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Think about a city as an ant-hill. Despite the evident limits of such analogy, the great advantage of this approach is that it highlights the stupendous complexity we are all embedded in, so deeply that we usually tend to forget it. Just think about all the people you fugitively perceived on your way to work this morning. Try to remember those you interacted with, and try then to imagine those you couldn’t see. Imagine all these individual lifelines, in parallel most of the time, sometimes crossing each other at specific nodes in space and time.

Ordnance Survey is adding state-of-the-art satellite positioning receivers around the Thames Gateway and 2012 Olympic site as part of its ongoing investment in Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) across Britain.

Since the early beginnings of digital imagery people have used various forms of compression. The primary driver for this was almost always size related because imagery takes up a lot of space - doubling the resolution of vector data has little real effect on data sizes, whereas doubling the resolution of imagery increases storage requirements four fold.

Geospatial data is often voluminous - it takes up large amounts of disk space, requires a long time to process, and occupies a long time to transfer across networks. This is a longstanding problem which is aggravated in some network-based applications because network bandwidth is usually less than the bandwidth inside a computer (bus bandwidth).

For as long as we have had computers data compression has been an important issue. Essentially there are two reasons for data compression: compressed data require less disk space and communication of compressed data is faster. Already in the early days of computers file size was an issue, which required an efficient use of limited disk space. In modern times disk space seems unlimited, but for many types of data the file size can be huge. Communicating and using these files requires efficient storage and thus data compression.

The company, known in the geospatial community for many years as Laser-Scan, has recently been renamed 1Spatial. Renaming is not a step a company makes lightly. When there are strong reasons for doing so, however -- confirming the established market position and supporting new business visions and goals -- a new company name that expresses them loud and clear is a wise decision. The new name, 1Spatial, speaks for itself. We took this unique opportunity to ask Mike Sanderson, 1Spatial CEO, to share with us some of his views on the company’s mission and its goals, especially in the spatial data quality business.

Imagine a large metropolitan area in which many cities have installed different highway video monitoring systems, all connected to the World Wide Web. Imagine a transportation manager using a map display interface to select highway segments or intersections the manager wants to view using video. The monitors have been installed independently at different times by different vendors using different equipment and software, but all the vendors have implemented a set of standards that enable the user's application to discover, control and access all of the monitors in the same way, as shown in Figure 1. Many of those standards - the OGC(r)'s Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) standards - have been approved by the OGC's membership and are beginning to be deployed in solutions.

This article takes a look at fiber-based LiDAR technology and its geospatial development spearheaded by German-based TopoSys GmbH. Currently this is the only organization manufacturing and utilizing fiber-based LiDAR for airborne survey and remote sensing applications.

IGI is a small but innovative German high-technology company that, for over twenty years, has been in the forefront of the development of computer-based flight navigation, guidance and management systems for use in airborne survey and mapping missions. However, recently the company has extended its activities into the development of airborne digital cameras and airborne and ground-based laser scanning systems. The products resulting from this development have started to make a significant impact within these fields, while, at the same time, the company has retained its major presence in the area of in-flight positioning, navigation, guidance and sensor management systems.