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Berlin/Karlsruhe, 20 March 2017 With their wide variety of possible applications, drones drive innovation and efficiency in a global economy.

Virtually no other sector is growing and becoming more professional at a faster rate than UAS (unmanned aerial systems). The focus has long since moved beyond technical aspects such as drone hardware or software. The acquisition of attractive startups such as MAVINCI and Ascending Technologies by global players like Intel in 2016, and the great interest being shown in the technology by investors through global companies such as DHL, Mercedes, Yamaha, Amazon and Airbus, demonstrates that the emphasis has shifted to the wide range of possible applications for drones. The focus is increasingly on optimization and on improving the efficiency of business processes and workflows.

Clear leadership aspiration of INTERAERIAL SOLUTIONS
In September 2017, these companies will turn their attention to Berlin. INTERAERIAL SOLUTIONS, which is taking place from 26 to 28 September as part of INTERGEO, the world’s leading trade fair for geodesy, geoinformation and land management, is not simply bringing Europe’s largest drone show to the German capital. It also has the clear aspiration of becoming established as the number one industry gathering for commercial and civil drone applications in Europe.

Berlin welcomes experts from around the world
At Messe Berlin, global industry experts – including top decision-makers from the worldwide UAS community, managers from large industrial groups and political representatives – will meet suppliers, manufacturers of drones and accessories, service providers and commercial drone users from various industries.

Forum also reflects diversity of user industries
The three-day programme of the INTERAERIAL SOLUTIONS Forum covers the full range of possible uses and intelligent applications for drones in areas such as construction planning and monitoring, inspection tasks in the energy and water sectors, real estate, insurance, agriculture, forestry and disaster prevention. This makes the trade fair the only platform that combines all relevant drone applications at a single location.
Initial reports are expected regarding implementation of Germany’s new drone regulations, which were passed by the upper house of the German parliament just a few days ago. The Forum will also provide details about how to obtain the “driving licence” required for drones weighing 2 kg or more and about implementing the obligation to register drones weighing over 250 g – because these two regulations will provisionally enter into force on 1 October, just a few days after the trade fair.

New marketplace for suppliers of drone parts
Suppliers, companies offering accessories and service providers now have their very own exhibition area – the INTERAERIAL SOLUTIONS Supplier Zone – which offers the ideal environment for discussing matters such as sourcing and partnerships.
For the first time ever, the Startup Zone will offer young and innovative startups in the sectors covered by INTERGEO and INTERAERIAL SOLUTIONS a dedicated platform for showcasing their products and concepts to potential investors and industry representatives.

DRONE THINK TANK launched
Initiated by INTERAERIAL SOLUTIONS, the first DRONE THINK TANK was launched in Berlin on 7 March 2017. It is intended as a catalyst for a sector that is growing fast and changing all the time. The objective is to use the DRONE THINK TANK to discuss developments, initiate ideas, develop new formats and form networks. Initial ideas from the launch meeting will already be in evidence at INTERAERIAL SOLUTIONS 2017 in Berlin. The founding members are Kay Wackwitz from DRONEII, Benjamin Federmann from AIBOTIX, Lelia Miklos from CopterCloud, Michael Wieland from CopterView, Michael Niesen from Intel and Juliane Jähnke from INTERAERIAL SOLUTIONS.

About INTERAERIAL SOLUTIONS
INTERAERIAL SOLUTIONS, consisting of exhibition, forum & flight zone, is Europe’s leading platform for unmanned aerial systems (UAS). It visits a new German city each year in tandem with INTERGEO. The Forum deals with current issues from politics, administration, science and industry. The Flight Zone in the outdoor zone offers live demonstrations of the various flight systems and thus delivers an all-round experience of products and the market.
With the wealth of potential on offer, INTERAERIAL SOLUTIONS highlights the wide range of applications for UAS that already exist and provides a glimpse of future markets. Its forthcoming venues in the years ahead are also internationally renowned exhibition cities, including Berlin in 2017 and Frankfurt in 2018.
HINTE Messe- und Ausstellungs-GmbH is the host of INTERAERIAL SOLUTIONS. Umbrella association UAV DACH and research company DRONEII are once again the partners of INTERAERIAL SOLUTIONS in 2017.

