Yesterday (Mar 18) Thermopylae Sciences & Technology (TST) hosted its fourth annual Technology Summit (press release) for its development partners and government users. The company focuses on delivering Google-based geosolutions that take advantage of the cloud, mobile and the latest technology. I saw highlights of the new features coming to the company's 3.0 releases of Ubiquity and iSpatial products via an online meeting today.
Ubiquity is a platform for quickly and easlity deploying mobile apps. With a bit of drag and drop even a non-tecnical user can group widgets into an app. More technical individuals can write new widgets. The real power of Ubiquity is the deployment of the apps. A supervisor can send field workers a link or QR code to download the app or manually push a new or updated app to their mobile devices. Further, she can set up a zone (geofence in common parlance) on the map of area of interest which when entered by field staff prompts immediate download of the app. Further, changes to the definition of the app at the server (say a widget is removed), immediatly propagates to all who have it installed on their devices. Visualization of data collected (say in the field after a disaster) can be visualized on a mobile device's map or via an augmented reality implementation.
Ubiquity 3.0, coming later this year, will include support for:
- HTML5
- publication of apps to app stores (Apples App Store, Google Play, etc.)
- new map widget with support for WMS and WFS
- maintaining proprietary IP
- access to backend technology
- forms use when offine
- enahanced batter life, minized bandwidth use and standardized messaging
iSpatial is TST's geospatial workhorse; it's a framework to author, ingest, export, search, vizualize and track geodata. That said, it's not meant to replace, but to complement existing systems. Support for a variety of data and interface standards make that possible.
iSpatial supports 50+ languages (that can be changed on the fly) and can ingest data in many formats and encodings from shapefiles to KML to WFS. The system can be used to develop a real time picture of operations on the ground using input from GPS and other tracking devices. Zones (geofences) can be set up to trigger alerts when specific individuals (targets) cross into or out of (rules) an area (boundary). That integration of datasets becomes the actionable information for military and business leaders.
