There’s a nice feature in today’s New York Times that outlines the use of open mapping tools to deal with a crisis. The focus is on Ushahidi, with the title, “Africa’s Gift to Silicon Valley: How to Track a Crisis”.

“This kind of everyone-as-informant mapping is shaking up the world, bringing the Wikipedia revolution to the work of humanitarians and soldiers who parachute into places with little good information. And an important force behind this upheaval is a small Kenyan-born organization called Ushahidi, which has become a hero of the Haitian and Chilean earthquakes and which may have something larger to tell us about the future of humanitarianism, innovation and the nature of what we label as truth.”

Read the full feature from the New York Times here.

The U.S. Census Bureau is hard at work on the 2010 Census, fighting technological hurdles and an apparent malaise about being counted. In order to highlight the tradition of the these population counts that occur ever 10 years, the agency has put together some highlights for each of the 23 counts that have taken place since 1790.

The “Through the Decades” website contains interesting facts about the population size, the number of census workers, any new types of questions or race categories, and any new technologies deployed to ease this monumental task. There are some fascinating facts here about the changing size and makeup of the population as well as the march of technology.

Here are some of the details about the progression of computers and geospatial tools:

• 1890 is the first year that census workers were given detailed maps to help complete their tasks, and it’s also the same year that an electric tabulating system was utilized for the count
• 1950 was the first time a computer was used to tabulate results, and it was also the first computer designed for civilian use
• 1960 was the first time that census results were digitally recorded (on magnetic tape)
• 1970 was the first time that census data products were made available digitally on magnetic tape.
• 1980 saw the creation of the State Data Center Program for easier access to digital data on computer tapes
• 1990 was the year that the Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing (TIGER), computer-based maps, was introduced. It also was the first year that data was released on CD-ROM
• 2000 was when the Internet became the primary means of distributing Census data
• 2010 won’t include the “long form” because this more detailed collection has been converted to the ongoing American Community Survey

Taken in 10 year chunks, this condensed history provides uncovers some trends about how society has changed, the growing role of technology for administration, and the way that Americans view themselves. The 2010 Census is less of a focal point for geospatial technologists given that the American Community Survey has provided much more detailed and ongoing data for spatial analysis, but it’s still the largest ongoing geographic data collection effort in the world.

Borrowing from federal CIO Vivek Kundra’s success with Web Services challenges for the District of Columbia in his Apps for Democracy challenge, the federal government is now poised to usher in an era of web services challenges for federal problem solving. A detailed 12-page memo was released on Monday to executive department heads and agencies that outlines the use of challenges for transparency and open government, with details on the potential benefits as well as an outline of many different types of prizes.

Geospatial tools are well poised to take advantage of this new Web Services paradigm shift, and individual developers as well as larger companies stand to benefit. With this big federal push, it stands to reason that states and local government will soon follow suit. If you’re a consultant or small service business owner, now’s the time to polish your web services skill sets and to forge alliances with other developers.

The White House released a list of appointees on Friday to the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel that’s in charge of oversight and feedback on how the recovery dollars are being spent and communicated. The appointment that’s chiefly of interest here for geospatial users is Edward Tufte, professor emeritus of political science, statistics and computer science at Yale University. His books on the Visual Display of Quantitative Information place him as a key force for the concise and insightful display of information.

Tufte is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Society for Technical Communication, and the American Statistical Association. He includes several maps in his work, and his ideas have influenced cartographers equally among other infographics practitioners.

It’s great to see the emphasis here on crystal-clear communication of information in a visual fashion. Let’s hope that his counsel results in some interesting and concise condensations of critical information.

Ongoing research of the largest metropolitan areas in the United States draws a direct connection between housing affordability, auto ownership, auto use and transit ridership. By factoring in the cost of transportation, the index puts an emphasis on location efficiency rather than simply the cost of housing.

The Housing+Transportation Affordability Index has been an ongoing project by the Center for Neighborhood Technology along with the Center for Transit Oriented Development with support from the Brookings Institute. The recently expanded website  includes analysis of more than 330 metro areas in the United States that account for more than 80% of the population, thanks to funding from the Rockefeller Foundation.

“Compact neighborhoods with walkable streets, access to transit, and a wide variety of stores and services have high location efficiency. They require less time, money, and greenhouse gas emissions for residents to meet their everyday travel requirements. The savings add up for households and communities. Transportation costs can range from 15% of household income in location efficient neighborhoods to over 28% in inefficient locations. Greenhouse gas emissions fluctuate too, depending on household reliance on costly, carbon-intensive automobile travel.”

Be sure to check out this application to see how your neighborhood rates.

Intelligent infrastructure combines sensors, network connectivity and software to monitor and analyze complex systems to uncover inefficiency and inform optimal operations. The sensor component collects operational detail over time as well as providing real-time inputs on current conditions. The network connectivity ensures the flow of information between systems, other sensors, and practitioners. The software component provides oversight and analysis, integrating insight from various systems and personnel. The approach incorporates the management of multiple processes for more collaborative and multidisciplinary workflows. Intelligence is constantly improving from such a system through incremental improvements that are informed through constant monitoring and analysis.