Written by 80 European scientific experts from more than 25 institutions, this first Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service Ocean State Report is a step forward into the development of regular annual reporting on the state and health of the Global Ocean and European Seas based on CMEMS marine environment monitoring capabilities.

The Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service Ocean State Report provides an annual report of the state of the global ocean and European regional seas for ocean community, policy and decision-makers with the additional aim of increasing general public awareness about the status of, and changes in, the marine environment.

The CMEMS Ocean State Report draws on expert analysis and provides a 4-D view (through reanalysis systems), from above (through remote sensing data) and directly from the interior (through in situ measurements) of the blue (hydrography, currents), white (sea ice) and green (e.g. Chlorophyll) global ocean and the European Seas.

This first issue delivers guidance on the physical ocean state and change over the period 1993–2015. Scientific integrity is assured through the process of independent peer review in collaboration with the Journal of Operational Oceanography.

Download the Ocean State Report 2016 here

Data scientists, GIS engineers and software developers from California-based company EOS have recently launched a cutting-edge cloud-based tool that allows users, journalists, researchers and students to easily search and analyze huge amounts of the most up-to-date earth observation data.

Land Viewer is an on-the-fly, real-time imagery processing and analytics service, which provides:

  • instant access to petabytes of new and archive data;
  • the ability to find geospatial images on any scale in 2 clicks by selecting the required territory on the map or by location name;
  • on-the-fly imagery analytics, with the option to download any images required for business purposes.

The EOS solution enables users to carry out multipurpose research, to find and employ any Earth Observation image available from the Sentinel 2 and Landsat 8 satellites in one place and many times faster than previously. The service is free of charge, simple to use and can be accessed from any browser or device.

With Land Viewer, users are able to explore satellite imagery from the Sentinel 2 and Landsat 8 satellites stored on the Amazon Cloud platform, to apply search filters by date of image acquisition, cloudiness or sun elevation, to analyze images, download and share them with others.

Using tiling technology, Land Viewer can recover scenes from archive data in any zoom in less than 10 seconds. Images can be viewed in different band combinations or in an on-the-fly spectral index such as NDVI, selected to provide the information that best matches the user’s needs. To make this possible, EOS experts have created a technology that transforms on-the-fly raw satellite imagery data stored in 16-bit GeoTIFF format into tiles, which the user can immediately see on the screen in his web browser. There is no need to create and store additional preview screens or to archive data, as the images can be displayed immediately in the browser from raw data.

The user can apply various pre-installed and customized spectral band combinations to highlight and visualize any data type on the image. For example, forest fires are easier to see in the infrared spectrum. Various bands are available for analysis of vegetation, agricultural land, ice cover, rivers, lakes and oceans. Users can review in detail all objects located within a scene, for example, in connection with fires, floods, illegal logging or water resources management. It is also possible to chronologically compare geospatial imagery from 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017 to track changes in the development of riverbeds, forests and other natural features.

In February 2017, earth scientists in Israel used Land Viewer to facilitate their research by extracting satellite derived bathymetry to create a 100 m grid map of the seas around the Arabian Peninsula. GIS experts were also able to carry out shallow bathymetry analysis using the very best imagery (no waves, clean atmosphere, good visualization of real bathymetry etc.) available in Land Viewer.

“By 2017, EOS will be listening to the social and commercial pulse of mankind on the planet”, says EOS founder and CEO Max Polyakov. Indeed, the company has the most powerful set of remote sensing image processing technologies at its disposal, while the EOS warehouse aggregates data from a variety of sources: satellites, aerial and UAV. From now on, users can receive access to innovative cloud-based imagery analytics technologies, neural network based methods, point cloud – photogrammetry, change detection, imagery tiling and mosaicking.

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SI Imaging Services (SIIS) has reported that, effective as of January 1, 2017, LAND INFO Worldwide Mapping, LLC (LAND INFO) is an authorized reseller of KOMPSAT data.

With this agreement, LAND INFO will expand its offering of value-added feature extraction and classification to include the use of KOMPSAT imagery. SIIS contributes to remote sensing and Earth Observation (EO) societies by providing very high resolution optical and SAR images through over 80 partners worldwide. The KOMPSAT (Korean Multi-Purpose Satellite) program is a part of the Korean government’s space development program, which provides very high resolution satellite imagery to the global remote sensing community.

