1000 GIS Applications & Uses – How GIS Is Changing the World (4)

#50 Telecommunications GIS Applications


847. Radio-Wave Propagation – Estimating the propagation of radio-waves for network with complex reflections and diffraction and line-of-sight.
848. Locating Cell Towers – Locating cell tower placements in urban areas using 3D building structures.
849. Network Management – Managing a network of telecommunication cables and towers in a network data set.
850. Fresnel Zones – Finding the region of space between wireless transmitter and receiver where obstructions cause interference to the signal.
851. Antenna Height Optimization – Optimizing antenna height using GIS 3D modelling.
852. Operations Support Systems (OSS) – Ensuring that network functions properly including outages, billing, and testing through GIS shared services.
853. Submarine Cable – Sketching out submarine cables that stretch across oceans. (Submarine Cable Map)
854. Network Signal Interpolation – Clustering geographically high and low network signals and interpolating results in cellular signal maps
855. Cellular Coverage Analysis – Maximizing cellular coverage using tower height by using interference analysis including viewshed and line-of-sight.
856. Frequency Management – Regulating radio spectrum to evaluate frequency interactions when approving applications using use terrain, environment, and building data. (Spectrum Regulation)
857. Fibre Optic Cable – Planning fibre optic cable infrastructure through network views showing capacity, equipment and customer demographics.
858. Market Segmentation – Segmenting customers geographically and forecast the demand for services where growth is likely to occur.
859. Operations – Investigating interruptions in service and managing repair and maintenance work with the Autodesk Topobase infrastructure model. (LIWEST and AutoCAD 3D)
860. Signal Expansion – Planning expansion by better understanding signal strengths in three dimensional buildings – or mapping your home Wi-Fi signal in 2D.
51 Tourism GIS Applications


Tourism GIS Applications


861. Personality Atlas – Assigning personality stereotypes to countries around the world based on a sample size of global population’s perspectives. (Personality Atlas)
862. Tourist Map – Plotting out landmarks in tourist maps.
863. Sunrise and Sunset – Finding the perfect sunrise and sunset during at any given location. (SunCalc)
864. Subway Map – Simplifying maps for the reader to better understand such as the lines of a subway map in high contrasting colors. (Cartographer Toolkit – Gretchen Peterson)
865. Linear Referencing – Using linear referencing along shorelines to track volumes of organic debris.
866. Off-Beaten Tracks – Finding the off-beaten track for backpackers and marking its position with 3 words. (Off-Beaten Track Location – What3Words)
867. Safe Travel – Advising travelers where unsafe location are on a map.
868. Tourism Dollars – Tracking the exports of purchased goods and services using desire lines.
869. Sustainable Tourism Planning – Identifying conflicting interests from tourism and solving issues by examining suitable locations for proposed developments.
870. Hotel Search – Searching geographically for five star hotels using a circle radius.
871. Horizon Blockage – Calculating the horizon blocking line in all directions from a given observation point with gvSIG’s Horizon Blockage.
872. Travel Mode Detection – Detecting travel mode (walk, car, bus, subway and commuter rail) from a multi-modal transportation network using GIS and GPS in New York City.
873. Finding Islands – Using satellite to find uninhabited islands around the world – Landsat found Landsat Island near the coast of Canada.
874. Time Zones – Representing time zones around the world.
875. Eco-Tourism Site Selection – Gauging environmental impacts for sustainable eco-tourism sites.
876. Virtual Travel – Seeing your destination before physically being there. (Google Earth Street View)
877. Geo-tagging – Discover places with 360 panoramic camera views. (Mapillary)
878. Highway Planning – Constructing viewpoints with multiple layers like ecology, topography and cultural features for a three-dimensional visual highway.
879. Virtual Arctic – Exploring the Arctic in Google Street View without getting out of your chair.
880. 3D Synthetic Scene – Overlaying synthetic scenes over real scene. (Manifold)
881. Life Travels – Accompanying travellers in their life travels in map-form. (Where in the World is Andrew?)
882. Yellowstone – Putting all the pieces together in a GIS database at Yellowstone National Park including its geologic past, geyser recharge and seismic activity.
883. Trip Planning – Adventuring around for your next road trip with pit stops and offbeat using suggested sites.
884. Observer Points – Calculating visibility through multiple observer points.
885. Historic Street View – Time-travelling in the past to see just how much a location has changed over time with historic street view.
52 Transmission Planning and Routing


