| | JULY 20148CIOReviewDoug Surianoopinionin myGIS AND BIG DATA: WHY "WHERE IN THE WORLD" MATTERSBy Steve Bein, VP-GIS, Michael Baker International Pennsylvania based Michael Baker International is a provider of engineering, development, intelligence and technology solutions with global reach and mobility.We have heard dozens of definitions of "Big Data" and the "Internet of Things," and how they have been changing, and are going to change IT forever. There is one component of both of these revolutions that unifies and joins all these data together and allows for analytics that would otherwise be impossible. That component is location. A leading manufacturer of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software around the world, Esri, made this point in front of map making practitioners and GIS professionals at a recent conference, "Geography Matters." Location information is associated with almost every piece of data in your enterprise and GIS makes it possible to harness that location information and view it in new and exciting ways for better decision making and improved management and organization of your information. Why otherwise would advertising titan Google in 2004 purchase a three year old startup called Keyhole which sought to bring seamless global satellite imagery and mapping to the US intelligence community? Google had the foresight to recognize that their advertising and customers were location based, and they could improve the quality and responsiveness of their advertising by linking it to location. With the broad endorsement of Google Maps, Google Earth and the myriad of Google Apps embedded to these platforms, this foresight has clearly proved its wisdom. Google recently announced its plan to purchase a satellite imaging company, Skybox, for $500 million, with the intention to launch a total of 24 satellites in coming years. In June, the U.S. government lifted restrictions on the allowed size of visible features for satellite imagery from 50cm to 31cm for one commercial company, Digital Globe. These changes are coming fast and it means that we will soon know the precise location of everything from mailboxes to manholes with an accuracy and ubiquity we never imagined.Michael Baker International owns and operates a state of the art Optech LYNX mobile LiDAR system. Simply put, this system measures and collects hundreds of thousands of location points per second and dozens of hi-res photos per second as it drives down the street. Each point measurement includes a highly accurate location, and together these points and photos can create a 3D scene from which automated and manual techniques can extract useful information such as the location of a manhole, the location and size of a pothole, or even the diameter and species of a tree. Engineering firms are often contacted by local governments to perform such infrastructure mapping and with the growing proliferation of cloud computing and freedom of public information, organizations may find this information is increasingly available for use. But is your enterprise ready to make use of this Big Data?As more and more of these location-based "Big" datasets become available, companies will be finding new and innovative ways to leverage it. In the Steve Bein
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