KOMPSAT 3A, the most recent optical satellite among SIIS’ products, offers 40 centimeter resolution imagery for a variety of purposes such as mapping, infrastructure monitoring and natural resources. KOMPSAT-5, the first Korean SAR satellite, offers very high resolution SAR imagery (up to 85 centimeters) for change detection regardless of weather conditions.

si-imaging.com/

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(By Andrey Pirogov, Racurs, Russia) For Russian geomatics, 2016 was an abundant year in terms of events, laws and new projects.

After numerous attempts to commercialise Russia’s Earth observation and remote sensing data (RSD), the Roscosmos State Corporation (former Federal Space Agency) finally managed to do it at the end of the year and the data can now even be purchased by non-residents! A number of Russian companies have already signed contracts regarding proliferation of the Russian RSD obtained by the Kanopus-V (2m GSD) and Resurs-P (1m GSD) satellites.

However, it’s difficult to say whether the Russian data can become competitive in the world market. The cost of 1km2 worth of data from Resurs-P is almost USD10, and although the data from Kanopus is cheaper it is delivered as microframes which is very labour-intensive in terms of processing. Another significant Roscosmos project was an open-data ERSD portal providing access to the Resurs-P and Kanopus-V data.

The other large-scale federal project in 2016 was the ‘Business Navigator’ service for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which is as yet only available in the Russian language. The service was commissioned by the joint stock company ‘Federal Corporation on the Development of Small and Medium Enterprises’, which was created by order of the president of the Russian Federation in 2015. The service for SMEs was developed as a “resource for businessmen who want to start or promote their businesses and to work honestly and transparently to pay all the taxes and securing their own future and the future of their children”. We hope that the service will become popular and help the promotion of street retail (as opposed to shopping malls or outlet-based retail).

In 2016 the joint stock company ‘Rostelecom’ entered the Russian geomatics market. It is a large telecommunication company, partially government-owned, which offers its own geoinformation system, namely RusGIS. Unfortunately there is lack of information about the results so far, although the company is loudly announcing its GIS ambitions and has created a number of geoportals for regions of Russia.

As for the Russian commercial companies, the NextGIS and Sovzond projects are worthy of a special mention. NextGIS presented a cloud-based version of the NextGIS Web and the QMS service (a catalogue of WMS/WFS services). Sovzond issued a cartographo-statistical product called World Evolution, which covers the major changes that have occurred in different countries across the globe between the 1980s and the present.

Open geodata progress

The amount of open geodata increased in Russia in 2016. For the first time ever, free access was given to data about road accidents in Russia. The Interior Ministry provides the data in the BezopasnyeDorogy.RF portal.

The actions of the Federal Service For State Registration, Cadastre And Cartography (Rosreestr) were somewhat confusing. It opened the section containing data about the administrative-territorial division of Russian but suddenly closed it a week later. Therefore, one now has to use the data about the boundaries within Russia from the OpenStreetMap project once more.

The largest Russian bank Sberbank launched the ‘Open Data’ project. Although Sberbank’s so-called ‘open data’ does not exactly fit with the commonly accepted definition of open data, we nevertheless welcome the initiative. We hope that there will be more data and that it will meet standard international requirements.

Russia is keeping pace with the world in the sphere of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) usage. The Russian UAV mapping market is presented with five largest companies producing a dozen fixed-wing UAV models and five multicopter models. The UAV market also survived a legislative challenge in Russia in 2016, when drones were banned from January until June. The laws were later revoked, however, and one can now use drones again providing the correct registration procedures are followed.

What can we expect in 2017?

The terms ‘import substitution’ and the ‘Register of Russian software’ became the major trends in the year 2016. Analysis of GIS-Lab.info (the most popular Russian forum of geomatics experts) shows an increasing number of queries for substitution of the foreign GIS for Russian ones or ones with an open source. Practically all Russian software developers entered the Register of the Russian Software which is controlled by the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation. In 2017 this trend for import substitution will continue.