Transmission GIS Applications


886. Corridor Analyst – Identifying possible corridors and preferred transmission routes using Least Cost Path engineering, environment and combined routing algorithms. (Trimble Corridor Analyst)
887. Transmission Line Monitoring – Monitoring overhead transmission towers with active and passive satellite data.
888. Viewshed – Understanding the impacts of how a transmission line would look using viewsheds.
889. Right-of-way – Buffering proposed transmission lines which will be areas cleared for the transmission line.
890. Transmission Line Design – Considering slope, soils and land use for factoring into transmission line design.
891. Tree Encroachment – Reducing risk of falling trees with LiDAR in search for dead and dying trees near utility lines.
892. Public Consultation – Visualizing the transmission line with towers during public using 2D and 3D environments.
893. Line Vision – Synchronizing 2D viewing in 3D environments with viewports. (gvSIG 3D Plugin)
894. 3D Geometry – Sketching up custom 3D transmission towers and lines for import into ArcScene. (Google SketchUp and COLLADA)
895. Line Profile – Utilizing slope profiles to generate terrain profiles with Manifold GIS.
896. Environmental Monitoring – Referencing environmentally sensitive sites along a linear transmission and reporting conflicting points.
897. Map Automation – Generating maps automatically from tiles along a transmission corridor with ArcGIS Data Driven Pages or QGIS Atlas.
53 Transportation GIS Applications


Transportation GIS Applications


898. Travelling Salesman – Constructing efficient journeys that visit any number of points on a network in no particular order. (Travelling Salesman)
899. Hadoop – Leveraging the Hadoop framework for millions of data points with big data spatial analytics. (Hadoop Framework)
900. Deadliest Roads – Pinpointing the safest and deadliest roads on the planet with the Roads Kills Map. Spoiler: Dominican Republic has the most dangerous roads. (Roads Kill Map)
901. Multimodal – Getting cars off the road for multi-modal options by studying cycling paths and walkability.
902. Turn Restrictions – Adding restrictions to U-turns in a network dataset. (TNT Network Analysis)
903. Parking Demand – Estimating parking demand and its fit with parking capacity with Python. (PARKFIT)
904. A/B Testing – Making real-world choices sending cars to various routes for the fastest deliveries. (Spatial A/B Testing)
905. Closest Facility – Solving the cost of traveling between incidents and facilities for which are nearest to one other.
906. Infrastructure Damage – Reporting damaged infrastructure in a browser web mapping system.
907. Motor Vehicle Collisions – Correlating motor vehicle collisions with spatial attributes such as speed limits, guardrails and on-street parking.
908. Intersection Analysis – Improving intersection safety through crash and road safety analysis with the MapWindow Safety Software Plugin.
909. Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) – Feeding data from GPS units, video cameras, and road monitoring units to advance efficiency and safety of transportation systems.
910. Shortest Path – Generating the shortest, fastest, or least-costly route between any number of origins and any number of destinations, with any number of intermediate points. (Shortest Path)
911. Vessel Tracking – Plotting automatic identification system (AIS) points on a map in real-time.
912. Network Travel Costs – Determining travel costs from each origin to all destinations
913. Road Asset Management – Using ground survey data showing assets on a roadway in Manifold GIS.
914. UPS Parcel Delivery – Seeing every driver in near-real time to study safety and find shorter routes – saving time, tire tread, and costs.
915. Floating Car Systems – Displaying taxi fleet in one hour. (Floating Car Systems – Anita Graser)
916. Logistics Management – Planning, implementing, and controlling the efficient effective flow and storage of goods and services from a point of origin to point of consumption.
917. Street Repair – Inventorying and reporting repairs on streets.
918. Road Assessment – Taking measure of pavement through aerial and mobile LiDAR.
919. Trip Generation/Production – Estimating the number of trips that are produced or originate in each zone of a study area. (TransCAD Trip Generation and Production)
920. Railways – Tying railways together with CartoDB’s railways map – from cargo to passenger trains. (Railroads – A Staple for Growth)
921. Service Areas – Identifying service areas from a fixed points along a network route to show response coverage for emergency vehicles.
922. OD Cost Matrix – Improving coordination amongst transportation providers when given multiple origins and multiple destinations.
923. Paratransit – Accessing rides through address entry and buffering points to find nearest routes.
924. World Traffic – Helping drivers get to destinations efficiently with traffic conditions around the world. (World Traffic Map)
925. Transportation Master Plan – Planning future highways and roads by looking at growth of communities and traffic demand.
926. Airline Planning – Navigating to safer airspace by including nearby land use to runway lighting systems.
927. Routing Workers – Optimizing routes by seeing overlap which saves fuel costs.
928. Traffic Ways – Seeing the world as only traffic ways. (Traffic Ways)
929. Carpooling – Adding carpool lots by analyzing the number of incoming trips in a city.
930. Bus Route – Designing transit routes with cost and demographic impacts. (TransMix Transit Planning)
931. Active Transportation Planning – Leveraging the public with Participatory Geographic Information Systems and active transportation
932. Conflation – Conflating two road datasets with OpenJump Vivid extension “Road Mapper” or Spatial Adjustment in ArcGIS.
933. Infrastructure Life Cycle – Reiterating the process of planning, designing, constructing, operating, and maintaining a transportation system.
934. Inter-modal Transportation – Compiling two different modes of transportation (such as rail and truck) to move goods or passengers.
935. Rails-to-Trails Conservancy – Converting unused railway into a paved multi-use paths. (Rails-to-Trails)
936. Traffic Congestion – Alleviating traffic congestion by making the best possible use of the existing transportation network and gathering data to improve decisions for modifying the network.
937. Sidewalk Inventory – Storing sidewalk data in a database with attributes like width, surface type and clearing priority.
938. Transit Ridership – Collecting statistics on how many passengers ride transit in a given neighborhood.
939. National Bridge Inventory – Making a repository of bridges in a national-wide database.
940. UPS Telematics – Monitor performance and safety of package cars Safety including seatbelt usage, speed and whether or not a door was shut.
941. Urban Traffic Air Pollution – Recording urban traffic air pollution and quality trough 3D visualization in planar and non-planar views.
942. Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis – Selecting highway route using multiple criteria. (Multi-criteria Decision Analysis QGIS Plugin)
943. Walkability – Mapping out hot spots and cold spots with walkability and kernel density.
944. Bike Sharing – Optimizing locations bike-sharing programs stations.
54 Utilities GIS Applications


