There has never been a greater national need for consistent 3D models of the landscape to address pressing resource management, conservation, natural hazards and economic issues. The government is considering a program to enhance the quality, consistency and availability of 3D landscape information using lidar and related measurement technologies. This presentation will introduce lidar technology and outline the concept of a national program, including science and operational applications, benefits and the challenges of creating a national lidar data layer applicable to many government and other national business uses.

With all of the hype around cloud computing it is reasonable for decision makers to ask “yes, but what is really good for?”. This talk will establish a baseline for discussions around what cloud computing is, what it isn’t and how it should be applied to real world applications. Successful deployments over the past year will be shared along with generic examples of applications that can definitely benefit from the cloud paradigm. Finally, a brief overview of Microsoft’s cloud offerings with emphasis on the cloud development platform will be provided.

Effects of earthquake damage to highway components (e.g., bridges, tunnels, roadways, etc.) can go well beyond life-safety risks and costs to repair the damaged components. Such damage can also disrupt traffic flows which, in turn, can impact the region’s economic recovery and emergency response. These impacts will depend not only on the seismic performance of the components, but also on the characteristics of the overall highway system such as its network configuration and roadway-link characteristics (e.g., link locations, redundancies, and traffic capacities). Unfortunately, such traffic impacts are usually not considered in seismic risk reduction activities at state transportation departments. One reason for this has been the lack of a technically-sound and practical tool for estimating these impacts. Therefore, since the mid-1990s, the FHWA has sponsored multi-year seismic-research projects at MCEER that have included development and programming of such a tool based on geospatial technologies. This has led to new software named REDARS (Risks from Earthquake DAmage to Roadway Systems) that was released for public use recently. Read more...
(Image Courtesy of FHWA REDARS)

The real-time city is now real! The increasing deployment of sensors and hand-held electronics in recent years is allowing a new approach to the study of the built environment. The way we describe and understand cities is being radically transformed - alongside the tools we use to design them and impact on their physical structure. This presentation will address some of these changes from a critical point of view through the work of the SENSEable City Laboratory, a new research initiative at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

This talk covers the "Today of Geospatial" and introduces to the audience several geospatial directions at Microsoft, e.g., SQL Server Spatial, Bing Maps, SQL Server, Business Intelligence(BI), SQL Spatial Library, and then, goes into the "Future of Geospatial": geostreaming and, more specifically, geostreaming in the cloud. The talk is divided into two parts: The first part provides a 10,000 foot view of various geospatial efforts at Microsoft. The second part of the talk introduces the Microsoft SQL Server StreamInsight approach to geostreaming. This talk provides the unique lessons that have been taken over the last few years, an industrial perspective of the problem, and definitely a vision of how the .geo term will be one of the hottest terms over the coming decades. Read more...

Geospatial informatics has achieved a level of maturity that is bringing spatial data to ever more applications. Examples include web mapping, 3-D browsers, spatial data infrastructures, sensor webs, and location based services. Key principles to this achievement include: robust open source and proprietary implementations; consistent geospatial concepts across implementations; and standards adopted through open consensus offered freely as in free beer on the web.
Several applications are now ripe for rapid development based on this established baseline of standards, software implementations and deployed systems. The value and use of geospatial information will continue to increase through various systems-of-systems of geospatial services. Beyond traditional SDI communities the Geoscience communities are rapidly developing information systems using OGC and other open standards. The application of geospatial to Business Intelligence is poised for phenomenal growth. The emergence of mobile Internet will result in the second generation of location-based services.

As more and more organizations implement and embrace the geo-enabled enterprise, it has become possible not just to incorporate maps and geospatial analysis into applications, but to create a new class of solutions that implicitly and inherently rely on the geospatial substrate that is part of todays information systems. Critical applications -- business Intelligence and analytics, operational systems, web and cloud services are more targeted, more context-appropriate, and incorporate more relevant information because the data infrastructure increasingly understands and delivers location, sensor and tagged content from devices through standard interfaces. This presentation will describe how the base components of the IT infrastructure comprise a complete geospatial substrate and how applications, BI, analytic technologies and tools incorporate these capabilities and the new classes of applications that will soon be possible through the synthesis of 3D modeling, augmented reality, and operational data. Read more...

This talk addresses the growing desire to design better, smarter, and more efficient cities. Cities are inherently very complex to model because of their spatial size and their intricate underlying behavioral structure. I will show how our concurrent behavioral and geometrical simulation significantly benefits the design, editing, and prediction of large-scale 3D city models. The result is the ability to quickly generate 3D city models resembling existing locations, to visualize the outcome of urban regulations, to consider meteorological influences, and to improve emergency response. I will present our latest collection of works as well other state of the art methods. (Image Courtesy of Dr. Daniel Aliaga at Purdue University) Read more...

High resolution population distribution data is critical for successfully addressing critical issues ranging from energy and socio-environmental research to public health to homeland security. Commonly available population data from Census is constrained both in space and time and does not capture the population dynamics as functions of space and time. This imposes a significant negative consequence on the fidelity of event based simulation models with sensitive space-time resolution. Such limitations, to a large degree, can be overcome by developing population data with a finer resolution in both space and time at sub-Census levels. Geodemographic data at such scales will represent a more realistic non-uniform distribution of population. Using an innovative approach with Geographic Information System and Remote Sensing, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has made significant progress towards solving this problem. ORNL, as part of its LandScan global population project, has developed the finest resolution global and US population distribution models. This talk will describe ongoing development of the computational framework for spatial data integration and modeling framework for LandScan. Discussions will cover development of algorithms to utilize population infrastructure datasets (such as residences, business locations, academic institutions, correctional facilities, and public offices) along with behavioral or activity-based mobility datasets for representing temporal dynamics of population. In addition, we will discuss development and integration of transportation, physical and behavioral science computational algorithms; the integration of these models that address different scales and different time frames; and the development of dynamic optimization routines to take advantage of real-time data from sensor networks.