Recent Posts

Self-driving Vehicle to Tackle Desert

Story imported from the previous Slashgeo Slashcode site, user comments have not been migrated. For more information, please read Welcome to the new Slashgeo!. Thank you for your understanding.

gps writes “A team of Cornell University engineers has built a self-driving vehicle to enter the DARPA Grand Challenge, in which a vehicle must cross 175 miles of battlefield-like terrain entirely under computer control. The vehicle will be loaded with a set of waypoints which the vehicle must then follow using its onboard GPS unit with no interaction from humans. Sounds challenging? The contestants don’t have much faith that anyone will complete the journey.”

Global Landsat mosaic: raw data access

Story imported from the previous Slashgeo Slashcode site, user comments have not been migrated. For more information, please read Welcome to the new Slashgeo!. Thank you for your understanding.

spatialguru writes “When the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) set up their Web Map Server (WMS) for a global Landsat image mosaic, it blew my socks off. They’ve got it wrapped up really nicely. Of course, all those eager WorldWind users gave it a good stress test early on, bringing it to its knees (and leaving a few of us lamenting for a while). But once they had the WMS back up and running, it was even better and more stable and it is a staple data layer in many applications.

So what’s new? Have you ever wanted more “raw” access to the data? I have! It doesn’t take long before you hit the WMS image size limitations and find you can’t print large, high quality maps. So what’s a guy to do? Hold your breath for recent work at San Diego State University’s (SDSU) Center for Information Technology and Infrastructure. John Graham tempted me with enough information to make me drool. JPL is giving a copy of the Landsat mosaic to SDSU to host. John says: “We should have it available for download as geotiffs and via wms very soon…” Wow! Imagery downloads from this great dataset will go a long way to grassroots global mapping initiatives and I’m stoked to see it happening. I asked about them serving it up via Web Coverage Server (WCS) specifications. In his usual encouraging manner he replied: “We will make it available in as many formats as we are asked for :)”. Go team go! Good luck and godspeed!”

GeoServer 1.3.0 RC3 Released

Story imported from the previous Slashgeo Slashcode site, user comments have not been migrated. For more information, please read Welcome to the new Slashgeo!. Thank you for your understanding.

cholmes writes “The GeoServer Project has released version 1.3.0-RC3, offering fully compliant WFS, WFS-T, WMS and WMS-SLD support on top of PostGIS, Oracle, Shapefiles, ArcSDE and MySQL. The focus is ease of installation and use, with installers and a web based configuration tool. The new release includes instant visualization of new layers utilizing the AJAX-based MapBuilder web mapping client toolkit.”

Is Geomatics Doomed to Disappear?

Story imported from the previous Slashgeo Slashcode site, user comments have not been migrated. For more information, please read Welcome to the new Slashgeo!. Thank you for your understanding.

geo writes “Geomatics (or GIScience, if you prefer) must meet a variety of “new” needs:

Need to extend geomatics from its software focus to an action/learning focus. Need to extend to incorporate body space. Need to better integrate metaphoric space than we do currently. Need to develop qualitative tools to support social science, humanities, arts and letters - the future of the world is tied to this. Need to integrate across established approaches and the margins of the discipline.

If we do nothing, geomatics will cease to be relevant. But if we do all that needs to be done, will we still know what geomatics is? Does it matter, does anybody care?”

Geo-Temporal Visualization of RFID

Story imported from the previous Slashgeo Slashcode site, user comments have not been migrated. For more information, please read Welcome to the new Slashgeo!. Thank you for your understanding.

LocationIntelligence published part 2 (here’s part 1 :-) of their Geo-Temporal Vizualisation of RFID information in USA’s DoD Supply Chain case study. The abstract goes: The use of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology is expanding rapidly in both commercial and Department of Defense (DoD) supply chains. Many resources within the RFID research and development community have been focused on hardware and firmware components, including active and passive RFID tags, tag readers, and embedded software, yet fewer resources have been focused on exploiting the data collected by tag readers and stored in electronic databases. GeoTime™ visualization exploits the collection and storage of RFID data, and provides global in-transit visibility of the DoD supply chain down to the last tactical mile.