Carbon Project Sponsors Situational Awareness Conference in Nation’s Capital

Since 1930, the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C. has been a Washington landmark. Photo © 2007 Omni Hotels

The Carbon Project is proud to announce our sponsorship of the first Spatial and Situational Awareness Conference. The conference will be held at the prestigious Omni Shoreham hotel in Washington, DC on December 12, 2007.

The conference provides a forum to examine the role geospatial systems play in homeland security, crisis management and everyday first response. New approaches to improve situational awareness including mashups, geospatial platforms, peer-to-peer applications and web-based solutions will be highlighted in this unique forum.

Spatial and situational awareness is incredibly important in today’s information rich homeland security environment. We look forward to discussing how technologies like Virtual Earth, Spatial Data Infrastructures and Peer-to-Peer mashups can deliver situational awareness faster and at lower cost than traditional methods.

The conference welcomes both public and private organizations and enterprises to meet, discuss and learn about one of today’s most innovative technology areas in this exciting new forum.

Additional information about the conference including registration, speaking, and sponsorship opportunities can be found at http://www.homelanddefensejournal.com/hdl/spatial-situational-dec.htm.

Filters for Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure

We had a great time with the CGDI Interoperability Project in Canada this week. I'll try to describe some of the events over the next few days. One of the highlights (for me at least) was our new Filter Builder tools based on OGC Filters and CGDI.

One part of the demo showed how emergency analysts could use OGC Filters, WFS services and data from CGDI - for analysis. The demo used a simulated release plume polygon to construct new features such as impacted roads and places. This involved intersecting release plume polygons with impacted areas, but used the CGDI service to do the analysis.

Here's how it worked - we used CarbonArc PRO to select an existing GML feature (a release plume polygon), construct a Filter Encoding request using Spatial Operators (in this case it was the Spatial Operator "Intersect"), and then send it to CubeWerx and acquire impacted roads and places. All done in real time - very cool.

The tools are based on Filters - the basic idea of an OGC Filter is to provide a SQL-like spatial and logical language to make advanced data queries possible in a distributed environment. Filters do this using a series of logical ("AND" this, "OR" that), comparison (is this "Equal To") and spatial (does that road "Intersect"?) operators.

The Filter Encoding (FE) specification, when wrapped up into easy-to-use tools, lets SDI users quickly add complex and powerful queries to their work flows.

All this means a big change from the days when analysis was done using GIS on the desktop.