logo
WEBSITE    ABOUT   HOW TO JOIN    NEWS/EVENTS    CONTACT

 

Like us on Facebook    Follow us on Twitter     Visit our blog

IMIA Report                                                                               

Industry News, Profiles and Future Events                 

July 2016

John Payne Retiring
John Payne
After a 51-year career in the spatial information industry, John Payne, long-time IMIA member and past Director on many IMIA Boards, has retired.
 
John studied at The Australian National University from 1970 - 1974 and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (Geog), Geography and Cartography.
 
Through the years his career covered many areas of the mapping and geospatial sciences industry, which lead him to take on the role of Chief Executive Officer at the Australian Surveying & Land Information Group (AUSLIG), located in Canberra.  John remained with AUSLIG until 1999 after which he started his own successful aerial imagery business - Earthinsite.com.
 
John has been involved with our industry association from its inception. One of the founding members of the Australian Map Industry Association (AMIA) in 1989, John played a fundamental role in establishing the association that benefited the map publishing and retail map community and also coordinated the first AMIA Melbourne Conference in 1990.
 
In 1995, AMIA  joined the International Map Trade Association (IMTA).  John held several Board positions over the years and fulfilled the role of President of IMTA Asia Pacific Region in 1997, 1998, 1999, and 2004.  John served IMTA as its International President in 2005 - 2006, culminating with a much deserved Life Member Award in 2007.
 
Whether John was at the helm or as a Director on the Board, his focus was always on the importance of IMIA's global significance as he helped coordinate the tasks that were required to keep the Association moving forward.  His involvement was still present when he worked with the IMIA International website committee a couple of years ago..
 
On behalf of IMIA and its members, thank you for your contribution through the years and congratulations on a wonderful career.
 
Enjoy your retirement.
 
Bruce McGurty
Past President - IMIA Asia Pacific

The Largest 3D Universe Map Ever Made Unravels
The Measurements Of Dark Energy
The scientists constructed a new map of 1.2 million galaxies, which can provide measurements of dark energy. (Photo : Staff / Getty Images) 
  
Physicists and astronomers created a three-dimensional map of distant 1.2 million galaxies that would make precise measurements of the dark energy.
 
Jeremy Tinker of New York University and the co-leader of the scientific team explained that they have spent five years accumulating measurements of 1.2 million galaxies over one-quarter of the sky to map out the structure of the Universe over a volume of 650 cubic billion light years. He further explained that this map has allowed them to make the best measurements yet of the effects of dark energy and the expansion of the Universe. They are making the results and the map available to the world.
 
The research was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society this week. It was led by researchers from DOE / Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, according to Science Daily.
 
With the new map, which was constructed using the data from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) program of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-III, the researchers can measure the expansion rate of the Universe. They can also determine the amount of matter and dark energy that would make up the present-day Universe. The astronomers could also analyze the changes that are taking place in the Universe and how dark energy influences it, according to Express.
 
David Schlegel, an astrophysicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and principal investigator for BOSS said that they have made the largest map for studying the 95 percent of the universe that is dark. He further said that in this map, they can see galaxies being gravitationally pulled towards other galaxies by dark matter. On much larger scales, they can see the effect of dark energy ripping the universe apart.
 
Dark energy is an undetermined form of energy, which is theorized to enter all of the space, tending to accelerate the expansion of the Universe. It implies that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. If the standard model of cosmology is precise, the best current measurements suggest that dark energy contributes 69 percent of the total energy in the present-day observable universe.
 
The constructed map also shows the unique signature of the coherent movement of galaxies toward regions of the Universe with more matter, due to the attractive force of gravity. Natalie Roe, the Physics Division director at Berkeley Lab, said that the results from BOSS deliver a solid foundation for even more precise future BAO measurements, such as those they expect from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). This will create a more detailed 3-dimensional map in a volume of space ten times bigger to precisely characterize dark energy--- and ultimately the future of the Universe.
 
Science World Report

Data Science Skills Gap, Pokémon Go Maps: Big Data Roundup
The data and analytics skills gap is an obstacle to achieving digital transformation, according to a Gartner survey; Microsoft is looking to fill that skills gap with a new online degree program; and Pokemon Go's creator shares the secrets behind how the game's maps were created.
 
Microsoft's new professional degree program will debut with a Data Science degree pilot. Facebook's CEO plans to benefit from Microsoft Graph and Delve across its new Office 365 deployment and its own Facebook at Work. Gartner says IT organizations know that analytics and data will be big for digital business, but skills to make that happen are still hard to find. Plus, we take a look at geographic data experts behind the giant mobile game hit Pokémon Go in this week's Big Data Roundup.