The ministries and offices of various levels will keep increasing the amount of open data, and not only of economic statistics. For instance, the public transport navigation data in Samara is open, due to the fact the citizens can choose between different mobile applications for the transport system. The open data will be actively applied in the regional and institutional GIS projects.

Global expectations

Cloud solutions and computing clusters are becoming more and more popular on the world stage. The virtual reality technologies are being intensively developed. Besides, we expect the growth of the Earth observation and remote sensing satellite constellations. Within the next decade or so hundreds of large satellites and a couple of thousand micro- and nanosatellites will be launched into Earth’s orbit. Everyday coverage with 1-3m GSD will be available soon. This will be followed by the transformation of quantity into the quality of the data distributed to the customers through web services.

The GIS industry is going to be affected by the level of competition in the data visualisation field. The projects of start-ups like Habidatum and Urbica are changing the approach to handling spatial information, from the classic reflection of the data on a map to the information being managed in the four-dimensional space. Integration of GIS with GRM and ERP systems has become evident. Consequently the methods and techniques in the sphere of geographical and geoinformational education will also have to change. Managers, marketing and financial experts should all be educated about GIS.

Andrey Pirogov has been head of the marketing department at Racurs since 2008. Andrey is also a lecturer on geoinformation-related aspects of business at the MSU Business School. Furthermore, he is a co-founder of the GISGeo project which is aimed at promoting geomarketing and the application of geomatics in Russian business. His fields of interest include marketing and management in the geospatial industry, geoanalysis and GIS education.

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(28 February 2017) Developers of an app that combines the increasing availability of satellite images with social networking took home the top prize at this year’s Space App Camp in Barcelona.

The App Camp offers access to the latest space data and the SAP Cloud Platform to European app developers, who work to make the information accessible to a broad audience.

As Europe’s Copernicus programme continues to launch the Sentinel satellites transforming their data into information to benefit citizens poses both a challenge and an opportunity. The App Camp is an occasion for developers to bring the data from these and other satellites to the everyday user via mobile apps.

The SnapPlanet app allows users to choose a location around the world at a given time, ‘snap’ it using images from Earth-observing satellites and share it with their followers.

“We know that our satellite data are key for a wide range of applications, but it surprises us every year how the participants come up with new ideas and new ways of integrating our data into these application areas,” said Josef Aschbacher, Director of ESA’s Earth Observation Programmes.

“This is both inspiring, as the development of new ideas never ceases, and motivating for us to continue to deliver data from space for people on Earth.”

The participating teams at the five-day App Camp, held at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, had been selected from ESA’s Business Incubation Centres. Each team, composed of two members, demonstrated how satellite and business data can be used to create new business models and solutions in a nearly untapped market.

The winning team won €5000 and will be considered for the SAP Start-up Focus programme. As part of its ongoing collaboration with ESA, SAP works with the start-ups from ESA’s Business Incubation Centres across Europe.

“The startup solutions seen today are strategic bets on radically new business, further increasing the value of our thriving Earth observation ecosystem,” said Carsten Linz, global head of the Center for Digital Leadership at SAP.

“This allows a seamless, data-driven business turning big data into smart data and creating exemplary customer and user value.”

Other apps developed during the App Camp included Droughtscan miramAPP, which uses Sentinel-2 data to assist water managers who experience problems with dry peat levees during periods of severe drought.

SOUL aims to merge data from satellites and vehicle-based instruments to provide air-quality data in near-real time.

The Saturnalia app allows users to scan a bottle of wine and displays the best year for that particular wine based on satellite and meteorological data providing soil, atmosphere and weather information The app also recommends wines cultivated in similar conditions.

Exploiting Sentinel-1, -2 and -3 data, Earthflow analyses how climate change is impacting agriculture in different regions, and can advise farmers on selecting the most suitable crops while aiding regional governments in implementing better policies for agriculture and water management.

Initiated by ESA, the App Camp is managed by SAP’s Center for Digital Leadership and organised by Anwendungszentrum GmbH Oberpfaffenhofen.

