In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

Here's what we published so far regarding Géomatique 2011, the geospatial conference in Montréal for which Slashgeo has been a media partner. In this entry, I'll focus on my personal notes taken during the conference. You can refer to the detailed program if you want to learn more.

Day 2 general impressions:

• The organisation of the event has been flawless - congratulations
• I'm wondering why no one from the OGC deemed give a presentation on the state of geospatial standards
• The great second-day lunchtime keynote was provided by Dr. Sonia Lupien, Director of the Centre for Studies on Human Stress. Last winter I happened to read her excellent book on human stress (which is apparently only available in French)

Here's my talk notes, in chronological order. This is not summaries, you'll find links to talk summaries in the detailed program. 

Needium - using tweet locations to provide services:

• They're salvaging, filtering, categoring and locating tweets to provide services related to the expressed needs in the tweets. Example: someone tweets "I'm feeling sushi tonight", a Needium employee will contact that person telling him where the nearest sushi bar is
• When tweets aren't implicitely geolocated, they infer location using other methods when possible, such as the home city in the user profile and other previous tweets made
• They index over 12 million messages every day
• Only Needium employees reply to twitter users, no automated messages
• Needium makes money by partnering with local businesses that they can recommend whenever appropriate... and it works, they are making money

NRCan - Update on national mapping

• Given by Éric Loubier of Natural Resources Canada
• What's the impact of the overabundance of information on cartographic agencies?
• With the numerous new sources of geodata, including crowsourced ones, can we rely on the data quality?
• There's a siplification of processes and products, so they become more easily digestible
• Redefining the role of government regarding geodata production and dissemination
• And a change of paradigm, more open, quickly provided, enabling added value and easy sharing
• Government must modernize in order to stay relevant
• The dangers of trying of normalizing everything, there is no such thing as one size fits all

Cartography 2.0 - Boris Mericskay

• Non geo-experts are doing mapping now
• They are omnipresent in contributions and uses similar tools as experts
• Along with crowdsourcing, citizens are now the sensors, example of EDDMapS.org
• Little metadata comes with voluntary contributions

Hydro-Québec and their use of LiDAR

• Excellent crash course on LiDAR
• Measuring everything at remote locations with high resolution lidar
• They use lidar wither for overground and underground installations

City of Québec in 3D

• Virtual city, made out of Esri and Bentley products, amongst many others

• Various levels of details

• Sharing it with their partners

From 2D cadastre to 3D

• This was initially an undergraduate project

• It requires about 20 minutes per building to generate the 3D cadastre, along with over 100 clicks to clean scanned vectors, in other words, it's not that automated

• There's plans to have 3D cadastre for 2016 (mentioned by someone from the attendance)

The Geoide Network since 1998

• Given by Nicolas Chrisman

• 320 students, 119 researchers, 27 universities currently (?)

• Informed decisions, science, social needs. Commercialization, local to global

Closing the gap between outdoor and indoor navigation

• Given by Ann Vanclooster
• Challenges = technologies and 3D indoor models
• Bing and Google are poor for existing indoor passages, no incorporation of them, while some others are better, such as Via Michelin, OpenRouteService
• In short, seamless global outdoor and indoor positioning system, we're not there yet

WikiGIS and collaborative Geodesign

• Given by Wided Batita
• The numerous 'geodesign' definitions, essentially combining gis and design
• WikiGIS prototype: wikisig.scg.ulaval.ca

GeoEduc3D

• Given by Sylvie Daniel of ULaval
• Real-world games to teach geospatial via smartphones and tablets, using augmented reality for instance
• Mainly targeting kids
• geoeduc3d.scg.ulaval.ca
• To be released as open source
• Bentley and Ubisoft are partners

Data aggregation for decisions

• Given by Eve Grenier, ULaval
• No one size fits all solution

Dessau: geomatics in big engineering projects

• Given by Mathieu Arcand, GIS team leader
• Engineers haven't integrated geomatics yet and are not necessarily convinced - lost of control... They don't understand the potential of geospatial technologies - we're not 'just' map makers
• The importance of understanding the domain to which geomatics is applied
• The various phases of big engineering projects - project life cycle
• The importance of data validation
• AutoCAD vs GIS: they do different things and there's a lot of internal competition between CAD and GIS teams
• Technology choice must be well made

Spatial SQL servers comparison

• Given by Simon Mercier, presentation available Mgeospatial.com/database.pdf (in French)
• The data warehouse is central
• The history of SQL servers
• Fisheries and Oceans Canada helped create Oracle 11g
• There are free (but limited) versions of MS SQL Server and Oracle Spatial
• In regards to spatial capabilities, PostGIS and Oracle Spatial are way ahead of MS SQL Server, and both support SQL-MM and offer better spatial indexes / functions and OS.
• Comparison of performances difficult to do, and it's also illegal in the terms of license of Oracle and MS SQL Server
• Oracle Spatial vs Oracle Locator explained
• Oracle spatial not cheap, but can worth it in some contexts

