Novedge Pulse™ of Geoff Zeiss

In a very appropriately titled session Taking Society's Pulse in Real-time at the Creating the Policy and Legal Framework for a Location-enabled Society conference in Boston, one item really got people's attention focussed on the issues that arise from combining [more...]

At the Distributech 2013 conference, the largest electric power distribution conference in North America with attendance of about 9600, earler ths year in San Diego, if there was one consistent message, it was that smart grid has become mainstream - [more...]

McKinsey Global Institute published a report Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity that analyzes the state of digital data, how it is used in different domains in both the private and public sectors, and offers suggestions [more...]

Infrastructure-excellence.com is hosting the second annual competition showcasing Excellence in Infrastructure— highlighting the best projects done in 2012/2013. The winners will be given over US$10,000 in prizes by the competition sponsors. The competition is open to anyone 21 years and [more...]

At the Creating the Policy and Legal Framework for a Location-enabled Society conference in Boston, Kirk Goldsberry, who is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard, gave a fascinatng presentation with the help of two of [more...]

I blogged previously about a presentation that, Rod Nikula, VP Power Supply at Wright-Hennepin Cooperative Electric Assn (WH) in Minnesota, gave at this year's NRECA conference that hit on a very sensitive topic among power utilties. Companies like Solar City [more...]

The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGEO) has announced the formation of the Open Source Geospatial Laboratory (OSGL) at the University of Southampton in the UK.. In 2011, the International Cartographic Association (ICA) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the [more...]

On Thursday and Friday of this week the Centre for Spatial Law and Policy is co-hosting a conference with Harvard University's Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA), Berkman Center of Internet and Society and Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs [more...]

Memoori, a UK research firm, has released a report “The Smart Grid Business 2012 to 2017”, which analyzes global smart grid-related sales. Its research has identified some interesting trends in the current smart grid market. Globally In the last 3 [more...]

The National Science and Technology Council has released a National Strategy for Civil Earth Observation.. Currently, 11 Federal departments and agencies participate in over 100 Earth observation programs which together cost billions of dollars annually. The Strategy provides a mechanism [more...]

The principle of free and open access to government geospatial data has been adopted by many governments including US Federal, Canada, Japan, South Africa, Brazil, California, and by the City of Vancouver and other cities. But being able to access [more...]

Google released a report What is the economic impact of Geo services ? earlier this year prepared by Oxera Consulting Ltd in the UK. What are geospatial services ? Oxera incuded all interactive digital mapping and location-based data, products, and [more...]

At SPAR 2013 Keith Warren, BIM/3D SUE Manager at VTN Consulting gave a fascinating presentation on the 3D above and below ground model of city infrastructure including roads, utilities, telecom, and buildings that VTN has developed with the City of [more...]

It's nesting season in Southern Ontario. Geese are notoriously territorial about their nests, so finding a way across the campus at the Univerity of Waterloo (where the Blackberry was originally developed) that avoids goose nests is important. The university's Open [more...]

Kevin Gilson, of the Project Visualization group at Parsons Brinkerhoff (PB), gave an overview of how PB manages 3D+ datasets in support of design and construction for large infrastructure projects such as the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, the I-95 New [more...]

At SPAR 2013 Dennis Rodriguez, Project Manager at Denver International Airport (DIA), and Daniel Stonecipher of Immersiv, gave a fascinating presentation on how they combined a BIM-based design and construction process with GIS to create a facilities and operations management [more...]

The Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) is responsible for about $30 billion in assets including pavement, bridges, signs, culverts and signals. At SPAR 2013 Stan Burns, Asset Management Director at UDOT gave an overview of a very ambitious program involving [more...]

At SPAR 2013 I had the opportunity to hear very forward looking presentations by Ron Singh, Chief of Surveys/Geometronics Manager at the Oregon Department of Transportation. What Ron sees in the future and what motivates a lot of what Don [more...]

At SPAR 2013 I had the opportuniy to hear a very forward looking presentation by Ron Singh, Chief of Surveys/Geometronics Manager at the Oregon Department of Transportation. It was even more impressive because Ron's background is surveying. His primary objective [more...]

According to a report by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) the geospatial services industry in the United States generates annual revenues of $75 billion annually. That is about 0.5 % of the US GDP. The report breaks the geospatial services [more...]

Two countries, Australia and New Zealand, have commissioned studies to estimate the contribution of geospatial data and technology to the national economy. Canada has just announced the award of a similar project to a team that includes ACIL Tasman, who [more...]

There are several business models for water distribution including investor owned, coops, regional associations, private-public partnerships and municipal. In the UK there are a small number of regulated regional investor owned water utilities like Thames Water, Northwest Water and Southern [more...]

Recognizes the right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation as a human right that is essential for the full enjoyment of life and all human rights and Calls upon States and international organizations to provide financial resources, capacity-building [more...]

In her introduction to the session she was chairing at the Canadian Water Network conference Margaret Catley-Carlson, who has been involved with water internationally for about 15 years, focused on some of the myths about water that need to be [more...]

At the Canadian Water Network conference we heard a fascinating presentation by Helmi Ansari, Director, Sustainability and Organizational Capability, PepsiCo Foods on how PepsiCo has reduced its water (and energy and waste) footprint and some of the business challenges specific [more...]

The Ontario Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) has reported that demand for electricity in Ontario was reduced by 448 megawatts (MW) or 2.7 per cent as a result of Earth Hour. According to Toronto Hydro electricity demand dropped 205 megawatts [more...]

At the Geospatial World Forum (GWF) in Amsterdam last year, Paul Cheung of the United Nations Initiative on Global Geospatial Information Management (GGIM) voiced the concern about their role that many national mapping agencies and other government organizations with responsibility [more...]

At the Canadian Water Network conference we heard that it is estimated that 800 million people don't have access to clean drinking water and 41 percent of the world’s population, 2.3 billion people, live in water-stressed areas. Cash-stressed governments are [more...]

Several years ago I had the opportunity to visit the Southerly wastewater treatment plant in Cleveland, Ohio, where I learned that the plant, which serves a population of more than 601,000 in the Greater Cleveland area, is one of the [more...]

OpenStack is an open source cloud computing platform for public and private clouds. The project aims to deliver solutions for all types of clouds by being open, simple to implement, and massively scalable. The OpenStack Foundation was founded by Rackspace [more...]

The Semantic Web is an effort of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The idea of the Semantic Web is to provide a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries, or [more...]

I have blogged frequently on the workforce challenges facing the utility industry resulting from accelerating retirement among engineers and skilled workers and by the technology transformation associated with the smart grid. Community colleges in partnership with utiltiies have been the [more...]

Starting 8 March 2013, a 1:1 million scale topographic dataset, EuroGlobalMap has been available free of charge for any use under a new open data licence, the EuroGeographics OpenData Licence, which allows you to: Reproduce the Product, distribute it and [more...]