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

GIS - An Advanced-Infrastructure Tool for Facility Management

If you had a chance to read my previous post entitled "Introducing the Advanced-Infrastructure Toolbox", you may recall that advanced infrastructure systems are built upon data collected about the physical world, and managed in robust and flexible data management systems. For facility management purposes, the data management system of choice is GIS. Essentially a powerful CAD system with an underlying relational database structure, GIS is capable of managing, visualizing and exploring the complex interactions between land, buildings, infrastructure, furniture, and equipment, which are necessary for the operations of a facility. In this post, we will be discussing ten (10) very useful application for GIS in facility management. The examples are set in the context of a university or college campus setting; however, they are very applicable to any facility management scenario, including amusement parks, airports, concert venues, business parks or hospitals - to name just a few.

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: