As mentioned in my previous post, it's obvious by the vendor exhibits at the MundoGEO Connect conference here in Sao Paulo that the focus is on data: data capture, data management and metadata. That was brought home again in today's keynote addresses.
Dale Lutz, vice president and co-founder of Safe Software offered his perspective on the community's ability to handle as much data as we are collecting. "We are inundated by data in the form of point clouds. LiDAR is inexpensive, accurate and voluminous," said Lutz. In addition, Lutz noted that while solutions from his company make it easy to integrate data by extracting, transforming and loading, i.e. spatial ETL, geospatial data to minimize myriad format exchange problems, this solves only part of the problem. "Everyone has difference jobs and different needs and the result is different formats."
Ruedi Wagner, vice president of imaging for Leica Geosystems, noted another challenge caused by point clouds. LiDAR creates n-dimensional data because it is possible to annotate points with hyperspectral data. This can lead to not only spatially accurate data but data containing information derived from sensors that parse spectroradiometric information into extremely narrow bands. "At 5 cm accuracy, you can map every single tree leaf … There is work for us for years to come, said Wagner."
Ray Kerwin, global product planning director for Topcon, discussed precision guidance of construction vehicles. He showed how it is possible to monitor machine sensors for equipment health as well as establishing a geofence to make certain that the equipment does not venture outside an area where that equipment will not function properly.
And so, while Brazil is an extremely developed nation with well established infrastructure, the need to continually collect data for maintenance as well as new projects is paramount. As mentioned above, data collection equipment has become relatively inexpensive. However, the manpower to process these data is not and the country faces a challenge to education more geospatial professionals.
