Advanced-Infrastructure.com

The World is Built Entirely of "Things" and Metaweb Has Classified Over 12,000,000 of Them.

In perhaps their most serious play towards developing the concept of the Semantic Web, Google announced a few days ago that they were acquiring San Francisco-based Metaweb, as well as Metaweb's free and open database of over 12,000,000 semantically-linked data objects. Now, this is pretty big news, especially if - like me - you're a self-proclaimed disciple of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British engineer / computer scientist / MIT professor / Knight who pretty much invented the World Wide Web and first coined the phrase "Semantic Web". If you're not like me and don't yet have a good grasp on how the Semantic Web will forever change the Internet, the following is a short video clip from the Metaweb.com website to get you up to speed:

A Bit of Background Information

This blog entry probably requires a bit of background information, as it is actually a repost of an article published in May 2010 on the popular job board Odinjobs.com, included here with permission from the author. About six months ago or so, I was contacted out-of-the-blue by the Marketing Director of Odinjobs, inquiring if I would be interested in participating in an online interview, along with several other experienced GIS professionals. The idea was that Odinjobs would ask the panel of experts a series of brief questions concerning their skills and knowledge of GIS and the answers posted on the Odinjobs blog, with the goal of providing other professionals and job-seekers with detailed insight into specific areas of the technology, the industry and the opportunities available. Although I was initially skeptical of the educational value of such an endeavor, I decided to participate. Well, to my delight, it turned out that the panel discussion was simultaneously insightful, interesting and very well done. I wanted to take this opportunity to both thank Odinjobs for the opportunity to share my thoughts and to share the resulting discussion with the readers here.

How Snow Crash Changed the Future of Mapping

For anyone who has ever read the 1992 science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson called Snow Crash, it is easy to appreciate how closely real life can sometimes imitates art. Never mind the parallels between Stephenson's "Metaverse" and the popular online game "Second Life" - that's a blog discussion for another day. I want to focus instead on examining how closely today's Google Earth and Microsoft's Bing Map (formerly Virtual Earth) emulate the "Earth" application in Snow Crash". Consider the following excerpt from Chapter 13 of the book:

I have been meaning to cover this topic for some time now. In my opinion, an exploration of the role of advanced infrastructure in sustainable design is both relevant and long overdue. Certainly, technology has changed the way we live, do business and think about the world. However, whether technology can also be leveraged to create a more sustainable society is an entirely different question. Many people, for example, might argue that we need to simplify our lives to make them more sustainable. I think this is largely true. However, I also believe strongly that we need better ways of measuring exactly how sustainable

The Sad State of Our Buried Infrastructure Knowledge

As a civil engineer with site and utility design experience, it amazes me to think about how little we actually know about what is buried just beneath our feet. Specifically, the quality of our engineering knowledge about existing buried infrastructure - water lines, sewers, telecommunication, gas and electric utilities - does not nearly reflect just how critical this infrastructure is to the very fabric of our society. The problem is both widespread and systemic. As engineers and facility managers, we simply do not have a good history of utility-related record-keeping - a fact which profoundly affects our ability to manage, maintain and expand our engineering infrastructure today. In engineering and construction practice, uncertainty about utility locations can easily lead to budget overruns, project delays, and construction change orders. In the worst-case scenarios, it can result in unwanted legal action, costly damage to existing utilities, and safety risks to excavating contractors.

From a historical perspective, there are many reasons why our buried infrastructure records are in such an unfortunate state. Much of our infrastructure was designed and constructed decades ago - perhaps even over a century ago, in our older cities. Computer-Aided Drafting (CAD) and Geographic

Location: Austin, Texas

The University of Texas at Austin and ASCE will be hosting the 2009 ASCE International Workshop on Computing in Civil Engineering. The workshop is a gathering of researchers, academics and practitioners interested in the use of information and communication technologies for planning, managing and executing construction projects.

Location: Denver, Colorado

Event Registration and Details

New 3D data capture systems based on laser scanning, LIDAR, high dynamic range photography, GPS, sonar and inertial navigation technologies challenge organizations to rethink how they use 3D data for efficient and safe operations. Project managers responsible for design, fabrication and construction of capital assets are finding new ways to mitigate execution risk using 3D – not just the design data but as-built, as-constructed 3D information. Asset and facility managers are also beginning to harness the power of field-validated 3D.

Location: Funchal, Madeira, Portugal
Event Registration and Details

Soft computing technology includes aspects of computer science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, evolutionary based methods and tools. Most frequently, soft computing technology methods are employed on complex and computationally intensive problems that have traditionally proved intractable for conventional analysis methods.

The key areas of soft computing covered by this conference include, but are not limited to:

• Neural networks
• Fuzzy systems
• Genetic algorithms
• Ant colony optimization
• Evolutionary methods
• Simulated annealing
• Harmony search
• Cellular automata
• Swarm intelligence
• Bayesian networks
• Chaos theory
• Data mining
• Expert systems
• Support vector machines

On January 28, 2009, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) published the 2009 Infrastructure Report Card for the United States. The Report Card is an assessment by professional engineers of the nation's status in 15 categories of infrastructure. The report cards is as follows: