In recent years, there has been a rapid increase in the occurrence of natural disasters; for example, earthquake in Haiti and Hurricane Katrina. Taking 2005 Hurricane Katrina of New Orleans in the United States for example, approximately 150,000 human lives were endangered, despite efforts to evacuate residents to safe shelters.

Mining subsidence as a result of mine productions underneath the settlement areas, especially in Western European countries where underground coalmining is of great value, has been long a crucialmining issue with economic, social, technicaland environmentalaspects.

Various nations have passed legislation that makes it possible for ruralcommunities to register their lands as a single legalentity and act as decentralized land administration and management bodies. However, due to various political, financialand capacity constraints, these laws are often not implemented successfully.

Considering its commitment to highlight the user rights issues, Integrated SpatialAnalytics Consultants (ISAC) has teamed up with Portuguese and Dutch academicians to focus in the current paper on the Indian Forest Rights Act from 2006 as the Use Case of indigenous property rights. United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples reaffirmed the importance of the protection of indigenous property rights in Articles 25- 29.

NavCom Technology, Inc has announced a new feature for its GNSS receivers, StarFire Over IP. It allows users to access StarFire corrections over the Internet, giving them access to the same reliable five centimeter globalpositioning accuracy without the need for a base station.

An upset Tokyo has lodged a protest with New Delhiagainst the Survey of India not indicating ‘Sea of Japan’ on its maps by that name. India’s official map-making agency, the Survey of India has omitted naming the water body in its English version, though the Hindione calls the area ‘Japan Sagar’ on its maps. A marginal sea of the western Pacific Ocean, lying between the Asian mainland, the Japanese archipelago and Sakhalin, it is bordered by Japan, North Korea, Russia and South Korea.

A Soyuz ST-B launcher carrying two Galileo in-orbit validation (IOV) satellites took off as scheduled at 18:15 GMT (20:15 CEST; 2:15 p.m. EDT) on October 12 from the European Spaceport in French Guiana. All the stages of the Soyuz vehicle performed as planned and the Fregat-MT upper stage released the Galileo satellites into their targeted orbit close to 23,200 kilometer altitude, three hours 45 minutes after liftoff.

Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) plans to launch 58 space missions, including sending spacecraft to moon and Mars, an exclusive satellite to keep a round-the-clock watch on the country and deploy 500 transponders in the next fi ve years. The space agency also aims to deploy its own version of the GPS by putting into orbit a constellation of seven satellites which would form the Indian Regional Navigational Satellite System (IRNSS).

According to Microsoft, some products sold by Google-owned Motorola Mobility infringe on a patent that describes a method of obtaining the map from one database, resource information such as Starbucks locations from a second database, and overlaying the two sets of data.

The latest satellite in China’s Beidou-2 navigation system has been launched in Xichang. The system is expected to start providing positioning and navigation services for China and neighboring areas by the end of this year. And once the system is fully established by 2020, it will play a major role in the country’s economic development and national security.