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(By Kendall Russell | March 3, 2017) Robbie Schingler is the co-founder and chief strategy officer at Planet, where he heads the company’s efforts to usher in the next era of Earth Observation (EO) capabilities. Ahead of his opening keynote “A Global Sensing Revolution” at the SATELLITE 2017 Conference & Exhibition in Washington, D.C. on Thursday, March 9, Schingler took a moment to talk with Via Satellite about the company’s long term goals and his hopes for the EO industry.

VIA SATELLITE: The big elephant in the room is the Terra Bella acquisition. What are you most excited about as far as what this unlocks for Planet?

Schingler: About a month ago we did announce that Planet entered a definitive agreement to purchase Terra Bella out of Google. The deal is not finalized — we are going through a number of regulatory approvals, and everything is going well. We expect that it will happen over the coming weeks to couple of months, so we really do look forward to this coming true.

From a personal standpoint both Will [Marshall], the co-founder of Planet, and I have known the team from the very beginning, as we both were startups at the beginning of the decade. While we take a similar approach to technology development, Planet chose to go much smaller in satellite size and mass to allow for us to launch more spacecraft and come up with a monitoring mission to image the whole world every day. I think what Terra Bella chose to focus on was innovating on the cost side of things. So all along we’ve been fairly complementary in what our product offerings and aspirations are.

VIA SATELLITE: Could you lay out your game plan for 2017? Are there any projects you’re particularly interested in pursuing this year?

Schingler: Well, we’ve already had a very busy 2017. Let me give you a couple of highlights. One, of course, is the Terra Bella announcement. Additionally though, we launched a world record of 88 satellites on an Indian PSLV. We have contacted all of the spacecraft, we’re undergoing commissioning at the moment and our team has been quite focused on catching all of that data and getting it whitelisted. That will be the case for the next quarter or so. But what’s super important is this has actually been the mission we’ve been on since we started six years ago, and that is to image the whole world every day. These satellites do that. We’ve had a number of really compelling user applications that have been developed on top of this monitoring data and I think it’s just scratching the surface.

VIA SATELLITE: Could you describe your Earth Observation (EO) capabilities in further detail?

Schingler: We have so many satellites in space that we effectively created a line scanner for the planet at 9:30 a.m. This is in polar orbit, in a sun synchronous orbit, and as the Earth rotates underneath it we scan the planet. We image everywhere every day. When you stack all that data and put some analytics against it, you can extract extremely meaningful things about what’s happening. That’s useful for just about any sector you can think about, from the federal community to the agriculture and forestry sectors to the commodities and insurance markets.

This is a new step, to be able to image the whole world every day and then activate that data to IT infrastructure that allows for you and I to actually get access to it. People who aren’t experts in remote sensing can get access to this data and these information feeds to search, discover, annotate, and share stories around the changing planet. I think that’s the major theme of this year for us at Planet: we’re building the infrastructure to make this possible.

VIA SATELLITE: Are there any other companies operating on a similar scale as far as earth observation?

Schingler: You have government programs like the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Sentinel primarily used by the science community. They’re fairly coarse, from 10 meters to 30 meters in spatial resolution, so that means a football field is only 3 pixels in length and only 1 pixel wide. Something that coarse is really good for scientific understanding, but as you get down to 3 meters per pixel — which is what we do — then increase the temporal resolution by updating that every day, you can really see dynamic change. And there is no one capable, government, commercial or otherwise, that can image the whole world every day at this high resolution.

VIA SATELLITE: What challenges do you foresee this year and beyond?

Schingler: I’m a space guy. I kind of grew up at NASA through my twenties … so I very much enjoy coming up with new missions and developing new technology. We have to make sure we anchor in progress and really become focused on our users and our customers. So for me one of the challenges is to become very maniacally user-driven. I think it’s incumbent on us and our team of 400 to build a long-term sustainable enterprise that brings about this new information feed for the planet.

On the space side of things … the largest challenge that we face is launch, getting frequent, reliable, low cost access to space where you want to go and when you want to go. That has been and continues to remain the largest barrier of innovation in the aerospace community. I’m a strong advocate and would be one of the first paying customers for the emergence of small, nano launch capabilities to allow for us to change the mental model of what we do in space.

VIA SATELLITE: What does the next step for EO look like? Are there any big technological shifts lurking around the corner?

