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A lawsuit enters court in early February that may significantly impact federal contracting for mapping. It may put federal projects, including those that are not survying related, under the oversight of surveyors. We’ve done our best to lay out the facts for those in the industry at Directions Magazine‘s February’s Brooks Act Litigation: What Geospatial Practitioners Need to Know.
Update 1/19: I contacting Sandia regarding the original PR that mis-defined GIS, it’s since been corrected.
- ORIGINAL POST FOLLOWS
Asian News International (ANI) reports that researchers at Sandia National lab are tracking known reports of radiological material to define their distribution and determine where the next nuclear device may appear. The simulation involves GIS (though apparently the reporter is not aware of the definition). More importantly perhaps, the program was turned on an historical event and “got the right answer.” That was in the case of A. Q. Khan’s work in Pakistan.
In the study, York collected and collated data from 800 open-source incidents from 1992 to the present, along with the movement of dual-use items like beryllium and zirconium. He plotted the incidents on a global information system (GIS) software platform and came up with a network of countries and routes between countries indicative of an illicit nuclear and radiological trafficking scheme.
The Washington City Paper was also at the ESRI Federal User Group Meeting last week. He offers up some highlights and posts the attendence at 1,900.
One bullet:
• GISmos: Post-session talk turned to the improved infrared-mapping capabilities that enable the Roomba wireless vacuum robot to learn its owner’s floor plan for faster autonomous cleaning—a home version of robotic building-mapping systems discussed during the conference.
That’d be Sarah, the robot from PenBay Media. She’ll be with us at our Location Intelligence Conference in April. I too have described her as “Roomba”-like, though she’s better looking.
It’s a bit tough to navigate this local paper article, but I believe it says that instead of using the $45K allocated to GIS and “pictometry,” the city coucil is recommending it would be better to get updated aerials (orthos, I guess?) since the existing ones are some four years old.
The Dispatch (Maryland)
