You're listening to various spatial podcast, episode 757, March 23rd, 2025.
Hello and welcome to a very spatial podcast.
I'm Jesse.
I'm Sue,
I'm Barb,
and this is Frank.
And this week we're gonna be talking to a few different people at the
North Carolina GIS conference.
But first, a little bit of news.
The Data Rescue Project is a project to create a data curation
repository or clearinghouse for open data and public data.
And it is.
Started in part by the International Association of Social Science
Information Service and Technology.
And this is an association that's been around a very long time.
It's 50 this year.
And they are taking the lead so that.
You have a clearinghouse so that people aren't duplicating efforts for
either collecting data or sharing data.
So it's another place to come when people are asking, where do I find data Now?
Here is another place to go to find data that you might be looking for.
They also are accepting volunteers.
This ties into a blog post we had recently that highlighted some
of the efforts that are going on.
So again.
With many of the sites continuing to go offline in the United States, much to
our consternation, these are ways to try to at least get back to that information
so that we do still have access to data.
At some level it is making it curious with teaching classes about accessing
data and places we've gone to and told students about for decades or.
Not necessarily where they need to go now.
So yeah, it's, it's throwing a little curve ball into some of our lectures.
Yeah.
And I also think it's important to there's been a lot of situations in.
The past, oh, 30, 40 years, something like that.
That, well, certainly since the internet basically has come online and allowed
us to publish all this data where we've kind of forgotten that a single point
of failure is a single point of failure, I. The one that, where it was really
highlighted for me was Katrina, where a awful lot of the federal data agencies
had their data servers down in Louisiana.
For a whole lot of reasons that were perfectly legitimate reasons, but
whenever the hurricane came through and shut off, all power flooded, everything,
stuff like that, suddenly there was a loss of a lot of really critical data.
It's, you know, it just sort of highlights the importance of not
just technical redundancy, but in fact there can be a, a political.
A hurricane, for lack of a better analogy, that comes through and, and
decimate something or hinders something.
So we do need these multiple points of failure, not just from
a technology standpoint, but also from a philosophical point of view,
which ties into our second note that I. We keep seeing more and more committees
that are directly related to geospatial technologies, either through delay
data collection data serving data analysis, processing, making it public.
All these different agencies that touch the geospatial space and, you know,
data in general are seeing significant cuts, if not attempts at closure.
We're seeing a lot of pushback at the federal judiciary level.
On the completely get rid, rid of.
But of course, we're also seeing the current administration ignoring
the judiciary in many ways.
So just keep in mind the one that I have in the show notes is the
Office of Space Commerce which had a committee that basically couldn't
meet because funding was, was cut.
We have seen other committees have their funding cut and their planned
in-person meetings be canceled, but.
They continue to meet virtually.
And so getting things through that way.
So just, just be aware to, you know, if there are committees that
you're interested in the activities they're undertaking, keep an
eye on them see what's going on.
Some of this is ending up in the federal Register, but at the same
time, the Federal Register, I don't think can probably keep up.
I mean, and whether or not they're even publishing these to the federal
Register, which of course itself is.
Not what's supposed to happen, not publishing information to
the Federal Register, but yeah.
So yes, go out, check out the committees that you're interested in, whether it
be the Office of Space Commerce or any others that do of course have impacts on.
The geospatial industry in this case, of course, the launching of,
of various satellites and such.
Well, that's where I was wondering that a lot of these are
shared, again, shared resources.
You go to them, you expect to find them 'cause you've told people about them.
You plan to use them for, for projects and other things.
You know, even in international partnerships.
And then they're just suddenly not there.
And then you do the where is it?
But also you wonder about the people that created it, maintained it.
And how they're doing.
So also reach out to, to people, you know, even to tell them, you know,
great job on the work you've done.
You know, we've relied on it for a long time.
I, I don't have a link in the show notes.
And because I didn't think the source was necessarily, I, I didn't wanna rely on it.
But I did hear I'm gonna call it rumor that somebody of a note in the current
administration said that we should not be thinking about relying upon GPS anymore.
We should be doing something else.
And that was a little frightening to me.
