GIS

UN-GGIM recommends establishing a Global Geodetic Centre of Excellence

The UN-GGIM Subcommittee on Geodesy has recommended establishing a Global Geodetic Centre of Excellence to strengthen the capacity to implement the UN General Assembly resolution. The subcommittee is presenting the second iteration of the position paper defining appropriate governance arrangements.

The Global Geodetic Reference Frame (GGRF) is in acute danger of degradation, due to ageing infrastructure, insufficient coordination and financing, and diminishing human capacity.

The GGRF is the foundation for virtually every aspect in collecting and managing of spatial information and global monitoring of the Earth. It is imperative to ensure its sustainability and enhancement.

Data to reduce traffic congestion

A partnership between Ordnance Survey, the Department for Transport, the British Parking Association, and GeoPlace, could dramatically reduce traffic congestion on UK roads by making crucial data on planned changes to the road network available to tech companies to build artificial intelligence routing platforms.

Through the Department for Transport’s review of legislation around Traffic Regulation Orders (TROs), the data could soon be made available to tech fi rms to develop and enhance navigational apps. It is hoped the apps could warn drivers up to months in advance of planned disruption to routes and offer alternatives, potentially saving them time and money. www.Os.uk

Transformation of common land

Software by SCISYS UK Ltd., has been chosen by Welsh Government to enable the on-going implementation of the Commons Act 2006. The software will enable the development and introduction of electronic registers for common land and town or village greens throughout Wales. The Commons Act 2006 was introduced to protect common land from development, allow more sustainable management of common land and to improve the protection of common land from neglect and abuse.

The Commons Act 2006 includes a new provision allowing the creation of digital registers and maps leading to the decision by Welsh ministers to develop and introduce electronic registers in Wales. www.scisys.co.uk

New geospatial cloud platform by MyCRM

MyCRM, based on the Isle of Wight, is building up to the worldwide launch of its new mapping technology suite. Mapsimise will enable businesses to connect live data from Salesforce, SugarCRM and Microsoft Dynamics. Using other services with Google Maps and, crucially, store it all securely in the cloud.

Organizations of any type will be able to visualize and map data, either via connectors or by uploading data to create representative maps. These geospatial technologies will help businesses to build targeted mailing lists by location and help sales teams plan appointments by location. Mapsimise will be released in late 2019, hosted with data centres in the US and the EU. www.mapsimise.com

OGC seeks to modernize its Observations & Measurements standards

Newly revised O&M SWG will update the existing O&M standards to conform to modern web architecture requirements and best practice, and create a new OGC standard for JSON encoding of O&M data. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) requests public comment on the recharter of the OGC Observations and Measurements (O&M) Standards Working Group (SWG).

The O&M standard was originally defined within the OGC Sensor Web Enablement Initiative in 2003-2007. Version 2.0 of the standard was co-published as the OGC Abstract Specification Topic 20 and ISO 19156:2011. The latest version of OGC Abstract Specification Topic 20 is from 2013. As such, the standard requires revising to accommodate technical issues discovered in various standard implementations and harmonization with recent W3C/OGC standardization work on sensor network terminology and concepts defined in the Semantic Sensor Network (SSN) and Sensor, Observation, Sample, and Actuator (SOSA) ontologies. The ISO 19156 revision will be carried out by the ISO/TC 211 in parallel, and in close co-operation with the O&M SWG revision work on the OGC O&M encoding Standards.

The OGC Observations and Measurements – XML Implementation (OGC 10-025r1) Standard defines an XML encoding for the concepts defined in OGC Abstract Specification Topic 20 and will also be revised to accommodate the changes to the OGC Observations and Measurements Abstract Specification.

Notably, and in addition to the revision of the O&M XML Implementation Standard, there is an identified need to standardize an O&M data encoding for formats like JSON/GeoJSON. These formats are preferred in modern Web APIs, including those conforming to the OGC API – Features – Part 1: Core Draft Standard (OGC 17-069r2).

Both the Observations and Measurements conceptual data model and its standardized XML encoding are used extensively in Spatial Data Infrastructures such as in the EU INSPIRE. There is also on-going work to additionally provide INSPIRE O&M datasets in JSON/GeoJSON based formats, but no standard has yet been identified describing an interoperable way of doing this. www.ogc.org

Dubai Municipality opens geospatial training centre

Dubai Municipality has recently launched an internationally accredited training centre for geospatial courses by ESRI. It is the only accredited centre in Dubai to offer specialized courses in the field of GIS and Geospatial Service, the civic body said in a press release. www.dm.gov.ae