Rapidly Making Colorful Landsat-8 Imagery Composite with Free Advanced Image Stretching and Pan-sharpening Software from GeoSage - See more at: http://www.gisuser.com/content/view/30197/2/#sthash.36sxzlnJ.dpuf
OpenCage Data Looks to Open Up OpenStreetMap Data to Users - Well, another State of the Map US event has come and gone and if you happen to be anything like me then you're likely mumbling to yourself... "dam, why wasn't I there this year??" Indeed you do wish you were there I bet as about 400 Geogeeks, developers, consultants and more hit San Fran to talk everything OSM and more.
5 Things on Friday #12 - GeoGeek Edition! - This edition gets a little geeky for our developer friends. Some of the goodies shared in this one include special activities at ESRIUC for the devgeeks; some GeoJSON tips; foursquare mashing up your data; iOS 7 goodies; crowd-sourcing for the National Map, and a GeoServer book of interest.
7 Awesome Things To do at ESRIUC 2013 - There's no shortage of things to do at ESRIUC, that's a fact! This year will mark my 15th UC and like most years, hammering down exactly what I'll do all week is a challenge - there's simply so many things to select from.
Landsat 8 Set to Extend Long Run of Observing Earth - NASA launched the Landsat Data Continuity Mission satellite on February 11. Since then, NASA mission engineers and scientists, with USGS collaboration, have been putting the satellite through its paces
Hot Products, Innovation, Business Integration and more at HxGNLive - A number of themes and crucial take-aways are worthy a quick mention when recapping this record-setting event. Like many tech conferences, common themes and hot buzz topics that emerged included: The Cloud, the crowd, mobile, big data, and sensors.
A GIS Laboratory, Indeed - A Look at Arizona State's GIS master's program - A good place to get a sense of where the geographic information system (GIS) field is headed is Lattie F. Coor Hall at Arizona State University in Tempe, Ariz. That's the home of the 30-credit-hour Masters of Advanced Study in GIS (MAS-GIS) Program
Top 10 Features in The New Google Maps - Google has reinforced that Maps are all about exploring and discovering, especially on mobile. The experience will only get better, for the developer and end user.
AEC Firms Lose an Average 100K a Year - Architectural, engineering and environmental firms she works for easily lose $100,000 each year through inefficient and ineffective practices
Canada Post Suing Over the use of Postal Code - An interesting issue is unfolding in Canada and quite frankly its darned amazing! Imagine this, you have a website and offer some kind of product or service.
Location, Location! 10 Map Services Your Business MUST Be Listed in - You have a business... perhaps a bar, a coffee shop, or maybe a consulting firm. Regardless of the business type, if you have a brick and mortar presence then you need to get your business listed in some of the popular online, location-based resources and search tools.
Editing OpenStreetMap (OSM) Just Got Easy, Really Easy! I'm sure that many (if not most) of you have often wanted to mess around with OSM and add/edit some features but were a little lazy - I'm guilty! But now we have no excuse thanks to the new OpenStreetMap in-browser map editing tools available from the iD Editor
Creative Cartography Meets Music in The Song Map - Oh yes, I love art. I also love music too, heck, who doesn't right? Well, I know you GeoGeeks and music lovers will really dig this one as we stumble onto yet another amazing cartographic product that quite simply will make you say WOW
Why is Landsat important and the Landsat Missions Timeline - Landsat has the optimal ground resolution and spectral bands to efficiently track land use and to document land change due to climate change, urbanization, drought, wildfire, biomass changes (carbon assessments), and a host of other natural and human-caused changes.
Mobile Market Trends show Apple users most loyal - Results from a recent survey indicate that Mobile Market Trends reveal Apple users are most loyal, T-Mobile customers most likely to bail - are you still confident that your clients are loyal to your brand?