The idea of intelligent infrastructure has been around for a long time in one form or another. Early forays into real-time monitoring of systems include industrial control systems such as SCADA. What largely sets the newer concept of intelligent infrastructure apart is an advancement in sensors, systems and networks that enable us to go beyond simply monitoring. Instead of the more passive alarms when inputs exceed accepted norms, intelligent infrastructure is a more holistic approach that aims to model and manage with a greater understanding of the interconnectivity of systems and the implications of events.

Big Blue Leads the Way

IBM is well out in front of publicizing and practicing the concept of intelligent infrastructure with their Smarter Planet campaign and their SmarterCity initiative. The company trades on their large-scale integration work and their understanding of complex systems to promote this idea of instrumented, interconnected, and then intelligent systems.

At the core of this concept is the idea of a system of systems approach. In the complex urban core, it’s a combination of transportation, healthcare, economic development, public safety, energy and utilities, and education systems. Each of these individual systems is in themselves a system of multiple inputs from multiple sensors and systems. IBM asserts that it’s largely an issue of constant data collection and open data exchanges that yield smarts for these systems. The resulting repository yields the ability to see how things are performing and a clear picture on how to redeploy resources quickly in advance of any problems or failures.

IBM takes a partnership approach toward achieving their Smarter Planet goals, working with a number of geospatial players to map assets and analyze details geographically. IBM’s Maximo Spatial Asset Management system integrates with ESRI’s ArcGIS Server to incorporate the GIS view, display map content, provide geospatial querying capability, and read data direct from multiple geodatabases. The geospatial component is clearly needed, particularly in the complex environments of an urban setting, and location often acts as the glue to integrate disparate data and systems together.

Flexible and Responsive

Given the changes of rapid urbanization and the pressures to adapt to climate change, it’s imperative that we fine tune our systems to be more flexible and responsive. The concept of intelligent infrastructure is also strategically timed for great demographic shifts that will leave many high-level jobs vacant due to retirements. These systems can bridge the knowledge gap by recording and modeling best business practice and process in advance of losing legacy operational knowledge.

Examples of industry approaches that might qualify as “intelligent infrastructure” in my mind are:

• the skeletonization of water networks for better understanding of full-network issues
• intelligent traffic systems and sensors on bridges to measure and monitor performance
• the detailed use of spatial analysis for renewable energy siting and ongoing monitoring of in situ conditions for optimal energy generation
• more efficient building heating, cooling and lighting systems for energy conservation
• detailed underground models for more informed oil and gas extraction

In all the above examples, there is a considerable increase in infrastructure and mapping efforts, but the payoffs can also be huge. An energy savings of 40 percent translates into a lower energy bill, less of a dependence on foreign energy sources, and reduced emissions. Intelligent traffic can dramatically reduce drive times and congestion, while cutting down on carbon emissions. While the solutions themselves are smart, the investment is also smart because the benefits far outweigh the costs.

Unleashing Creativity

Given the cross-cutting nature of intelligent infrastructure, where operational data from multiple separate operations are combined, there’s a great deal of opportunity for creative approaches to problem solving. Instead of being constrained by traditional business silos, these new systems will unlock cross-organization information to reveal the inefficiencies that exist between different systems.

As the systems mature and much more is known about operations, solutions to problems can be tested almost as in a laboratory setting. With the sensor-based feedback, and the growing knowledge base, pilot projects can be tested and the great deal of data that is generated can be analyzed to determine any performance improvements.

Through the application of intelligent infrastructure, we can gain a much better handle on the materials and resources that our systems consume. This conservation-first approach will go a long way toward improving our efficiency for a more sustainable approach, and will greatly improve the way we manage and construct our built world.

Get Involved: The Geospatial Information & Technology Association will be exploring the geospatial dimension of intelligent infrastructure at their upcoming annual meeting in Phoenix in April. I’ll be acting as facilitator for discussions with the Industry Trends Analysis Group (ITAG) on Monday morning of the event. If this topic is of interest to you, be sure to become involved.

Additional Resources

IBM – A Smarter Planet Initiative

Intelligent Infrastructure Definition – University of Toronto, Dept. of Civil Engineering

Intelligent Infrastructure – Water Matters Blog at the Earth Institute at Columbia University

A new mapping tool brings together the functionality of HealthMap and Bio.DIASPORA to analyze the potential health threats to Canada due to the global convergence of people around the 2010 Olympic Games. HealthMap provides a means to track global infection trends via a Google Maps mashup that trolls the Internet for signs of emerging epidemics, while the Bio.DIASPORA system adds the global patterns of human travel via commercial airlines.

Disease outbreaks have surrounded similar global events in the past. The potential impact to Canada can be assessed with these tools,  with analysis of who is coming to Canada for the games and the types of medical issues that are experienced in the country of origin. Such a tool can be useful for future international gatherings to help the host country be more prepared.