So I think that that.
Underlies the general notion that if you're doing anything with us based
information, data processes or anything like that start thinking about a plan
B just to be safe because a lot of this stuff is I'm trying to think of the proper
words without getting in too much trouble.
It's less.
Firm foundation than we thought.
The some of the trade journals, you know, I saw recently the professional
surveyors, their trade journals were talking about the impact on, you
know, their industry in geospatial.
And just saying, you know.
This is going to be very, very difficult.
How are we going to do this?
So I know a lot of people are making plans.
I've seen ESI making announcements saying, you know, this data is here.
So you can also look at a lot of the ESRI.
So in commercial UAV news the actual name of the trade journal there was an
editorial talking about basically that drone technology they believe in the next
decade is going to be, see, be seeing.
It's on the path to commoditization.
What this means is that technology normally goes through different
timelines and that the drone technology industry is becoming a maturing
industry where a lot of things settle into just a few companies.
This is exciting.
You know, when I read it, because again one of my first jobs was
at a research company that was at that middle period of UAVs.
And I remember working with commoditization and talking
about it and working towards it.
And it's a long effort that takes time, but we, it looks like we
will be here in the next decade.
That's it for the names.
So in the web corner, a geographer in Pittsburgh, understanding that many
people do not understand Pittsburgh, its navigation, how it developed, anything
like that, has gone ahead and made a map book of 50 maps of Pittsburgh to basically
explain the layered history of their city immigration and the story behind the maps.
And I thought this was a lot of fun.
You know, map books are, are always fun a. Graphic interpretation of your city.
So if you've already always been fascinated by a city like Pittsburgh
which is, you know, weirdly laid out, I know Joseph Kirsty has a small YouTube
video where he talks about Pittsburgh.
You know, it's pretty fun.
She left out the most awesome part of it.
The name maps.
That's just a cool name.
I'm here today with Jack Adams, who is the, an account executive with
NC Tech imaging or just NC Tech.
Yeah.
NC Tech Imaging, NC Tech.
Either
way.
Yeah.
Thanks for joining me today.
Yeah, of course.
Thanks for having me.
And can you tell us a little about NC Tech?
Yeah.
So NC Tech has been a. Around about 15 years, we got our start
developing camera systems for the Google Street View program.
And about five years ago made kind of a strategic shift to start targeting
other markets collecting the imagery and collecting LIDAR data as well for
local government and utilities and telco companies and some other verticals.
Now as you mentioned, it's not a new company.
Can you give us an idea of kind of where you guys started?
With that original kind of building out systems to get where you
are today with data collection?
Yeah.
So the company started in Edinburgh, Scotland again about 15 years ago.
And the idea was to create a low cost.
But high quality camera system that could be scaled across Google's
pretty large street view program.
So the idea was to build something, you know, that was very scalable but
could still produce high quality data.
So yeah, that, that was kind of how the idea was born and have been developing
and, and making new camera systems sense.
What are some of the use cases
that you see, some of the customers that you're, you know, seeing here at North
Carolina GIS conference or at other places utilizing this information for right
now?
Yeah, it's interesting.
I think probably every person on earth or every person you know, that, that.
Has access to the internet, has probably looked at Google Street View before.
It's just kind of an innate desire that if you're going somewhere or if
you wanna see what a certain part of the world looks like, you go to Google
Maps, you look at the street view.
'cause you want to feel like you're there on the ground, right?
So the use cases that we're seeing in the public sector, for example, with
asset management or with property assessment kind of stems from that.
Desire to want to be on the ground looking at the assets that the city or the
county or the state is responsible for.
So really the biggest use cases we're seeing are asset management use cases
for things like street signs, urban canopy and urban tree management,
public utilities private utilities.
Telecommunications drainage assets, you know, really you, you name something that
you can see from a street view image.
We're able to then classify that using the lidar or make measurements
of it and, and take inventories for your asset management programs.
So kind of expanding beyond that.
Do you have a lot of people who are utilizing some of the 3D capabilities
of having, you know, the stereo, not, not stereo pair, but the
overlapping images from the, the cameras plus of course the lidar.