10 Must Have Gadgets and Technology for the Remote Office - Chances are good that if you happen to work in technology or you're a consultant, that you may be working remotely or from a home-based office at some time soon - or perhaps you already do
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Safe Software has continued with their deliver of fine online training, this time via a session on March 8 titled "How to Prepare LIDAR Data to Meet Your Requirements".
The session was designed to introduce users and potential users of Safe Software's FME solutions as they apply to LiDAR data. Designed for anyone, the training really was quite useful for anyone, regardless of experience with FME or with LiDAR data for that matter, however, the experienced FME user would have likely taken a little more away from the session. Nonetheless, getting to listen to Dale Lutz for 30-40 minutes is always a treat (and fun) so Safe scores big points regardless!
With the use of LiDAR data soaring in popularity, there's no wonder that this session was popular and attended well, no doubt you'll also be hearing much more about LiDAR in the coming weeks as conference season kicks off with events like ASPRS, IGARSS (http://www.igarss12.org/), ISPRS and more - there's even a new, dedicated web and print magazine specifically about LiDAR at LiDARnews.com
Obviously, the focus of Dale's webinar was to discuss how user's of LiDAR can leverage FME 2012 and Safe's Solutions to better manage and work with their data. It became evident right from the get go when Dale launched right into a live demo that showed off the nifty model-builder style graphic UI for inspecting a using the FME "data inspector". This enabled his to quickly inspect a LiDAR xyz file. Simply put he pointed to a directory, selected all the required XYZ data files, connected these input files to an output location and ran the model, resulting in a folder that contained the LAS files. Lutz noted that anything you run in FME can be run over and over again in batch mode later. LAter in the session Lutz build a pretty detailed model showing off some of the possible tasks (See image below)
I had to chuckle when Dale pointed out so casually that LiDAR and point clouds are really "rasters gone wild" - so true - and then commented on some typical misbehaviors of LiDAR data that make them a little tricky for folks:
huge data volumes
irregular spacing - makes it tough to answer questions quickly
multiple returns at same point
many measurements per return
A quickie poll of the webinar attendees asked what do you need to do with LiDAR? Some of the common responses were: to reproject, create subsets, tile data, create a surface (dem, contour), translate to another format.
Attendees were later asked, What data formats are you working with?
Common responses were: LAS, E57, oracle spatial, LASzip, ascixyz - Most indicated they work with LAS (52%) and ASCII XYZ 43%
Discussions rolled into the FME workbench. Using the workbench LiDAR users can accomplish the following:
Cubic Clipping - 3D clipping routine
Point cloud thinning (removes data)
surface modeling
Split scenes
Colorization
extents calculation
Some interesting tidbits in the sessions:
BlueMarble reprojection is being brought into FME!
Many users realize up to 10X compression with their LAS files
Safe once had a contest to pick a name for a Library, the winner was to call it "The Library"!
Added support for LiDAR in ArcGIS 10.1
Option to create a .lasd file for quick use in ArcGIS 10.1
Overall Lutz and crew accomplished a fair bit in a little over 30 minutes. I highly suggest anyone working with or considering working with large amounts of LiDAR data to consider investigating how FME can help. Lutz also suggested that advanced users might also consider c hecking out the article they have published on Parallel Processing - This article speaks about parallel processing in FME and explores several ways of using it including such operations as buffering and clipping as well as surface modeling and point cloud manipulations See http://fme.ly/parallel
More information will also be available in the coming FME World Tour - a series of events, perhaps coming to a city near you! Of note, the Vancouver World Tour, April 27, will be livestreamed from Vancouver! See all the dates at http://fme.safe.com/content/FME-2012-World-Tour
For more info of Safe Software webinars and the archived sessions see http://fme.ly/archive
See more 
This is a section devoted to providing our valued contributors with a corner to do whatever they like with and discuss Geo/Tech topics that are near and dear to them! Be sure to check out ALL of our experts for commentary, editorial, links, and advice! Interested in becoming a contributing expert? 