Let's start with the new Gartner survey, which focuses on the digitization of business and how IT will get us there. The survey of nearly 1,000 IT prosrevealed that respondents said they believe they will play a part in their organizations' transition to digital business, but that their organizations aren't really ready yet to make that transformation. Indeed, 59 percent said their IT organizations are unprepared for digital business in the next two years. To read more ...
 
InformationWeek
 
Because self-driving cars need mapping.

Why Ford Motor Is Investing in 3D Mapping Startup Civil Maps

Ford Motor Co. is among a group of investors putting seed money into 3D mapping startup Civil Maps as the automaker looks for new ways to push forward the development of self-driving cars.

The $6.6 million seed round was led by Motus Ventures. Wicklow Capital, StartX Stanford, and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang's AME Cloud Ventures also participated in the round. To read more ...
 
FORTUNE
Blood Falls, Antarctica
The Most Mysterious Places Around the World

Planet Earth is a mysterious place that never ceases to amaze. You won't have to look far to find some natural peculiarity for which science sometimes offer a theory. However, many places are complete enigma.

Getting to these locations is often difficult and sometimes you will find that you really don't want to be there - depending on whether you believe the rumors of ghosts and aliens. Scientists keep looking for answers and are often surprised by the obscurities they find. To read more ...
 
New iPhone App Maps Concealed Carry
Permit Holders
 
A new mobile app for iPhone called   Halos  brings concealed carriers together on a virtual map with the goal of creating safer communities.
 
The app, launched in late June on  iTunes , allows concealed carry permit holders to broadcast their legal carry status to other users. Displayed on a map, it's a virtual networking of good guys using location based smartphone technology.
 
.

To read
Intelligence Agencies Announce New Cooperation on Commercial Imagery
See more at:
WASHINGTON - Two U.S. intelligence agencies - the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office - announced July 15 a new collaboration to help their organizations buy and analyze commercial satellite imagery.
 
In recent years, NGA has undertaken several ventures, from formal strategies to contracting experiments, to take advantage of a burgeoning commercial imagery market, fueled in part by Silicon Valley startups. This latest effort, known as the Commercial GEOINT Activity, is slated to kick off no later than Sept. 30 and aims to help both agencies better use commercial imagery.
 
The new partnership will recommend investments to both agencies and help synchronize acquisition from companies that both collect and analyze images. The NRO, which builds and operates the country's spy satellites, is responsible for collecting images from government satellites. The NGA is responsible for processing those images into actionable intelligence.
 
"We're fortunate to witness a daily proliferation of new commercial geospatial technologies and data sources," Robert Cardillo, NGA's director, said during a speech in May at the GEOINT 2016 conference in Orlando. "Our commercial space partners will provide meaningful, higher revisit capabilities this year and we look forward to turning their exciting potential into our mission reality."
 
In a July 15 press release, Cardillo said he hoped the new office would "improve my ability to satisfy GEOINT needs using all available solutions."
 
Betty Sapp, the NRO's director, said the new partnership will provide for "a coordinated voice and integrated approach to our industry partners."
 
NGA's current EnhancedView service contract is with longtime supplier DigitalGlobe of Westminster, Colorado. While newcomers, such as Planet, BlackSky Global and Terra Bella, are not expected to offer quite the same imagery quality as DigitalGlobe in terms of resolution and geospatial accuracy, they can provide more-frequent revisit times via larger constellations, along with novel capabilities such as full-motion video.
 
In an email to SpaceNews, Jeffrey Tarr, DigitalGlobe's chief executive, said "we've been working closely with both the NGA and NRO for many years and believe the opportunity for increased coordination is good for DigitalGlobe, the United States and its allies."
 
SPACE NEWS

Imagine life without GPS. For those of us old enough, that might not be hard to do. For younger people, it's almost unimaginable. Now imagine that GPS - for whatever reason - is suddenly unavailable. What if you're not on land, where printed maps are filled with landmarks? What else do you rely on?
 
Before GPS, early explorers navigated by the stars using celestial navigation and a sextant, the same basic techniques that guided ancient Polynesians in the open Pacific and Magellan around the world (the first sextant device was invented in 1757 by John Bird).
 
As Don Jewell describes in his gripping Defense PNT newsletter column "Lost Over the Pacific," a massive electrical failure on his aircraft caused the crew to rely on his skills navigating with a sextant. "The crew regarded me with some skepticism as they realized I intended to use an old-fashioned sextant to determine the speed and heading and then navigate a multi-hundred-million-dollar modern reconnaissance aircraft," he recalls.
 
