Article No.1
TerraGo brings collaboration to non-GIS experts
TerraGo Technologies, maintained by Carahsoft, recently previewed their latest release Mobile for Android and announced the acquisition of Geosemble, which brings into the fold GeoXray.
Parent company Carahsoft is a government IT solutions provider providing software solutiosn for federal, state and local government agencies. Under the company umbrella are solutions from not only TerraGo, but Adobe and other geospatial intelligence solutions.
Jim Sheen, vice president of products and services for TerraGo , Jessica Sunday, technical account manager and Nathan Jones, vice president of engineering spoke about the recent news in a webinar. TerraGo’s claim to fame is its unique GeoPDF format, which allows for geospatial information to be accessed and displayed in a PDF format. TerraGo covers collaboration and workflows for deploying GeoPDFs for maps and imagery.
For the enterprise, TerraGo provides a suite of applications that help both small and large enterprises and Fortune 100 companies to produce access and share geospatial information with anyone, anywhere. These applications are for those who are not GIS experts and don’t have access to GIS software, as well as those who do.
Round trip workflows can be designed with TerraGo that travel from the enterprise to the outside edge of the enterprise. The upcoming TerraGo V6 serves as a platform for geospatial applications and for moving spatially aware information among different users and systems throughout the workflow.“Field users don’t have to be GIS experts, so that users represent a wide range of different skill sets,” said Sheen. “We make solutions as simple to use and economical as possible. They can be used online and in a disconnected offline way.”
This is very important when communications are unavailable and in military communications.“TerraGo Publisher plugs into your existing GIS to deploy the geospatial assets as GeoPDF maps and imagery,” said Sheen. “So it allows you to take the complexity built into your maps and imagery in the GIS system, simplify it and make it interactive and portable, so it can be used downstream collaboratively.”
PDF maps and imagery can be further extended using TerraGo Composer, to build and configure different types of geospatial apps, for example, GeoPDF map books or digital atlases that can be deployed to the field with either the TerraGo Toolbar or TerraGo Mobile. Toolbar and Mobile enable end users to interact with the maps and imagery, gather on-the-ground intelligence and collaborate with other users. Once that’s done, in some cases, the end result for the customer is to get data out to the field where the remote workers can collaborate with one another. The field data that has been updated can be entered into the enterprise GIS.
The new version 6 to be available in a couple of months will contain TerraGo Publisher for ArcGIS, Composer for Acrobat and TerraGo Toolbar. New enhancements in annotation and geomarking have been added to Toolbar and Composer so end users can use Adobe Reader with Toolbar to add, edit, annotate and add geomarks on any PDF produced directly in the TerraGo system. As you create GeoPDFs they become immediately available.
Geoforms are data entry forms that can be attached and georeferenced to geomarks and annotations. Those forms can be distributed to field workers for field data collection and real time sharing and that data can also be reconsolidated into the enterprise GIS.
In summary, TerraGo has been well positioned to move into the mobile and non-GIS expert market, making GIS and geospatial accessible to a broader number of users by extending the reach of GeoPDF. It will be interesting to see where the company goes with the new offerings. With its simple but elegant link to Adobe PDF, coupled with the recent acquisition of Geosemble for data mining, the possibilities look endless.
For further information visit: http://www10.giscafe.com/
Article No.2
Geospatial Solutions Aid in Recovery of Devastating Waldo Canyon Fires in Colorado Springs
This summer, Colorado experienced one of the most devastating fires in its history. The blaze decimated more than 18,000 acres of forest in Waldo Canyon and the Pike National Forest near Colorado Springs. As a result, more than 32,000 residents were evacuated and 346 homes were subsequently destroyed.
After a natural disaster, first responders and other decision makers need geospatial data that are actionable, as well as easy to manage and understand to effectively save lives and assess damage. In addition to needing information quickly, the geospatial data must be able to be used by personnel who do not have GIS tools or training.
For the recent Waldo Canyon fires, geospatial solutions from TerraGo Technologies and Colorado-based DigitalGlobe played a key role in aiding disaster recovery, emergency planning and change detection within the area’s most impacted by the blaze.
Using DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-2 satellite imagery, the analyst turned to Esri ArcGIS® desktop to create maps that were then outputted in TerraGo GeoPDFÒ maps, produced by TerraGo Publisher® and compiled into map books by TerraGo Composer® for Adobe® Acrobat®. The GeoPDF maps can be downloaded here.
Natural disasters are unpredictable and having current intelligence enables emergency personnel to adapt on the fly as conditions change to save lives. We are gratified that our software and solutions aided first responders and other emergency personnel with the intelligence they needed for effective, efficient decision-making in the wake of this disaster.
For further information visit: http://www10.giscafe.com/
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