GeoWorld

Vol. 25, No. 5 1030 W. Higgins Road, Suite 230 Park Ridge, IL 60068 www.geoplace.com Integrated Content EDITOR IN CHIEF, GEOWORLD, GEOPLACE.COM AND GEOREPORT Todd Danielson, tdanielson@geoplace.com CHIEF NEWS CORRESPONDENT L. Scott Tillett EDITORIAL AND SOCIAL MEDIA ASSISTANT Kelly Thomas GeoTec Event CONFERENCE SHOW MANAGER Katie Smith, ksmith@m2media360.com CONFERENCE PROGRAM MANAGER Todd Danielson, tdanielson@geoplace.com Contributing Editors Peter Batty, Joseph K. Berry, Ron Bisio, Mark Dolezel, Ron Lake, Janet Jackson, Mark Reichardt, Erik Shepard, Daniel Sui, Nigel Waters, Patrick Wong Editorial Advisory Board Dan Adams TOMTOM Chris Andrews AUTODESK INC. Peter Batty UBISENSE Jack Dangermond ESRI Charles H. Drinnan EWAM ASSOCIATES Jim Farley ORACLE CORP. Connie Gurchiek TRANSCEND SPATIAL SOLUTIONS William Holland REDGIANT ANALYTICS INC. Anup Jindal RMSI Roy Kolstad NAVTEQ Ron Lake GALDOS SYSTEMS David Linden SAIC Xavier Lopez ORACLE CORP. Dale Lutz SAFE SOFTWARE Carey Mann BENTLEY SYSTEMS INC. Carl Reed OPEN GEOSPATIAL CONSORTIUM INC. Walter S. Scott DIGITALGLOBE David Sonnen IDC Mladen Stojic ERDAS INC. Steve Woolven APPLANIX CORP. Production PRODUCTION DIRECTOR Mary Jo Tomei, mtomei@m2media360.com ART DIRECTOR Kathleen Sage, ksage@m2media360.com Advertising WORLDWIDE ADVERTISING ACCOUNTS MANAGER Craig Miller, cmiller@m2media360.com, 213-596-7228 List Rental, Reprint Marketing Services Cheryl Naughton, cnaughton@m2media360.com M2MEDIA360 CEO/PRESIDENT Marion Minor VICE PRESIDENT, FINANCE AND OPERATIONS Gerald Winkel VICE PRESIDENT, CIRCULATION AND COLLATERAL SERVICES Joanne Juda-Prainito PRODUCTION AND OPERATIONS DIRECTOR Mary Jo Tomei GeoWorld is published monthly by M2MEDIA360, a Bev-Al Communications Company. Authorization to photocopy items for educational, internal or personal use, or specific clients, is granted by M2MEDIA360, provided appropriate fees are paid prior to photocopying items, please contact Cheryl Naughton, cnaughton@m2media360.com M2MEDIA360 1030 W. Higgins Road, Suite 230 Park Ridge, IL 60068 Phone: (847) 720-5600 Fax: (847) 720-5601 e-mail: tdanielson@geoplace.com Web: www.geoplace.com CIRCULATION: For subscription inquiries and customer service questions please call 845-856-2229. © 2012 BY M2MEDIA360 All rights reserved. ISSN# 0897-5507 Canadian GST# 82917 9944 RT 0001 Canadian CPM #1528653 Single Copy Price U.S $8.00, Single Copy Price Canada/Mexico/Foreign $12.00 2 GEO W ORLD / M AY 2O12 GeoWorld Services GeoWorld Online Visit GeoWorld at GeoPlace.com for online reviews, features, news, classified ads and event listings. GeoMarketplace The GeoMarketplace resource directory provides an easy means to connect with product and services vendors. Indexed listings of imagery, data, data conversion, hardware, mapping/surveying, mobile mapping, software development and Web services will appear monthly. Contact Cheryl Naughton at cnaughton@m2media360.com for more information. Reprints Order custom reprints of GeoWorld columns and features on glossy magazine stock in black and white or full color, individualized with company logos, photos or advertising insertions. For reprints, please contact: Contact Cheryl Naughton by phone, 678-292-6054, fax 360-294-6054, or e-mail cnaughton@m2media360.com. Advertising To advertise in GeoWorld, contact Craig Miller, worldwide advertising accounts manager [213-596-7228, cmiller@m2media360.com]. Subscriptions To order a GeoWorld subscription, visit the magazine's Web site (www.geoplace.com). To report an address change or correct circulation problems, contact Customer Service [845-856-2229]. List Rental Order custom mailing lists from GeoWorld if you are looking for professionals in the geospatial industry working with GIS applications in government, utilities, education and the private sector. Contact Cheryl Naughton by phone, 678-292-6054, fax 360-294-6054, or e-mail cnaughton@m2media360.com. All names are proven direct-mail responsive, and they are all selectable by title and business. One phone call will guide you toward the best list choices for your needs. FROM THE ARCHIVES GeoWorld magazine has built a reputation as a trusted source of information with consistently forward-looking and authorita- tive content. We were the first publication to address the needs of the GIS user community, and we have enjoyed much success as the industry "found its footing" and expanded into a wide range of disciplines. We feel lucky to have served a dedicated readership for more than two decades. The content of each GeoWorld issue has been posted online at www.geoplace.com since 1996. This rich resource provides perspective on technology development and clear relevance to the challenges faced today.To highlight some of the infor- mational resources available, each issue will feature archived stories relating to that issue's cover story. Simply click on "Articles & Archives" at the top of the menu bar on GeoPlace.com, and type in a few of the key words from the fol- lowing list to find the full article on our site. May 2011 Is What You See, What You Get? Geospatial Visualizations Address Scale and Usability By Aashish Chaudhary and Jeff Baumes March 2011 26 Are You Ready for BIM? By Liam Speden May 2010 Show and Tell: Use 3-D GIS to Present Real-World Results By Robbi McKinney and Garrett McKinney BY AASHISH