Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/46658
NEWSLINK GIS Hall of Fame to Welcome Two Inductees William Huxhold, a pioneer in municipal GIS, and Barry Wellar, a longtime GIS researcher/consultant, will be inducted into the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association (URISA) GIS Hall of Fame in November 2011 during URISA's 49th Annual Conference. Huxhold, known for leading the city of Milwaukee's effort to establish one of the nation's first GISs while serving as project director for the city's Policy Development Information System during the 1970s and 1980s, published "An Introduction to Urban Geographic Information Systems" in 1991. The book, one of the first GIS textbooks, was followed by other GIS books co-authored by Huxhold. Wellar, whose work in the GIS field spans nearly 50 years, has played roles ranging from researcher to teacher to GIS practitioner to consultant. His areas of expertise have involved practical applications of GIS and other information technologies to solve problems at public agencies and private-sector companies. Army System Supports FEMA's Hurricane Response A system managed by the U.S. Army Geospatial Center served as a backbone for coordinating emergency- response activities for Defense Department and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) workers during Hurricane Irene and its aftermath. The Department of Defense, Defense Support to Civil Authorities Automated Support System (DDASS) helped coordinate 29 FEMA mission assignments and deploy $18 million in military assets to stage FEMA equipment and personnel at locations along the East Coast. The Web-enabled DDASS application also helped users coordinate and track the transportation of relief supplies and provide initial aerial storm assessments. RapidEye AG Assets Acquired by Iunctus RapidEye Canada Ltd., a Canadian division of optical satellite-imagery provider Iunctus Geomatics Corp., acquired the assets of RapidEye AG of Brandenburg an der Havel, Germany, which specializes in providing high-resolution imagery and geospatial solutions. The companies finalized the purchase in late August 2011. "RapidEye will continue to operate as an independent company, leveraging a new strong German management team to maintain its successful brand and relation- ships," said Ryan Johnson, president and CEO of Iunctus Geomatics. "Iunctus will continue to invest in RapidEye as we focus on creating a more customer-focused approach and additional value for our customers through our reorga- nization activities." The RapidEye acquisition should help expand Iunctus Geomatics' worldwide presence in the geospatial-information market. The acquisition brings together large commercial satellite-imagery archives with Iunctus' distribution channels for satellite data and related solutions. At the heart of the data-gathering operation is a constel- lation of five RapidEye Earth-observation satellites. The satellites were launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in summer 2008, enabling RapidEye to amass 2 billion square kilometers in its archive in just more than RapidEye's five satellites took to orbit in 2008 and have amassed billions of square kilometers of data. two years of commercial operation. The data-gathering efforts involve a combination of wide-area repetitive cover- age and five-meter pixel-size multispectral imagery. 8 GEO W ORLD / OCT O BE R 2O11 RAPIDEYE AG