Advanced-Infrastructure.com

Google Acquires Metaweb in Pursuit of the Sematic Web

Damon — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 03:23:30 +0000

The World is Built Entirely of "Things" and Metaweb Has Classified Over 12,000,000 of Them. Read the Press Release Visit the Metaweb Site The Semantic Web, by Wikipedia How Stuff Works - The Semantic Web How Google Beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web 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"....

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Geographic Information Systems (GIS) - A Chat with GIS Experts

Damon — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 04:42:46 +0000

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...

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Augmented Reality and Google Earth - Is This "Snow Crash" Realized?

Damon — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 04:44:18 +0000

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: read more

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Sustainable Infrastructure: The Role of Innovation, Computing and Emerging Technology in Sustainability

Damon — Tue, 19 May 2009 15:48:53 +0000

What is sustainability? Tell me more about Advanced Infrastructure. How do we measure sustainability,anyway? 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 read more

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RFID for Utility Marking and Buried Asset Management

Damon — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 10:40:11 +0000

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,...

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2009 ASCE International Workshop on Computing in Civil Engineering

Damon — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 06:10:14 +0000

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. read more

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6th Annual Spar 2009 Conference on 3-D Imaging for Design, Construction and Manufacturing

Damon — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 06:01:18 +0000

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. read more

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The First International Conference on Soft Computing Technology in Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering

Damon — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 05:46:59 +0000

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 read more

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America's Infrastructure Receives an Overall D Grade in 2009

Damon — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 14:06:25 +0000

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: read more

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