GIS

Global Data Enrichment and Geo Addressing Coverage Precisely

Precisely has announced the regional expansion of its unique location identifier, the PreciselyID, for its World Points of Interest (POI) data offering. Points of interest located in the US, Canada, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Sweden, and Singapore now benefit from accurate, standardized, and meaningful data – allowing businesses to streamline location-based decision-making across multiple regions of operation. Keeping POI data fresh is no small feat, even for companies such as Google, who recently revealed that it removed seven million fake business profiles and prevented 12 million from being created throughout 2021 alone. Standardizing POI data is just as difficult; differences in address standards, language, character variations, or a lack of accurate address data, make it challenging for companies to effectively operationalize data from multiple regions. www.precisely.com

VCTI launches broadband map integrity service

VCTI has announced its Broadband Map Integrity service. The new offering is designed to help states, municipalities, schools and other interested parties to quickly and efficiently submit challenges to the recently-released FCC maps, the Broadband Serviceable Location Fabric (Fabric), that will inform the allocation of $42.5 billion in BEAD (Broadband Equity Access and Deployment) grants. Current estimates place map inaccuracies at around one-to-two percent, which could translate to three million underserved households being excluded from the final maps.

One fundamental challenge is the variability in how addresses are captured in the myriad of government systems, such as tax records, and within the FCC Fabric. Leveraging their expertise and suite of geospatial tools, the VCTI Broadband Map Integrity solution normalizes the addresses to map to the Fabric, and identifies missing and misclassified locations. www.vcti.io

ISRO to develop SDI Geoportal for UT-Ladakh, India

Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) Science & Technology; Minister of State (Independent Charge) Earth Sciences; Dr Jitendra Singh recently informed that Government of UT – Ladakh has approached the Indian Institute of Remote Sensing (IIRS), a unit of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) for developing “Spatial Data Infrastructure geoportal ‘Geo-Ladakh’ for UT-Ladakh”.

The project encompasses spatial database generation (water resources, vegetation and energy potential) using remote sensing, geospatial techniques and the development of a Geo-portal for hosting this database.The project also aims towards training of UT-Ladakh officials on Geospatial techniques and applications. Portal provides geospatial data visualization and analytics for UTLadakh, consisting of Spatial viewer, Carbon Neutrality, Geospatial utlility mapping and Geo-Tourism. An MoU was also signed between IIRS (ISRO) and UTLadakh Administration on January 1, 2022 towards carrying out the above work.

UAE Space Agency and AWS sign agreement

The United Arab Emirates Space Agency and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have signed a Statement of Strategic Intent and Cooperation that is designed to support the creation of a vibrant, sustainable, competitive, and innovative space sector in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

AWS will collaborate with the Space Agency and related UAE government space organizations on the following three initiatives, designed to support the Space Agency’s long-term development goals:
1. The Emirati – AWS Space Industry Development Program (EASID). This initiative focuses both on the growth of existing commercial space organizations as well as the promotion of an environment conducive to new entrants like space startups. This initiative is set to provide them access to AWS Activate and the AWS Founders program, both designed to provide startups with AWS credit, technical training, and business support.
2. The Emirati – AWS Talent for Space Program (EATS). This initiative includes outreach and training designed to support talent development for the space industry in the UAE, particularly with regards to cloud computing and big data.
3. The Emirati – AWS Open Data Sponsorship Program. This initiative will encourage collaboration among the UAE space and research community through the sharing of data sets on AWS related to space data-driven initiatives such as space surveillance and space situational awareness programs.

The UAE Space Agency is the first in the region to sign such an agreement with AWS. This agreement builds on AWS’s ongoing support of regional space endeavors including the UAE Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre, whose Hope Probe is using AWS to analyze and share scientific data about the Martian atmosphere. https://aws.amazon.com

CoreLogic launches Climate Risk Analytics

CoreLogic has announced the launch of Climate Risk Analytics™, designed to help government agencies and enterprises measure, model and mitigate the physical risks of climate change to the real estate industry, initially through 2050. This solution is built on Google Cloud’s secure and sustainable infrastructure.

Built on CoreLogic’s Discovery Platform, a spatial data and analytics platform, CoreLogic Climate Risk Analytics is powered by CoreLogic’s CLIP™ system, which leverages professional-grade, granular data to pinpoint a property’s exact location and its attributes. The solution provides a comprehensive, blended risk score for every U.S. property with a granular breakdown of specific peril risks and each risk’s financial impact. www.corelogic.com

Epic Games announces full release of RealityScan app

Epic Games and Capturing Reality announced this month that theRealityScan app is now available for free download on iOS products.The app is a step forward for easily creating 3D models of real-life objects to be used in a variety of different applications without the complex process of recreating the objects completely from scratch. With the app, users “scan” the real-life object they are trying to recreate, which is done by taking a series of photos capturing the entire object from all angles. www.capturingreality.com

Google to combine Maps and Waze teams

Google plans to merge its teams working on Maps products and the mapping service Waze with effect from December 9. The decision to consolidate processes comes as the search giant is facing pressure to streamline operations and cut costs. The restructuring is expected to reduce overlapping work across the Waze and Maps products. Waze’s more than 500 employees will be merged with Google’s Geo organization, which oversees Google Maps, Google Earth, and Street View products.

High-res spatial maps to assess climate-related shocks

ICRISAT scientists in collaboration with the Asian Development Bank (ADB) have developed high-resolution spatial maps that enable cropland mapping for insurance claims and agriculture policy decision-making on targeting regenerative agriculture (RA).

Physical ground surveys are a laborious process and often require an army of surveyors to validate the effects of floods and drought. ICRISAT scientists in collaboration with the ADB developed spatial maps for South Asia to assess croplands, crop type and crop intensity data. South Asia accounts for 1.9 billion people, constituting almost 25% of the world’s population, 87% of which are smallholder farmers. Insurance companies and government agencies require highquality satellite imagery to monitor and map floods/droughts and other climatic conditions to make the claims process more accurate and efficient.

To this end, ICRISAT scientists have produced three distinct spatial maps for South Asia with a spatial resolution of 30 m, which is much higher to get finer details of cropland for food and water security assessments. Currently, these factors are evaluated using mainly coarse-resolution (250–1000 m) remote sensing data.

The team developed three spatial maps for South Asia for the year 2014-15 to support food and water security assessments and management. These maps would assess irrigated versus rainfed croplands, crop types or crop dominance and cropping intensity i.e., the number of times a crop is grown on the same plot of land in a year. www.tandfonline.com

Stuttgart’s urban digital twin project

Hexagon’s Safety, Infrastructure & Geospatial division and Fujitsu Limited have partnered to deliver a digital twin platform for Stuttgart, Germany, to support the city’s urban digital twin project. The Civil Engineering Office will use the SaaS solution to visualize and analyze data from IoT sensors across the city to promote sustainability and enhance quality of life for the 600,000 residents of Stuttgart.

The solution will provide a common operating picture for monitoring sensor values, such as water quality, flood levels and parking space occupancy, enabling the city to derive insights for optimizing operations and making informed decisions for the future. The digital twin platform is based on Hexagon’s M.App Enterprise and Xalt | Integration, with Fujitsu providing the necessary cloud infrastructure service for the project. hexagon.com