Schingler: The major shift that I see in EO is all on the downstream side of things. I think the real fundamental shift is [EO] actually becoming a new utility that is used in our day-to-day lives, either in the workplace or in your personal life. We can move EO, which currently primarily has an end user that is a government customer, to operate so fast and efficiently that we can grow the number of users by orders of magnitude. When that happens there will be a tremendous amount of market growth and commercial growth, and commercial feedback as far as what people care about in their applications, in other data sets, etc.

There’s a lot of data and what’s been missing with making it available to the masses is the analytics on top of it.

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Poland’s Biebrza National Park, protected by the Wetlands Convention, experiences certain disturbances in its water levels and water transfer, which could threaten its biodiversity.

Wetlands, as defined by the Ramsar Convention, include all lakes and rivers, swamps and marshes, wet grasslands, peat lands, oases, estuaries, deltas and tidal flats, mangroves and other coastal areas, coral reefs, and all human-made sites such as fish ponds, rice paddies, reservoirs and salt pans, among others.

While long regarded as wastelands, wetlands are now considered hugely fruitful ecosystems that contribute essential beneficial services to society. Providing water entry for agricultural and domestic purposes, wetlands enable farmers to grow crops in all seasons, thus increasing food availability. They supply grazing and watering for domestic and wild animals, and are a habitat for diverse flora and fauna, serving as a lifeline for migratory birds.

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Greek company Planetek Hellas will participate to the new European Space Agency study on hyperspectral imaging to support the 2nd generation of the Copernicus Programme. The study will assess the future needs in terms of hyperspectral imaging, coordinate those needs with planned satellite missions and evaluate what existing or future infrastructures are needed to fulfill these needs.

The company was awarded a Phase 1 grant under the Horizon 2020 SME Instrument to produce a feasibility study a space product called OP3C (On board Processing for Compression and Clouds Classification in hyperspectral satellite data). The OP3C is an electronic component (hardware and software), which will be installed in specific satellites (hyperspectral) and facilitate their operation through automatic data compression functions that can be executed as they orbit around the Earth.

Hyperspectral satellites use hyperspectral sensors that collect images of several wavelengths and combines them into a 3D image. The main users of the OP3C will Space Agencies, Satellite Operating Centers, Satellite manufacturers, Hyperspectral sensor manufacturers and Consulting companies for satellite mission planning.
Maria Ieronymakis, engineer at Planetek Hellas thinks that no matter how small you are, you can have a critical advantage on a specific and well-defined niche market and be one step ahead compared other sometimes to bigger players.

Founded in 2006 and based in Athens, Greece, Planetek Hellas has 9 different contracts with the European Space Agency and is the first Greek company to have ever signed a contract with the European Space Astronomy Centre (March 2013).

(By Lisa Cornish) For smart cities to succeed, they require real-time, location-based strategies, solutions and responses to effectively deliver the services that make cities work.

These include everything from health and education to sanitation collection.

To date, the limited capacity and capabilities of the developing world has meant that they have not had the same opportunities as developed countries for the development and consumerism of geospatial technologies. But that is quickly changing.

“The developing world is learning from past mistakes by the developed world, particularly in attempting to create a technology in search of problems to solve, and is ensuring that geospatial information and technologies are more ubiquitous and closely tied to addressing real world needs and development issues,” said Greg Scott, senior advisor for global geospatial information management in the U.N. Statistics Division.

Thanks to Sustainable Development Goals pushing for a stronger focus on data, analytics, and geospatial and earth observation technologies, there is increasing attention on achieving and monitoring development outcomes. And such technologies will be a critical component for future smart cities in developing countries.

Land tenure and rights, poverty eradication, education and welfare, food security, climate change, health, and disasters are among the policy areas developing nations can become smarter at responding to thanks to these improved tools.

“The effective use of geospatial technologies can have a transformational impact on many of humanity’s most significant challenges in the developing world,” said Scott, who leads the development of policies and strategies through his role as secretariat for the U.N. Committee of Experts on Global Geospatial Information Management.

A key partnership

While the U.N. has been leading the charge, NASA has the tools to assist.

In 2005 the agency launched World Wind, a web-based, open source platform facilitating development of apps using satellite, thematic and geospatial data for analysis and visualization.