CHAUDHARY AND JEFF BAUMES Is What You See, What You Get? Geospatial Visualizations Address Scale and Usability nlimited geospatial information now is at everyone's fingertips with the proliferation of GPS-embedded mobile devices and large online geospatial databases. To fully understand these data and make wise decisions, more people are turn- ing to informatics and geospatial visualization, which are used to solve many real-world problems. To effectively gather information from data, it's critical to address scalability and intuitive user interac- tions and visualizations. New geospatial analysis and visualization techniques are being used in fields such as video analysis for national defense, urban planning and hydrology. Why Having Data Isn't Good Enough Anymore People are realizing that data are only useful if they can find the relevant pieces of data to make better deci- sions. This has broad applicability, from finding a movie to watch to elected officials deciding how much funding to allocate for an aging bridge. Information can easily be obtained, but how can it be sorted, organized, made sense of and acted on? The field of informatics solves this challenge by taking large amounts of data and pro- cessing them into meaningful, truthful insights. In informatics, two main challenges arise when com- puters try to condense information down to meaningful concepts: disorganization and size. Some information is available in neat, organized tables, ready for users to pull out the needed pieces, but most is scattered across and hidden in news articles, blog posts and poorly organized lists. G E O W O R L D / M A Y 2 O 1 1 Researchers are feverishly working on new ways to retrieve key ideas and facts from these types of messy data sources. For example, services such as Google News use computers that constantly "read" news articles and posts worldwide, and then automati- cally rank them by popularity, group them by topic, or organize them based on what the computer thinks is important to viewers. Researchers at places such as the University of California, Irvine, and Sandia National Laboratories are investigating the next approaches to sort through large amounts of documents using power- ful supercomputers. The other obstacle is the sheer volume of data. It's difficult to use informatics techniques that only work on data of limited size. Facebook, Google and Twitter have data centers that constantly process huge quantities of information to deliver timely and relevant information and advertisements to each person cur- rently logged on. Informatics is a key tool, but it's not enough to sim- on issues, exit polls and precinct reports during elec- tion times. People are just beginning to see the impact that well-designed geospatial visualizations have on their understanding of the world. BY ROBBI MCKINNEY AND GARRETT MCKINNEY ply find these insights that explain the data. Geospatial visualization bridges the gap from computer number- crunching to human understanding. If informatics is compared to finding the paths in a forest, visualization is like creating a visual map of those paths so a per- son can navigate through the forest with ease. Most people today are familiar with basic geospatial visualizations such as weather maps and Web sites for driving directions. The news media are starting to test more-complex geospatial visualizations such as online interactive maps to help navigate politicians' stances Show (26-29) VIS feature GEO0511tddn.indd 26 5/25/2011 10:20:45 AM (26-29) VIS feature GEO0511tddn.indd 27 24 G E O W O R L D / M A Y 2 O 1 0 Geospatial Visualization in the Real World People have been looking at data for decades, but the relevant information that accompanies the data has changed in recent years. In late 1999, Esri released a new software suite, ArcGIS, that could use data from various sources. ArcGIS provides an easy-to-use inter- face for visualizing 2-D and 3-D data in a geospatial context. In 2005, Google Earth launched and made geospatial visualization available to the general public. Geospatial visualization is becoming more signifi- and Tell Use 3-D GIS to Present Real-World Results cant and will continue to grow as it allows people to look at the totality of the data, not just one aspect. This enables better understanding and comprehen- sion, because it puts the data in context with their surroundings. The following three cases demonstrate geospatial visualization use in real-world scenarios: 1. Urban Planning Planners use geomodeling and geovisualization tools to explore possible scenarios and communicate their design decisions to team members or the general pub- lic. For example, urban planners may look at the pres- ence of underground water and the terrain's surrounding topology before deciding to build a new suburb. This is relevant for areas around Phoenix, for example, where underground water presence and proximity to a knoll Figure 1. A collection of videos are displayed without overlap (top). The outline color represents how close each video matches a query. An alternate view (bottom) places the videos on top of each other in a stack, showing only the strongest match result. M A Y 2 O 1 1 /W W W . G E O P L A C E . C O M 27 5/25/2011 10:20:58 AM Industry Trends Data Visualization

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