Despite its usefulness when things go sideways, celestial navigation was pulled from the curriculum at the U.S. Naval Academy in the late 1990s, considered "outdated." The course time was replaced with GPS and electronic navigation. Among the fleet, the Navy ended training in celestial navigation in 2006. A similar course at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy ended 10 years ago, but some instruction remains in theories of celestial navigation, and cadets use a sextant aboard the tall ship Eagle.
 
Now, however, what's old is new again. The Naval Academy has brought back celestial navigation courses, recognizing the importance of giving future naval officers the ability to find their position out at sea in case GPS is unavailable through jamming or hacking.

After all, an old-fashioned sextant can't be hacked.

SPACE NEWS
The Most Popular Sea Creature in Cartography
The ominous octopus is a key figure on many propaganda maps.
PJ Mode shows additional octopus maps in his Manhattan apartment. They are a part of 500 additional persuasive maps that will be digitized by Cornell University Library. [Photo: Lauren Young]

Many animals have been used in cartography to represent countries or landmarks, but one in particular has developed a stranglehold: the menacing, tentacled octopus. 
 
"I can't think of a good octopus," says PJ Mode, the collector of over 800 persuasive maps that are in the process of being digitized at Cornell University Library. "It's a great symbol of grasping, overreach and evil."
 
The image of the octopus is prolific in persuasive cartography-maps that are primarily intended to influence opinion or beliefs rather than communicate objective geographic information, Mode defines. In these maps, cartographers use the octopus as a symbol of power and oppression, often showing its tentacles unfurling around the globe. "Such symbols have a high emotional impact and convey their meaning at a glance," Judith Tyner, a geography professor at California State University, Long Beach wrote in the Journal of Geography. 
 
The first traceable use of octopuses in cartography was in 1877 by British map artist Fred W. Rose. He illustrated a war map that depicted Russia as an enormous, grey octopus, alluding to the country's territorialism. Ever since, cartographers have continued to use the octopus to send messages about political agendas from expansionism to Communism. To read more ...
 
Atlas Obscura

Landsat - The Watchman that Never Sleeps
 
In western North America, mountain pine beetles infest and ravage thousands of acres of forest lands. Landsat satellites bear witness to the onslaught in a way that neither humans nor most other satellites can.
 
Life and Death in Forests
 
Mo usgsuntain pine beetles have killed pine trees across vast areas of western North America since the late 1990s. Image of the northern Williams Range, Colorado, where beetles have killed more than 80 percent of mature lodgepole pine over many square kilometers. 

Since 1972, the U.S. Geological Survey's Landsat satellites have been the watchman that never sleeps with spectral bands capturing the subtle turning of green mountainsides into dying forests. From the ground, the extent of forest land damage is simply too large for field observers to quantify. But 438 miles above the Earth, Landsat satellites pass over every forest in the country dozens of times a year-every year-creating a historical archive of clear, composite images that tells the hidden stories of life and death in our nation's forests.

Such was the vision of Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall 50 years ago when he boldly called for Earth observations from space. What the U.S. Geological Survey has accumulated now are vast and continuous long-term records from Landsat that have become critical tools for agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service (Forest Service), which reports the status and health of our nation's forest resources.

Seeing the Forest for the Trees
 
Although Forest Service field crews can sample plots to characterize forest types, the species and age of trees, even soil types, the lands are so vast that in the West, field crews visit only a small fraction of the nation's forests each year. Landsat data increase the ability and frequency of the Forest Service to make these characterizations. To read more ...

 


The 8th National Cartographic Conference, GeoCart'2016, and the 4th ICA Regional Symposium on Cartography for Australasia and Oceania, will convene from 31 August - 2 September 2016. It will be held at the outstanding facilities of the National Library of New Zealand in the Coolest Little Capital in the World - Wellington, New Zealand.

 
For more information and details, please refer to: GeoCart 2016To visit the website, click on:
 
NOTE: IMIA MEMBERS MAY REGISTER AT THE MEMBER RATE. EARLY BIRD REGISTRATION ENDS FRIDAY.
Journal of Geography Article Earns
National Council for Geographic Education Accolade

esri logo A joint effort from   Esri Education  manager Tom Baker and a research group of seven university faculty members was selected as the Best Article for Geography Program Development by the National Council for Geographic Education ( NCGE). Published in the   Journal of Geography, the co-authored piece, entitled " A Research Agenda for Geospatial Technologies and Learning," provides a blueprint for advancing the study of geospatial technology (GST) in relation to education and learning.

