Man’s Mental Map of Hometown Brings him Back to Family after 23 Years

Luo Gang  was on his way to kindergarten at age five when he was kidnapped and taken away to a new home more than 1000 miles away. Twenty three years later he leanred of a charity working to reunite such children with their parents. But how might he know about his home town? He remembered the spatial layout and sketched a map of what he recalled, included two bridges, very close together.

GEOINT with SAP HANA, Esri ArcGIS

David Cruickshank from SAP's Co-Innovation Lab (COIL) describes in his blog the architecture of how SAP users can perform geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) analysis using both SAP's HANA in-memory database with a workflow to Esri's ArcGIS. Some of the workflow is explained as follows:

SAP NS2 looks to create through this COIL project, an SAP Rapid Deployment Solution (RDS) to address the activity based intelligence platform needs through a coupling of SAP and partner technologies. At the heart of SAP’s architecture for OLTP and OLAP processing is HANA. HANA is an in-memory database appliance that can perform high speed in-memory transaction processing (i.e. SAP Business Suite) and big-data analytics on the same data without the need for an ETL process to load a separate data warehouse and have the ability to scale to petabyte data stores. When such an appliance further incorporates ESRI to create the concept of geospatial data marts to enrich the analysis abilities of SAP Business Intelligence, this begins to provide a true integrated capability of text analysis, geospatial analysis and traditional BI/BA in a single user interface.

Cruickshank also provides examples from three solutions he believes most in need by Department of Defense and the intel community.

1. Activity Based Analysis solution 
2. RealTime Situational Awareness (RTSA) Rapid Deployment Solution (RDS
3. Integrating 1 & 2 with a secure mobile platform

Finally he provides a situational awareness example typically used by counter-terrorism units.

Landsat Data Continuity Mission: The Long Swath by NASA Earth Observatory-GigaPan

On April 12, 2013, the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) reached its final orbit, 705 kilometers (438 miles) above Earth. One week later, the satellite's natural-color imager scanned a swath of land 185-kilometers wide and 9,000 kilometers long (120 by 6,000 miles)--an unusual, unbroken distance considering 70 percent of Earth is covered with water. That flight path afforded us the chance to assemble 56 still images into a seamless, flyover view of what LDCM saw on April 19, 2013. Stretching from northern Russia to South Africa, the full mosaic from the Operational Land Imager can be browsed here [earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/LDCMLongSwath/?src=gigapan and below].

- NASA 

- GigaPan Systems

GIS/GPS Camp in Colorado and other Education GIS News

Colorado State University Extension is offering a four day summer camp called GEAR-Tech-21, which will introduce youth to robotics and GPS/GIS technologies. Youth 10 to 14 years of age may attend the day camps at five sites in northeast Colorado: Sterling, Akron, Brush, Holyoke and Yuma.

Over the span of four days, youth will do hands-on learning in two very current and rapidly changing technology fields. In the mornings they will learn about what makes your GarminTM or your TomtomTM work to guide and give you directions — global positioning systems (satellite positioning) and geospatial information systems (mapping). In the afternoons the youth will build and program the Lego NXT™ Robots, and learn some of the computer science that makes for some fun toys as well as smart tools.

Esri Offers Interactive Map for Directory of Major Malls

Esri and the Directory of Major Malls have partnered to create the DMM Future Retail story map that media can embed or share as part of ongoing retail and local business coverage. Built on exclusive data from the DMM, this map shows 25 lifestyle/specialty and urban mixed-used projects that are expected to open in the next few years, ranked by gross leasable area. Find out where the jobs will be created and get a preview of key anchors and other tenants that will occupy these retail centers.

This interactive map provides a nice snapshot view of mall occupancy, leasable square footage and owner developer. It's a handy tool for real estate managers looking for new retail opportunities.

- Esri