Yeah, absolutely.
And you know, it's one thing to be able to see something in a,
in an image which is nice, right?
But then it's another thing to be able to take measurements in a 3D space of that,
you know, whatever you're looking at.
It's also nice to include elevations and.
You know, x, y, Z coordinates when you're trying to locate something.
So definitely a lot of use cases for the point Cloud.
And when you compare that point cloud with the imagery and with the highly
accurate GPS data that we're using, you're getting accuracy spatial accuracies of
less than 10 centimeters on this data.
So you can have a high level of confidence that, you know, when you locate something
using our data, you know that it's really close to where it is in real life.
And of course that's kind of just to set up the question of, so have you
seen people using this with something like geospatial creator or, or things
like that that are coming from Google that of course are taking advantage
of the street view imagery and the the location information in terms of 3D
space to, you know, begin to use those
AR capabilities?
Yeah, absolutely.
And that's kind of on the cutting edge, right?
So we're hearing from.
You know, very progressive technology based city programs that, you know,
they want people to be able to basically be on their streets in an
ar sense without actually being there.
So we're not seeing a ton of it put into practice yet, but those
are definitely avenues that, that people are exploring currently.
Okay.
Is there anything you wanna say about NC Tech and how people can
find out more about the imagery that you guys are generating?
Yeah, absolutely.
You can go to nc tech imaging.com.
And there's plenty of information there.
If you want to talk to someone in sales, there's an inquiries
email you can just send in.
And, and someone will reach out to you with more information.
And then as far as you know, my personal information goes, it's
jackson.Adams@nctechimage.com.
Feel free to shoot me an email.
And yeah, we'd be happy to chat.
Okay.
Thanks, Jack.
Yeah, thanks Jesse.
Have a good day.
I'm here today with Dale Loberg who is with Bradshaw Consulting, who we've
not talked to, I think in a couple of North Carolina GIS conferences.
Thanks for joining me today.
Absolutely.
And can you tell us a little bit what your highlighting this time around?
Okay, sure.
BCS does a couple of different things but it's all kind of
relates to the same thing.
So our real focus is on public safety applications toward that
and anything that supports that.
So the first thing that we're highlighting here would be the addressing application.
So we have an enterprise wide application to help.
Maintain addresses, create addresses, and make sure that we have really
good information that can support our public safety applications.
Then on the public safety side what we do primarily with EMS and Fire, but we
have some applications for law as well.
But what we do is forecast where 9 1 1 calls are about to come from and
then we help pre-position resources so they're better able to respond.
And then also help make better decisions than what the normal computer-aided
dispatch, the CAD software simply looks for who's the closest unit.
So we have a new feature now that we look for what is the most appropriate unit.
So looking at certification levels, looking at capabilities.
Of a resource to make sure that we're getting the right resource that's gonna
give us the best outcome for that patient.
Let's start with the first one.
Can you give us maybe a use case where folks are, are utilizing
it nowadays or currently?
I probably should have Chris Harvey here.
He's a real expert on that.
He went off with a phone call.
But that application is like I say, an enterprise wide application.
So it uses a webpage and you can set up.
Because normally at the county level, there are certain municipalities that
will have addressing capabilities or responsibilities within their
jurisdiction, and so this allows you to set permissions so that they can edit
certain fields or certain data within their jurisdiction, but not others.
They can access that, but they can't edit that, so it's all about.
Controlling who has access to what sorts of edits, tracking those edits.
So it's a true enterprise application from the time that you know,
a new property development is being proposed to get establish
addresses for that to maintaining.
Current addresses redressing it handles all of those things.
Okay.
And then, of course, for the public safety, can you
give us a use case for that?
Maybe an example of a municipality that's currently using it.
Okay.
Yeah, there's that's definitely my wheelhouse.
So on the public safety side, we have quite a few customers in North
Carolina, since we're at NC Gs here many of 'em are along the, I 85
corridor from Mecklenburg County union County where I'm from uses it.
And we have some new customers now.
Buncombe County just purchased it.
But we have longtime customers at Guilford County.
We have what we do for those, a lot of those customers are all those customers.
