September 1, 2010

Irrigation myths busted at GITA conference

Posted by josediacono @ 9:35 am under Uncategorized

I have covered a couple of conferences recently for Asian Survey and Mapping e-zine, most recently GITA in Brisbane.

Irrigation Myths Busted

http://www.asmmag.com/features/gita-conference-irrigation-myths-busted

I’ll be writing about the CRC and some new products in coming editions.   There were some inspiring presentations on business and strategic directions at GITA. Terrey Effeney from Energex about the challenges of how to make an electricity grid built for the 20th century handle our 21st century lifestyle of airconditioners,Wii, solar panels feeding into the grid and electric cars.  Also Peter Woodgate of the CRC gave a very encouraging picture of how the CRC will take spatial to industries like health and energy and how to achieve James Bangay’s vision of a SimCity-like model of the electricity network.

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July 16, 2010

Mashups at Energy Australia

Posted by josediacono @ 12:33 pm under Uncategorized

Outage Mashup of customer data, network and Google map

Sydney electricity supplier, Energy Australia is using Mashups  for media communications, senior management briefings and engineering collaboration. They are bringing GIS  into the limelight by delivering information in a quick and user friendly way.  Craig Hersant and Daniel Hansen are speaking at the GITA conference in their paper “Using GIS to accelerate business performance” and Daniel will lead a session in the Mashups workshop to show how it is done. More

They paint a picture on a Google canvas  of an outage situation, a proposed network change or critical infrastructure. It is combined with output from GIS, customer service and outage management systems. The possibilities are endless.

Staff walk senior management through a scenario using the familiar backdrop of a Google map, switching easily into Google Earth 3D imagery or Streetview to clarify a question.

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May 26, 2010

Neogeographers and paleogeographers

Posted by josediacono @ 2:09 pm under Uncategorized

http://vimeo.com/11540899 Not your fathers approach to geodata creation and sharing posted by moderator Peter Batty.  This is quite a long video and I do plan to make a summary of the key points sometime,but for a start there is a very good explanation of openstreetmap as an example of neogeography and powerful pictures from post earth quake Haiti (the building housing the goverment GIS was destroyed in the earthquake so over a matter of days volunteers created new maps from old paper base maps, high res satellite imagery, even Maps from the CIA if I heard correctly – which made a huge difference to the emergency response and saved lives.

Some amusing banter between neogeographers and traditional GIS people cheekily referred to as paleogeographers.

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November 3, 2009

spatial and legal

Posted by josediacono @ 8:55 pm under Uncategorized

Legal aspects of spatial keep popping up.

“If people are confused, they say no, especially lawyers”

said Kevin Pomfret, a lawyer from the Open GIS Consortium.  He was urging us to seek out and educate the legal profession  avoid problems such as spatial evidence being ruled as inadmissible or lawyers refusing to approve data sharing licence agreements.  Technology is moving faster than the ability of people to understand it.  The OGC and GITA ran a  workshop for lawyers in the US.

Mobile phones, business intelligence, social networking and satellite tracking of vehicles and equipment raises a number of issues concerning privacy, intellectual property rights, liability,  and national security

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September 1, 2009

GITA workshop

Posted by josediacono @ 1:46 pm under Uncategorized

I was in Melbourne yesterday to lead a workshop on 3D Underground infrastructure modeling as part of the GITA conference. While we have had the technology for some time to model the undergrounds of our cities, getting the data from the different organisations is another matter. In Sydney the Dept of Lands has led this initiative with the Sydney Underground project – combining infrastructure assets from electricity, gas, water, rail and the city council to create a truly amazing model for emergency management and planning.

Inevitably the conversation came around todata quality – Energy Australia have completed a 4 year  audit and improvement project for their Low and High Voltage assets and Greg Oaten spoke about the process and the ensuing benefits to his organisation.

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August 30, 2009

Gita Workshop

Posted by admin @ 7:01 pm under Uncategorized

Tomorrow I am heading down to Melbourne to lead a workshop on spatial data sharing for 3d underground city modelling.

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