Geospatial data links information to a graphic reference; earth observation data is environmental data collected from remote sensing and satellite technologies. They are brought together using geographic information systems — computer systems that can capture, store, display and analyze data related to its location.

To encourage new and innovative ways of delivering data management tools for cities, World Wind Project Manager Patrick Hogan established the NASA World Wind Europa Challenge in collaboration with Politecnico di Milano, Geo for All, Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition, Hub Innovazione Trentino and the Hungarian Association for Geo-information.

Beginning in 2013, the challenge is now an annual event with projects delivering solutions for earthquake and bushfire management, traffic monitoring and environmental and agricultural monitoring solutions.

Dr. Gábor Remetey-Fülöpp from the Hungarian Association for Geo-information has been working with the project since 2012 as part of the scientific committee, applying his expertise in computer-aided design, remote sensing, geospatial technology and cartography to help design challenge themes and evaluate projects for the NASA World Wind Europa Challenge to ensure it meets its lofty goals.

Remetey-Fülöpp told Devex that the wider availability of geospatial technology combined with the use of open earth observation data, open governmental policy and open source apps today makes it more accessible to developing countries. “The synergy of using EO, geospatial and statistical data on a spatial data infrastructure basis can greatly improve the quality of monitoring and reporting, but it can also enhance measures taken on local level, helping to guide actions taken to improve societal benefits,” he said. “The open data policy and a growing number of open source tools for data analysis, allows intelligent information to be closer to the decision-makers.”

Remote sensing, cloud computing, big data, apps, social media and location-based services are among the services Remetey-Fülöpp believes open new opportunities to deliver better services for smart cities, including in developing nations.

That is the topic both Remetey-Fülöpp and Scott will be discussing in their session at the 10th International Symposium of Digital Earth in Sydney on April 5.

“The technologies were originally seen as being able to organize data, create digital representations of the world, and to automate mapping within and across agencies and enterprises,” Scott explained. But he says it has evolved to become a “major disruptor of change and much more consumer based.”

World Wind, GIS and the SDGs

The SDGs will be a driving force for implementing smart technology and solutions within developing countries. The U.N.’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development calls for inclusive social progress, environmental sustainability and economic development by 2030. It also calls for greater accountability than that experienced under the Millennium Development Goals.

“There is considerable emphasis on measuring and monitoring with good policy, science, technology and especially data,” Scott explained. “The 2030 agenda specifically demands the need for new data acquisition and integration approaches and captures specific references to the need for high-quality, timely, reliable and disaggregated data, including earth observations and geospatial information in the area of follow up and review.”

Enhanced capacity-building support for developing countries — including least developed countries and small island developing states — will also help create smarter and sustainable cities. High-quality, timely and reliable data on income, gender, age, race, ethnicity, migratory status, disability, geographic location and other characteristics have been identified as a priority, according to Scott.

But prioritizing and gathering data will require a dramatic shift in how development programs typically operate.

“Achieving these outcomes, and in such a short timeframe, will not only require transformation in how we think of sustainable development, but will also require transformation — a digital transformation — in how we are able to measure and monitor progress towards their achievement with new sources of data,” Scott said.

It will not just be traditional or official data to make this work; citizen-centric data will also be critical for evidence-based policy and decision-making. This is where World Wind comes in.

“World Wind is a web-based, open source platform facilitating development of apps using EO, thematic and geospatial data for analysis and visualization,” Remetey-Fülöpp said.

In the context of the SDGs, he said World Wind provides access to features needed to provide decision-making support on indicators and targets as defined in the 2030 agenda. “Accurate virtual globe visualization greatly facilitates understanding, which is key factor in the decision-making, especially in time-critical conditions,” Remetey-Fülöpp said.

Once measurements and data associated with SDG indicators are analyzed and visualized, decision-makers can begin building resilient cities and settlements. “It should be mentioned, World Wind applicability is also evident for other priority engagement areas as climate change, disaster risk reduction and ecosystem accounting,” Remetey-Fülöpp said.

In 2017, World Wind will turn to smart cities

The ability for NASA’s World Wind to assist in building smart cities of the future will be the focus of its public engagements in 2017.

