this field. (By Martin Kodde, contributing editor, GIM International) In your research work, you have a clear focus on the use of Lidar and photogrammetry for analysis of vegetation, forests, etc. How did your interest in vegetation develop? When I chose to specialise in remote sensing at master level in the 1980s,... (read more)

2016-10-24 09:49:55