Monday, March 31. 2008

IBI Taps Google Maps for WebFOCUS Solution

Information Builders (IBI) is announcing the availablity of WebFOCUS for Google Maps and looks to catapult itself to the forefront of business intelligence (BI) tools that are location enabled. IBI is touting the ability to rapidly develop a mashup of its BI engine with Google Maps to visualize a business' operational data and reports. This is somewhat of a departure for IBI which had looked to ESRI's ArcIMS as their platform for geospatial data visualization.

Blue Dasher, the next Immersive Media?

Joe Francica noted Blue Dasher the other day when we chatted. The company has come out of the shadows in conjunction with CTIA and is the heart of an article in the Miami Herald. Welcome to another player in the "photograph my street and put it on a website/mobile/nav device arena! Already in: Immersive Media, Everyscape and others. Blue Dasher will offer up in photo ads for businesses, but outside that, I'm not sure of it competitive differentiator.

Fish Eye Lens for Maps

The technology is from Alps in Japan but sounds very much like IDELIX pliable display technology I first ran into in 2001. Alas the company's site is in Japanese. But as I understand it, both technologies put a moveable lens in front of the map, providing details in the center but context to the rest of the map at the edges. IDELIX licensing it to I think BEA for use in imaging software.

via TechRadar

General Dynamics UK to Offer 3D Near Real Time Environments for Soldiers

The technology, described as an "urban intelligence and surveillance system" is called Masthead and will be announced at a special forces show in Jordan this week.

Data capture can be done with a system based on LIDAR (Light Intensity Direction and Ranging) that sits atop a jeep. Also in development: the ability to fuse data from other sensors, such as those that see through walls.

Mike Thomas, the business development manager at the company's Mission Systems division "said that by using 3-D through-the-wall radar, thermal imaging and X-ray backscatter, you can fuse data to create a picture of a building's external and internal structures, as well as detect objects and people inside."

The UK developed and GD UK funded work is not subject to U.S. technology export regulations.

- Defense News

GIS Data Sharing the Schuylkill County (PA) Way

The REPUBLICAN & Herald in Pottsville, PA describes how the county shares geographic data. At this point 30% of the 67 municipalities in the county have signed the sharing agreement. It's an interesting agreement, which includes this passage:

Sharing members may only use shared data to promote clearly definable, publicly supported objectives and functions. These objectives and functions include public planning purposes, public safety purposes and other functions typically performed by governmental agencies, implementation and interpretation of scientific research and tabular information, the generation of new data sets, and the creation of hard copy maps, charts and reports

One municipality recently signed on with a 6-1 council vote. The one vote against was worried about the data might "potentially infringe on people’s individual rights." Penn State professor Donna Peuquet said that was only a possibility if the data got into the public's hands.

Businesses can access the data, too, just via a licensing agreement, that I suspect requires a fee. The arrangement has been in place since 2004.

Open Source Solution for Currier in NZ

Geographic Business Solutions (GBS) doesn't want to compete with GPS players like Navman and Armada. The good news: they can offer up flexible, on-off solutions. The company took eight weeks to deliver a tracking system.

[It] allows Urgent Couriers' dispatchers to pinpoint the location of every courier on a map, zoom in on couriers and view all relevant job information. The allocation of jobs to each of the company's 85 contractors is also assisted by GPS ensuring that couriers closest to jobs are efficiently assigned to pick-ups, preventing the need for them to double back to jobs, and saving on time and fuel.
...
The new GPS system for Urgent Couriers is based on open source database PostgreSQL (with PostGIS) and an open source mapserver, UMN Mapserver. GBS built the interface and web functionality in Internet Explorer (7) and configured it to fit Urgent Couriers' dispatch system.

- m-net.com