"Research that advances understanding from and in GST has long been sparse, so the methodology outlined in  A Research Agenda for Geospatial Technologies and Learning  is not only insightful, it's also an innovative asset for future studies to come," said Zachary Dulli, NCGE chief executive officer. "As a collaborative effort of interdisciplinary academia and experts in spatial cognition, the resultant agenda stands out for being mindful of objectivity and a multitude of approaches to instructing GST, constructing curriculum, professional development, and achieving learning."

In addition to Baker, article contributors included   Sarah Battersby  of the University of South Carolina,   Sarah W. Bednarz  of Texas A&M University,   Alec M. Bodzin  of Lehigh University,   Bob Kolvoord  of James Madison University, Steven Moore  of the University of Redlands,   Diana Sinton  of Cornell University, and   David Uttal  of Northwestern University.

"All the authors sincerely appreciate this acknowledgement from the National Council for Geographic Education,"   Tom Baker  said. "Geospatial tools evolve rapidly, and our knowledge of learning processes with these tools needs to grow just to keep pace." To read the full article ...


A forest in India (Christopher Kray)
India Plants a Record
50 Million Trees in 24 Hours
More than 800,000 volunteers planted saplings in public spaces
in the state of Uttar Pradesh hoping
to reduce greenhouse gases and reforest the countryside

There's no question that volunteers make a huge impact, but last week the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh undertook a 24-hour volunteer project that could one day be measured from space. The state coordinated the planting of almost 50 million trees by 800,000 volunteers in public spaces.

The tree planting frenzy is the beginning of a reforestation effort the nation of India agreed to during the 2015 Paris Climate Talks, reports Brian Clark Howard at National Geographic. During those talks, India made a commitment to reforest 12 percent of its land by 2030, a $6.2 billion commitment. To read more ...
Spatial Information Day Releases Impressive Lineup

Spatial Information Day 2016 (SID2016)  is the largest one-day surveying and spatial sciences conference in Australia and has just announced an   impressive lineup of speakers  in a diverse program aimed to educate graduates through to
executives.

The annual event is an initiative of the Surveying & Spatial Sciences Institute (SSSI) and Spatial Industries Business Association (SIBA), representing professionals and businesses covering Surveying (land, engineering & mining, hydrographic), Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry and Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

SID2016 is open to all industries, government and private, showcasing how spatial technology is being used to create smarter, safer, better connected communities. To read more ...

Spatial Information Day 2016
(SID2016) and SASEA Dinner
Time: 8am - 6pm, 7pm - 11:30pm
Date: 19 August 2016
Adelaide Convention Centre
North Terrace, Adelaide SA 5000 Australia
http://spatialinformationday.org.au/

IMIA Asia Pacific Meetup on 25 August 2016
Melbourne, Australia
 
The next IMIA Asia Pacific Meetup is scheduled to be held on Thursday 25 August 2016 at 5.30 p.m. at the Spatial Vision offices in Melbourne.  Further details will be added shortly to the IMIA website and Meetup site.
IMIA Asia Pacific Adelaide Meetup Recap
The IMIA Adelaide Meetup was held on the 6 July 2016 at the Department of Environment, Water & Natural Resources offices in Waymouth Street, Adelaide. The Meetup was attended by 15 people and provided a good opportunity for local networking in a relaxed and informal atmosphere.

The lightening talk format kept people engaged throughout five interesting and informative presentations with all presenters being asked many questions.

The Adelaide Meetup was sponsored by Hema Maps along with the Department of Environment, Water & Natural Resources .  

The feedback from attendees was very positive with several people commenting that they would be interested in coming along again. Here is a link to the presentations: http://imiamaps.org/adelaide-meetup-july-2016  
 
IMIA Asia Pacific New Member

Ashley Edwards
Arrow Spatial Services
417 Fleming Street
South Albury, NSW 2640
Australia
 
Phone: +61 (0)4211 81417
 
Arrow Spatial Services is a small business specialising in GIS and professional mapping for a range of industries including cultural heritage and environmental science.

 2016 Calendar of Events
 
Spatial Information Day 2016
19 August 2016
Adelaide SA,  Australia

IMIA Asia Pacific Meetup
25 August 2016
Melbourne, Australia
 
GeoCart'2016
National Cartographic Conference "Unfolding the Map"
29 - 30th August / Map Design (Pre-Conference Workshop)
31st August - 2nd September / Wellington, New Zealand

IMIA Americas Annual Conference
November 29 - December 02, 2016
Omni Hotel San Diego
San Diego, CA USA

 
IMIA Website Host and Developer:  NextByte Technologies Ltd., India 
Like us on Facebook     Follow us on Twitter