Read more about this effort in an article in today’s Globe and Mail.

I recently spoke to Fred Limp, the past director of the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies and a gifted geospatial educator and practitioner at the University of Arkansas. I’ve always been fascinated by the types of projects that Fred works on, and I conducted an interview to delve into the evolution that’s taking place in the 3D space.

Fred and his team have been working on LIDAR applications and digital city modeling among other cutting-edge applications. An area that Fred is tackling is the analysis of 3D data at multiple scales, which offers some unique challenges:

“What happens when scale changes is not just a simple case of there’s more and bigger data sets.One of the real challenges that I see to the whole geospatial community is that when you “zoom in,” you do a whole lot more than just zoom in. You have to change paradigms of analysis and sometimes the data structure. One of the things that I find particularly exciting that is helping us begin to think about this is that the work being done on CityGML and the use of the concept of levels of detail.

Our community has a bunch of verticals, there’s the remote sensing vertical, and the LIDAR vertical, and the terrestrial laser scanning vertical. But we also have all these horizontal applications that we have to decide what tools and what methods and what analysis to do at different scales. The level of detail concept in CityGML begins to give us a paradigm for moving seamlessly from scales of 1 to 50 or 1 to 100,000. We need to develop analysis and display systems where we know how to begin thinking about that.

I think that’s a really important idea and I don’t know if people have really addressed it. It’s about how you think about data as you move between different scales, and what analytical operations makes sense. To me, that whole scale issue is something that we really have to think about a lot because so much changes as you move through different scales.”

Read the full interview online here.

There has been much in the news about the abandoned and empty housing stock in Detroit now that there are far fewer jobs to support workers in that city. The city just completed a new survey to precisely map their parcels, and to determine the quantity, location and impacts of vacated housing stock.

The survey by the Detroit Data Collaborative found 91,000 vacant residential lots and 31,000 vacant structures. In the process, the survey also worked to map the neighborhoods that are in the best condition and that might warrant more attention for redevelopment. The city’s mayor, David Bing, is advocating the creation of a smaller city and a focus on making the city more livable.

The data collection effort is part of a push by City Connect Detroit Inc., which is funded by foundations, to create an in-depth regional data system to promote economic prosperity. The system takes a “data-driven approach to decision making with asset-based analysis” in order to inform and monitor planning decisions.

Read an overview of the study, including maps of the area, in this article from the Detroit Free Press.

The incoming chairman of the Spatial Industries Business Association (SIBA) has just sent out a press release that declares the country the world leader in spatial technology. The audacious claim tones down a bit in the body of the release, and more simply states that there is the intent for the country to be great at spatial technology.

Certainly Australia can lay claim to some geospatial greatness. I’m aware of the good software development work there that spawned ER Mapper and much of Intergraph’s location-based services offerings. I’m sure there are other world-class companies and research institutions in Australia that have contributed to the development of the technology, and I’m sure there are also passionate users of the technology.

Canada can lay claim to being the birthplace of GIS and other policy-driven systems of geospatial monitoring and analysis. I’ve had good exposure to the research and development work that takes place in that nation. There are software companies from Canada that offer products of great utility to the spatial community, including Safe Software and various open source GIS developers that are world leaders in the development of that toolset. The geospatial software development for Autodesk was headquartered in Calgary for years, and I understand there’s still a good contingent there. Bentley also houses their geospatial software development team in Quebec City.

The United Kingdom has a number of geospatial companies and operations. I know of Cadcorp on the software development side, and there’s the influential Center for Advanced Spatial Analysis at the University College London on the research side. There’s also the Ordnance Survey with their amazing map data accuracy and collection processes. I’m sure there are other worthy companies and efforts of note there.

The rest of the European Union has a rich history in spatial technology development, but I’m far less in tune with any other countries in Europe as that’s the domain to my partner Jeff Thurston in Berlin.

The United States is the home to the largest geospatial software company in ESRI, and there are a number of other large software development companies and research efforts. Just in the state of California there is the headquarters of Autodesk and the research facilities of Mike Goodchild and team at the University of California, Santa Barbara. There are also U.S.-based associations that have been around since the inception of GIS in both URISA and GITA that have helped shape the development of the technology by supporting both users and vendors. There are other top-notch geospatial research and development efforts such as the Center for Advanced Spatial Technology at the University of Arkansas, and the Center for Advanced Research of Spatial Information at Hunter College, among others.

This issue of world dominance is a spatial problem that encapsulates not just company headquarters or institutions, but also the nationalities of all the key spatial thinkers and application specialists. I’ve known quite a diverse group of technologists that hail from far and wide, and often travel far and wide. Mike Goodchild for one is a native of the United Kingdom that spent years teaching in Canada before settling in the United States.

I’m wondering if the Olympics helped to spur Australia’s announcement of world dominance with this release that promotes nationalist pride. It’s Australia’s summer right now, and perhaps they’re feeling left out given the winter focus of these games. Who do you think can lay claim to “#geoglobaldomination”?