SDI GeoNetwork OpenSource

• Given by Luc Vaillancourt
• Inspire in Europe
• Metadata becoming mandatory In my governmental contexts
• GeoNode, rating datasets
• Geocommons discussed, which does not use geonetwork

Canadian national elevation strategy

• Given by David Belanger, CITS (NRCan)
• DNEC data, the most popular geobase data
• Constraint and incoherences in the current data
• New database structure giving them increased flexibility
• 3 databases: management db, distribution db + metadata db
• Handling bith vector and raster
• Using PostGIS with PostGIS Raster
• Using geohashtree, using geohash and using GDAL-DEM

Data accuracy

• Given by François Riendeau, ViaSat
• Some data providers don't care that much about data accuracy, it depends so much on the use case
• Accuracy != precision, absolute vs relative (in French = exactitude vs precision)
• Error types
• Validation, metadata, documentation
• It's the role of the geospatial specialist to informs clients about precision, projections, datums, etc

State of the 3D data market

• Given by Jacynthe Pouliot of ULaval
• International survey results, made 9 months ago, followup of a previous survey completed in 2007
• 100 people has responded, mostly professionals and business execs
• Not that many people actually work with 3D geospatial data
• Main constraint is data availability, software performances, efforts to acquire and process the data
• Most do 3D for acquiring new knowledge or for client satisfaction
• Most expect that their use of 3D data will increase significantly in the coming years, people plan to spend more for 3D data
• Upcoming 3D GeoInfo Conference in May 16-17th 2012 in Québec City
• 3D privacy and law issues have not been explored

Augmented reality in geoengineering: perspective and challenges

• Given by Sylvie Daniel
• Infrastructure maintenance with AR
• The added value of AR vs existing mobile mapping solutions? There's 3D...
• It must be much more than just superposition to be really AR
• Example, visualization of in-wall electrical wires while roaming in buildings
• Reliability is important, you can't crash or be slow while working on a site
• Numerous constraints and challenges, positioning accuracy, platforms and different hardware (and battery), hostile environments (e.g. rainy days, direct sun), field of view (engineering work are large!), data transfer delays
• Sometimes 2D more efficient than 3D
• Another example, underground installations visualization from the ground
• In conclusion, we're not there yet (especially for Geo-engineering project), but getting closer
• Platforms are not built specifically for AR, dedicated devices coming eventually?
• Augmented Simulation: simulation directly via AR

Mapping Thermal vulnerabilities in Montréal

• Given by Felissa Lareau
• Urban heat islands
• The project's goal = finding vulnerable areas
• Thermal vulnerability: exposition, sensibility, adaptivity , + external factors
• Mapping the vulnerabilities: indices exists for some cities using different methodologies
• Mainly using thermal satellite imagery coupled with demographic data
• Final map shows several small vulnerable areas dispersed over the Montreal island
• Challenges: including ground truth, adaptivity, improved source data
• Conclusion, it works and the results are used during urban heat waves

Geo-Trafic, intelligent transports in Montreal

• Serge Kéna-Cohen & Son Thu Lê
• Traffic is dramatically increasing in the Montreal area
• New intelligent transport system
• Geo-Trafic is a real-time geodatabase for the road network, activities, incidents, snow removal activities
• Goal is streamlining traffic data flow
• Decided to go with off the shelf software instead of building their own - they're at this stage now
• Their data will be openly available and normalized

Québec City Police and mobile mapping

• Given by Jimmy Perron
• Quebec City has half a million citizens
• Its Police has 1000 employees, 140 vehicles and 25 motorcycles, 400,000 emergency calls per year
• Needs: mobile mapping, gps, geocollaboration, touch user interfaces
• Solution "NSim Contour" with vector data tiling, static data is cached, such as orthoimagery, accessing data from multiple sources
• Geocollaboration, real-time sharing of map modifications and enhancements with logs and chatting capabilities

SQ mobile solution for emergencies

• Given by Pascal Dionne
• For Search and Rescue operations
• Using laptop, with GPS, and ArcMap 10 with cached data
• Using established statistics to help narrow searches, "lost person behavior"
• Police Search and Rescue efforts entirely mapped
• Spatial data also used for forensics

911-GIS

• Given by Hassan Mazzene
• Intrado is a large company offering 911-related services and SQ are using their technology
• Manage 240 million emergency calls every year
• Txt2911, using SMS
• Cellphone 911 localization
• Diving into OGC standards for their next generation GIS

The 'Géomatique 20XY' conference in Montréal has recently been hosted every two years (with one exception), so I expect the next one will take place in Fall 2013, if you're in the Quebec province or nearby such as in Ottawa and Toronto, I strongly encourage you considering attending to this great conference unique in the region.