Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are, of course, one of the core tools in the geospatial realm. Providing spatial context to a variety of data points is crucial to truly understanding a problem and formulating a sustainable solution. GIS is used across a wide swath of sectors for a variety of purposes, as we cover extensively at Geo Week News. Whether it’s the COVID maps that were invaluable at the height of the pandemic, or city planning tools to determine where new health care facilities or schools may be needed, GIS opens up a number of different avenues.
One other area that we’ve covered quite a bit of late at Geo Week News is using GIS to spatially record key data collected with imagery and/or lidar. For surveyors, utility owners, engineers, construction managers, and many other professions this kind of spatial awareness is key to truly deriving the most value from that data. Below, you can find five articles highlighting this usage of GIS and the value that it provides.
OFIL Systems Announces Gridnostic, a Solution for Predictive Grid Resilience Analysis
We start with an article from just this week about a new product released by OFIL Systems. Gridnostic is a software solution for power utility owners who are dealing with imagery to be used for assisting inspection workflows and putting them into GIS platforms. The product uses algorithms to predict a “severity score” of certain points within a power grid, and that score is accurately placed into the right spatial context so that engineers know exactly where their focus can be. Given the demand on upkeep for our power grids, having this context can streamline work to a significant degree.
Merging GIS technology with paleontology
For this article, we move a little bit outside of our normal area of coverage and into the world of paleontology. Tom Hebert spent most of his professional career in insurance before finding a passion in paleontology, a passion that he’s ultimately followed into a new career. In his previous life, he had a fair amount of experience with GIS, and he’s put that experience to good use in this new field. This article outlines how he made this career shift, and what he’s trying to do to expand the use of GIS in the industry to help track exactly where certain discoveries are found.
Building Modern, Resilient, And Future-Proofed Energy Infrastructure
For this article we have a guest post contributed by VertiGIS CEO Andy Berry, who looks at the broad issue of developing sustainable energy systems. This is a crucial issue for the entire planet, but implementing these plans takes a lot of planning and involves a lot of data. GIS, he believes, can be the key to unlocking this work.
Creating digital dig boards with drone imagery and GIS
While most of the stories to this point have involved AEC, this is the first time we’ve seen GIS being used in this way explicitly for construction projects. In this article, Geo Week News spoke to representatives from construction firm Brasfield & Gorrie to learn about their processes. They speak to their work in utilizing drones to collect key imagery on a job site, and how that imagery is combined with GIS to create their digital dig boards.
France Inspects and Maps 45,000 Bridges to Prioritize Repairs
GIS is valuable for a lot of different reasons, but one of the areas in which it really shines is enabling planning for large-scale projects across different sites. That’s exactly the kind of project that is discussed in this article contributed by Esri’s Ian Koeppel. He writes about a massive project in France to inspect 45,000 bridges across the nation. That sheer number of bridges makes this a staggeringly complex project, but the agency leading this effort, Cerema, turned to GIS to help smooth that process, with great results.
