The devastation of Hurricane Sandy and the western wildfires in 2012 are sobering reminders that utilities always need to be prepared to respond to large-scale natural disasters. When faced with incidents of that size, a utility is forced to look at all of its resources in preparation, including those it doesn’t typically utilize under normal conditions. Danny Petrecca, director of Product Management Enterprise GIS at Schneider Electric, explains how a typical implementation for an enterprise-wide GIS system can be used to better prepare utilities for disasters.

In the city of Wyndham, Australia, rapid population growth, coupled with the diverse business activities of the city, has increased demand for spatial services exponentially. This article discusses how the Spatial Systems Unit at the Wyndham City Council planned to provide an accurate and current enterprise GIS for all staff, empowering them to obtain information seamlessly, while catering to future changes to other corporate systems.

The GEOStore project explores new types of geolocated digital content, such as 3D models and augmented reality, and defines new bundling and Web distribution techniques for digital content to facilitate new business models. In this article, the authors discuss the ways in which the GEOStore addresses the challenges of interoperability and Web-based distribution of geospatial data content to users in sectors such as education, geomarketing, tourism and urban management.

Location-based data and analysis are considered so critical to the understanding of a business’ operations that business analytics software companies routinely and prominently boast maps as part of their dashboard visualization toolkits. But Gartner, the market research company, gives scant mention of the importance of location intelligence. Editor in Chief Joe Francica looks at what’s missing from its most recent “Magic Quadrant” report. 

This past fall, NASA DEVELOP interns partnered with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Oregon Department of Forestry to apply NASA EOS in understanding the impact of the 2012 wildfire season in Oregon on landscape and air quality. DEVELOP students combined VIIRS and Landsat 7 data to create burn scars and fire risk maps, and CALIPSO curtains and HYSPLIT modeling to visualize the extent of smoke plumes and particulate matter from the fires. 

The Massachussetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) is essentially seeking new design ideas for its subway map - in the space of three weeks, for free, and with no rights retained by the cartographer. And if you win this contest? You get… um, fleeting glory, apparently. Andy Woodruff doesn't think this is such a great idea.

Cloudmade explores how the CloudMade On-Dash and In-Dash platforms use the Hybrid and Mapsafe technologies to let users search through point of interest data from many different providers and see the results represented as a single item.  

Now that we've all had a couple of weeks after the AAGs to relax and make fun of certain unnamed party-animals, we thought we would reflect on how the conference itself was reflected in the Twittersphere. With comments abound that there was more conference-related Twitter activity than ever before, we wanted to see if we couldn't uncover some more specific trends.

Each year indoor positioning has created more buzz in the location-based services arena. Acquisitions and new developments suggest 2013 might be a breakthrough year for the technology. Executive Editor Adena Schutzberg shares the basics on how it works and where it might be headed.

The term “geofencing” is popping up all over discussions of location-based services, with a special focus on its use in retailing. Why are geofences “hot” and how can retailers interested in leveraging geospatial technology and data best use the invisible boundaries?Directions Magazine posed those questions to Rip Gerber, CEO of Locaid, a location-as-a-service company.