Wired profiles Boeing’s Visual Security Operations Console Sentinel, or VSOC in use at U.S. embassy’s and some airports. The system integrates imagery, 3D models and sensors along with GIS data.
“We actually have a way of modeling an entire city in less than six weeks,” said John Thompson, the Boeing manager of the VSOC program. Boeing uses satellite imagery and aerial photography to map cities, then extrudes buildings, which can be populated with GIS data. A user scrolling a cursor over a building can pull up critical information such as the location of fire escapes. GPS or RFID locators on fire engines, ambulances or individuals can also be integrated with the system. Imagine a Sim City for first responders.
by Adena Schutzberg on 04/13 at 06:42 AM |
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A C|net blog noted a press release from Disney Mobile (which I could not find, but I did find this source) which highlights the nearly one year old company’s subscriber habits. While Disney won’t say how many subscriber it has it will say:
30 percent of its subscribers make use of its GPS location-tracking services. Parents who use the tracking feature do so about every other day. The company also said that about 30 percent of Disney Mobile’s location requests are made from the Web and 70 percent from the handset.
It’s of course hard to read the stat without comparable ones, but 30 percent seems low to me, especially for a company aimed at families. Using the locating figure every other day also seems high to me, based simply on how often my brother’s four kids are not with an adult. Would you use the feature if the kid was supposed to be at Mary’s house? Or would you call Mary’s mom?
by Adena Schutzberg on 04/10 at 07:46 AM |
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The folks at Safe have added GeoRSS support it FME 2007, currently in beta. Says the press release:
FME’s GeoRSS reader and writer support both RSS and Atom feeds, and all of the three current GeoRSS standards for encoding geographical data in a feed: World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Geo, GeoRSS Simple and GeoRSS GML Profile.
Do be careful, because while these are “standards” they’ve not been approved by anyone, just put out there by their creators. OGC has released GeoRSS from GeoRSS.org as a White Paper.
The folks at Safe eat their own dogfood by offering this sample map of the locations of their training courses powered by GeoRSS published on mapufacture (Mikel Maron’s app) and the same on my local guru (from m-spatial, that’s Adrian Cuthbert’s company). That right there is one of the great things about GeoRSS; you can “plop” your data down on any app that supports it.
Word on the street is we are going to have a bunch of the GeoRSS players, including Safe folks, at our Location Intelligence Conference.
by Adena Schutzberg on 02/08 at 07:22 AM |
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In our weekly podcast covering the week’s news Adena Schutzberg and Nora Parker look at news about a small bank using GIS, new offerings from EPA and Acxiom, and explore updates from the National Weather Service in how it shares weather alerts, ligitation related to the Brooks Act and new sponsors for OSGEO. The podcast is 10 minutes (< 4 Mb) and was recorded January 22, 2007.
Here are the
show notes. What are show notes? Links to all the things we mention in the audio.
Missed any podcasts?
Here’s the index.
by Adena Schutzberg on 01/23 at 01:00 AM |
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