Artificial Intelligence and location analytics

As we race head first into the 4th Industrial Revolution and the grasp of digital transformation is upon us, do we as geographers or geospatial professionals, have a grasp of what this actually means for our industry?  Do we appreciate the platform presented to us and that perhaps 'our time has come?' And while we've …

What makes a ‘safe city?’

One of the 3 stages of a Safe City (see my last blog post) is that our urban areas need to be safe for our citizens.  But what exactly constitutes safety in a city?  Is it policing?   Is it community?  Is it sensors that provide real-time monitoring and reporting?  Is it a psychological sense of …

3 stages of a Smart City

A quick online search on what constitutes a Smart City can result in days chasing definitions and perusing the various angles by consultants and technologists alike and you're no closer to getting a clear and concise guideline. Sure, there are the Smart City Concepts outlines by Frost & Sullivan which are a great starting point …

I have a smartphone so why can’t I use a $10 app?

The short answer is ‘of course you can.’  But if you want to capture accurate geospatial data that will add value to your organisation and be trusted in your asset management lifecycle then you may want to think again. How do we put value on data?  We seem to manage with physical assets within our …

How to choose a GIS hand-held GPS device

As the geospatial industry is set to grow significantly over the next 5 - 10 years, the value we place on geospatial data is going to increase and be valued within an organisation in the same way other strategic information is. When the importance of accurate (positional and attribute) spatial data is high on the …

What does a BIM look like?

It's been a while since I posted anything but in my defence, I've been fighting some interesting GIS/BIM/IM type battles.  These are ongoing and will continue to evolve but in the mean time it got me thinking.  Do we actually know what a BIM looks like?  I mean, could we draw a simple diagram that …

Do learning lessons ever become lessons learned?

New projects start-up all the time and similarly projects complete. Every so often large projects or major programmes kick-off and with them, all the industry players start making a play to get involved and get their expertise exposed to the client, the delivery partner or the programme management experts. And right behind them a string …

Streaming…streaming….timed out

I was recently on holiday in my home country, South Africa soaking up the sun and enjoying being outdoors at Christmas.  On the 2nd January 2012 I took a trip to the Kruger National Park with my parents for the day (you see I grew up in this area so always enjoy visiting) to enjoy …

Integrating Esri ArcGIS and Bentley ProjectWise

In today's engineering projects where GIS and CAD data is used almost seamlessly between the systems, we're still not buying into the tools that can integrate these systems.  Is there a reason?  Do we just not trust that tools cannot translate these two different data types without going through some sort of complex geoprocessing or …

Online GIS / Mapping tools – ArcGIS Explorer Online

It seems that there's a lot of great stuff going on out there in the online GIS/mapping world that is free to use. How much of it actually adds value to projects? Or should I be asking, how much if it is known to GIS professionals on projects and used as part of their solution …