In March at the 19th Conference of the Del Bianco Foundation in Florence, NASA and the European Space Agency will be launching DelBianco CitySmart, a new suite of tools built on World Wind to improve operations of smart cities through improved operations, including the management of urban infrastructure. “Any city will be able to continually tailor and advance functionalities serving their urban management needs, with an integrated system meant to increase awareness, efficiency, sustainability and quality of urban life,” Remetey-Fülöpp said

Smart cities will also be the theme for the 2017 NASA World Wind Europa Challenge this August, where experts will share ideas for open source apps that are expected to address urban management needs such as transportation, power, water, pollution, waste management and urban planning. And Remetey-Fülöpp anticipates that developing countries will respond well to the web-based, open source smart city apps. “Using openly accessible relevant EO data, especially if combined with citizen collected data, it will continually improve cost-effectiveness of delivering services.”

But he says the development of smart city technology using World Wind does not necessarily need to be built with developing countries in mind.

“All cities need essentially the same tools to manage urban infrastructure,” Remetey-Fülöpp explained. “What if we established an open source platform that allowed cities to share the functionalities each of them need? And what if the academic community as well as small and medium enterprise were challenged to work with their cities to build those solutions? Solutions developed by the more affluent cities would be entirely accessible to every other city. This way a world could advance in a collective enterprise advancing solutions they all need.”

World Wind, he said, is simply an open source platform that allows this to happen.
Barriers to helping developing communities become smart cities of the future

According to the 2017 Global Geospatial Industry Outlook, the geospatial industry is today worth $500 billion. Beyond 2017, Scott and Remetey-Fülöpp believe the value of geospatial technology to make sense of development data will continue to grow.

“As the digital data ecosystem grows it seems that we now have data everywhere about everything and that we have the capability to explore and analyze every aspect of our planet at amazing levels of temporal and spatial resolutions,” Scott said.

And Remetey-Fülöpp believes that to cope with the unprecedented population growth in some parts of the world, progressive governments will require a spatially enabled and oriented society, with citizens empowered by EO and geospatial infrastructure tools, to deliver the services and smarts required.

But for developing countries, there are still hurdles to overcome.

“There is a lot of infrastructure required for a city to be ‘smart’ and much of that infrastructure — internet bandwidth is a simple example — does not readily exist in developing countries or their many fragmented cities,” Scott said.

To tackle this problem, the U.N. is defining smart cities of the future in developing countries as cities that are smart, sustainable and resilient. “This makes it much easier for developing countries to conceptualize,” Scott said. Geospatial technology still remains a critical component for these cities.

In Kunming, China, from May 10 to 12, the UN-GGIM will be convening an international forum discussing smart cities in developing countries as a platform for discussing priority issues and the adoption of reliable, timely and quality geospatial information to shape these cities. For these efforts to succeed, Remetey-Fülöpp said enhanced partnership, cooperation and capacity building is required — and the onus may be on Scott. “The UN-GGIM board and its regional entities in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Oceania, serve a critical advisory role and network for the agenda 2030. It can effectively address the essential geospatial-related information management issues.”

For Scott and the UN-GGIM, a constant challenge is that geospatial information as a means to inform policy and decision-making is not yet mainstreamed and accepted enough, despite its long history. “It still tends to be viewed by many decision-makers as a back-room techno-geek solution and is not well understood,” Scott explained. “Yet, it is widely acknowledged that implementing the SDGs, and measuring and monitoring their progress, will require new and large amounts of data, and transformative change and collaborative approaches to link many types of data with the one thing they have in common — a geographic location.”

And despite the hurdles, the aims are grand: universal smart cities.

“To succeed in our global development aspirations we need to not only reach the developing countries, we need to reach the poorest of the poor in the least developed countries, and we need to give them a voice and location so as to ensure that no one is left behind,” Scott said.

Over six weeks, Devex — along with our partners — will explore what it takes to build a successful smart city, how climate resilient and environmentally friendly infrastructure and technologies are being implemented, and how actors in the global development community are working together toward common goals and engaging local communities in an inclusive way. Join us as we examine what it takes to create our smart cities of the future by tagging #SmartCities and @Devex.

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