Good morning, and welcome to the Monday Morning News Kick Off. We hope that everyone had a great weekend, and made some time to watch the beginning of the 2012 Olympic Games. This week’s kick off includes news surrounding the 2012 Olympics, a new report from ISE, and a multi-year agreement between DigitalGlobe and Esri. So, fire up that second cup of coffee and read on!
Mapping London for the Olympics
With the Olympic Games officially kicking off this past weekend, Rochester, N.Y.-based Pictometry is touting the more than 200 square kilometers of high-resolution, aerial oblique imagery it captured over central London prior to the start of the games.
According to Gordon Lawson, Pictometry’s vice president of international, there is an international customer using the imagery to help protects its athletes. The database is also available for license by governments and businesses that will take a particular interest in U.K. this summer.
“The purpose from a GEOINT perspective is to provide high resolution imagery that could be used for security planning and that sort of thing,” Lawson said.
Lawson added that Pictometry is also in discussions with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency about replicating this capability for other events and locations. Lawson said Pictometry’s imagery is unique, because unlike traditional top down aerial and satellite captures, its metric oblique images show each side of every structure, and are also compatible with both 2D and 3D applications.
The U.S. Secret Service uses Pictometry imagery to assist with route planning, Lawson said. However, the 2012 Olympics mark the company’s most aggressive push to date to demonstrate the capability of its imagery for major events. In addition to sporting events, Lawson said this capability would also be useful preceding world leader summits, such as G8, for example.
Google also has some fascinating maps and imagery related to the 2012 Olympic Games, including medal distribution and street views of the Olympic venues.
ISE Releases Annual Report to Congress
The U.S. government’s Information Sharing Environment (ISE) released its annual report to Congress last week, titled National Security through Responsible Information Sharing. The full report can be found here, and pages 34-35 focus particularly on geospatial information as a national resource.
PM-ISE Kshemendra Paul also wrote a blog post coinciding with the report’s release.
DigitalGlobe and Esri Sign Multi-Year Agreement
DigitalGlobe announced that Esri has licensed the rights for DigitalGlobe’s Global Basemap imagery layer. The announcement was made at the Esri International User Conference last week in San Diego.
The imagery layer will be integrated into Esri’s existing imagery basemap in ArcGIS Online, Esri’s cloud-based mapping and collaborative content management system. Later this year, ArcGIS users will be able to use the imagery in their web maps and easily share the results with other users online. In addition ArcGIS for Desktop users can leverage the same ArcGIS Online service to use the high quality data in their desktop applications.
