Esri to Map Pittsburgh’s Steps

Lauri Dafner, a solutions engineer at Esri's Philadelphia regional office joined a group of residents to plan this year's Step Trek, fundraiser that tours the ciites steps. She's working with the South Side Slopes Neighborhood Association to create "story map," which the local paper calls "a combination of mapping, with contextural information, photos and video" accessible by smarhones for the event in October. 

- Post Gazette

Image by Phone jack from Wikpedia, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Sensor Journalism: A New Frontier for Tech, Maps and Ethics

Sensor journalism changes data journalists usual practice of using existing data for stories to handing them control of data collection. But how to do that - both practically and ethically - is a challenge.

Columbia University plans to explore these issues, Emily Bell, director of the Columbia J-School’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, said at Betaworks Betaday on Thursday. To that end, the Tow Center will run a weekend workshop on sensor journalism in June and will fund a few projects. And next year, Bell said, the Tow Center plans to run a “sensor newsroom classroom” in partnership with the architecture school.

The practice seems to include both the use of in-situ sensors as well as crowdsourced data like those RadioLab is collecting on this year's cicada event (map embedded below). Clearly, this should be a topic close to GIS users' and geographers' hearts.

- PaidContnet

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