I, I'll, I'll even use Union as an example because that's where I live, and also.
Work.
So they forecast where calls are going to be coming from.
It's a routine that runs every five minutes and we're generally outta
the box about 75 to 80% accurate.
People are always impressed by that.
They, you know, they think 9 1 1 calls are random.
I. But we actually find that with a little bit of work and manipulating
how we do that query, how we do that, that analysis, we can get anywhere
from 85 to sometimes over 90% accurate.
So having that insight of where a call is likely to be coming from gives you
huge insight to be able to say, where should we put resources that are more
likely to address those calls within a timely fashion that will actually
make a difference in that patient's.
Outcome or the outcome of that particular event of a fire or, or whatever.
'cause it's all about having the right resources there at the right time.
So we have, we can plan for how to, resources can be there.
And then also looking at utilizing the resources in the best way.
So Union, for instance, just split up their their fleet for EMS.
So we have BLS or basic life support in addition to advanced life support.
That's the traditional model.
And so what that means is we have two different certifications.
So as calls come in, the dispatch center looks at what is the call type,
who's able to address that call, and try to preserve those resources that
are the rarer advanced life support capabilities for those calls that
absolutely need that level of service, and then use those other resources.
So it may take a little bit longer to get there.
But we're getting the right resource to that right patient so that we get the
best possible outcome and preserve that other resource so that when that cardiac
arrest or something else comes in, they're there to be able to, to solve that.
Now, of course, they're municipalities who are curious about this.
Now that they've heard about more of it can you tell us about how to get
in touch with you or BCS in general?
Okay.
BCS is around.
Actually, I would encourage folks especially in North Carolina, talk
to some of the other counties, other municipalities around
find out what they're using.
A lot of times it is BCS, but we're out of a South Carolina.
So you can our website is bcs gis.com.
We're on social media as BCS also has high performance EMS
and also as dynamic fire risk.
So there's lots of ways to find us if you want to learn more.
Anything else you wanna highlight for the company or other products?
Well, there's always things I can say.
You gimme a microphone and I can talk.
But now that's we have some really great folks, you know,
we have consulting in our name.
We don't do much of true consulting anymore.
It's, it's really the products that we focus on and customizing those products
because we want you to own your data.
We want you to own your application.
We want you to own the process.
You know, you don't have to come to us for that.
We want to empower you to do that because that's, customers can do great
things when you give 'em good products.
Okay.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
On the events corner.
As always, if you are interested in any of these events or others, go check them out.
Big 10 GIS Conference 2025 is taking place April 11th, and that'd be
virtual so you can get to it anywhere.
Horizons 2025 Beyond Boundaries will be taking place April 27th
through the 29th in Denver, Colorado,
and the Louisiana remote.
Sensing and GIS workshop will be taking place in the near future in May, on
the sixth of the eighth in Baton Rouge.
Of course, if you want us to add your event to the podcast, send us
email to podcast@veryspatial.com.
If you'd like to reach us individually, I could be reached at sue@veryspatial.com.
I'm
barb@veryspatial.com.
You can reach me atFrank@veryspatial.com,
and I'm available at kindaspatial.
And of course, if you would like to find any of our contact information,
hit over to very spatial.com/contacts.
As always,
we're the folks.
from very spatial.
Thanks for listening.
We'll see you in a couple weeks.
Get in the car drive really far.
It don't even matter.
Long as you hit hanging with me, we can go see decept.
Good company.
Yeah, we can hop in with the top off.
Grab a clothes express called say lock Killing.
These fit sticking.
Really cute picture going the phone.
We say, I know.
The world it ups.
Oh, you feeling more than, okay.
Nothing getting in the way.
This is how I wanna spend
all good
and
next to me.
Alright, come my friends by my side, eh, don shining bright.
Yeah.
Not the lift to do, but have a good time.
After we cry and say, I love you,
the.
Don't here with me.
We can go see.
Yeah.
C-O-N-P-A-N-Y-G double O-D-C-O-M-P-A-Y-G double O-C-P-A-N-Y-G double CAY.
Now what does that spell?
Good, good, good, g.
And one more time.