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Damage potentials and indication of dangers derived from satellite imagery and historical maps. The major cross-border river areas already completely captured. Key aim of FloodServer is a more efficient flood management across Europe.

Since the Management Buy Out a few years ago, 1Spatial has grown profitably through self-funding. In little over three years the company has made three acquisitions in Europe and firmly established itself as a leader in spatial database management. Graham Stickler, 1Spatial’s Product and Marketing Director, talks about the company’s future direction, the role of the 1Spatial Community and how the spatial industry is moving forward.

Imagine a fully automated, highly reliable system to produce high-accuracy orthos and mosaics of radar data all over the world. Time-sensitive applications such as oil spills and flood monitoring can now access high-accuracy radar orthos as soon as the data is available. These applications and more are now possible with the successful operation of the ALOS satellite.

In the months ahead a commercial Earth imaging satellite, GeoEye-1, will be launched by GeoEye Inc. It will provide the highest resolution and most advanced collection capabilities of any commercial remote sensing system. The satellite will acquire high-quality panchromatic and multispectral imagery at spatial resolutions of 0.41-meters in the panchromatic mode and 1.64-meters in the multispectral mode, respectively, and collect hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of map-accurate imagery in a single day.

Do you remember a person next to you, or yourself, giving route directions? Although these directions can be highly individual, following these directions is typically straight forward. They contain the information relevant for reaching the destination, are descriptive, they tell a story of route following, and can easily be memorized. The automatically generated directions by in-car navigation systems, location-based services and web based route planners look different. They are hard to memorize, and their communication is far from perfect. This article discusses the challenges of improving automatically generated route directions, recent progress of research in this area, and a first commercial demonstrator for some of these results.

A new service, developed in the framework of an ESA-supported project, is using satellite images to compare agricultural crop sites across Europe in order to ensure the more efficient use of pesticides.

25 years after the release of ARC/INFO GIS-market leader ESRI still knows how to attract thousands of people for an inspired user conference. They invited a Nobel Prize laureate, and of course there were hundreds of educational workshops and lectures for the GIS-specialist.

HP’s Graphic Arts Summit took place in Rome last May to present new technologies in their new printer series, which include the HP Designjet T610 and T1100, and the Designjet Z6100. HP employees, managers and engineers came from all over the world to explain the new large-format printers to resellers, dealers and the press. GeoInformatics spoke to Carles Magrinyà, Worldwide Product Manager for the HP Designjet T-series, based in Barcelona, Spain, about the company’s latest technology. Magrinya: “The world is interested in our innovations, and we had hundreds of resellers in Rome.”

At the Thuringian State Office for Surveying and Geographical Information in Erfurt, Germany, all plans and cartographic data are printed on thirty Canon large format printers in ten different locations. Mixed print jobs are not output by means of conventional multi-roll systems, but are distributed to three printers at each location. This saves the State Office a lot of time and paper. The print management solution, Microbox CAD Station, processes the automated distribution of formats to the corresponding printer and supports the transparent handling of multiple file formats from a range of applications.