Utilities GIS Applications


945. Billing Systems – Updating and correcting billing system for the cost of street and security lighting. (Spatial Billing Systems)
946. Network Management – Visualizing complex spatial webs of utility networks as the foundation to manage the lifecycle of network assets for utilities. (GE Smallworld)
947. Emergency Repairs – Flagging potential emergencies with weather forecasts, staging support where needed and logistics for the movement of people.
948. Underground Utilities – Penetrating the ground with radar for precise locations of underground gas, water, electrical and telephone utilities.
949. Pole Inventory – Pinning down with GPS accuracy utility poles.
950. Power Distribution – Figuring out where in a distribution line could take down an entire network.
951. Vegetation Encroachment – Overlaying LiDAR data with transmission to see where and how much vegetation is encroaching
952. Subsurface 3D Utility Model – Viewing underground utilities in 3D.
953. Lifecycle Management – Updating life cycle status of utility information as existing or proposed in GE SmallWorld
954. Permafrost – Assessing the impacts of permafrost freezing and thawing on utility lines.
955. Utility Pole Replacement – Obtaining all the information when replacing utility poles and other business operations (Asset ID, construction date, overhead/underground conductor and conductors it supports with number of wire and cable segments
956. Power Outages – Helping customers keep the lights on with assets and attributes such as poles and transformers in AutoCAD Map 3D.
957. Cost Path – Laying out a gas pipeline from one location to another location with a CAD schematic in AutoCAD 3D.
958. Energy Usage – Mapping trends of electricity usage that are metered to a network.
959. Smart Grids – Determining optimal locations for smart grid and real-time analytic components.
960. Infrastructure Design – Planning network infrastructure, build, operations and maintenance with Smallworld Core.
961. Energy Demand Estimation – Combining building volume, number of floors and other characteristics to predict the energy demand for heating and cooling using 3D city models in Germany. (Energy Demand Estimates)
962. Schematics – Representing a complex utilities network in a simple schematics diagram with ArcGIS Schematics.
963. Street View Measure – Examining utility operations in street view and measuring distances (MM Plugin in ArcGIS)
964. Line Extension Easements – Creating electrical line extension easements (legal rights of access) in GE SmallWorld Electric Office Geospatial Asset Management
965. Cloud Computing – Building and sharing maps in the cloud for common operating and faster decision-making. (GIS Cloud)
55 Volunteer GIS and Open Technology


Volunteer GIS Applications


966. GIS Corps – Volunteering in GIS projects such as bridging the divide between the world’s insurance markets and the most vulnerable, low-income people. (GIS Corps)
967. National Geographic Society – Preserving and protecting our planet as a global non-profit organization funding hundreds of projects each year. (National Geographic Society)
968. Urban and Regional Information Systems Association (URISA) – Solving challenges in local and national governments through GIS and other information technologies. (URISA)
969. Wikimapia – Describing the world in online, editable maps and mashups with free data available for you to experiment with and create unique applications. (Wikimapia)
970. OpenStreetMap – Establishing open information as a free, editable map through volunteered input. (Founder Steve Coast)
971. Open Geospatial Consortium – Making quality open standards for the global geospatial community. (Open Geospatial Consortium)
972. USGS Earth Explorer – Opening up satellite data to the world for free. (USGS Earth Explorer)
973. NASA World Wind – Monitoring weather patterns, visualize cities and terrain, track the movement of planes, vehicles and ships, analyze geospatial data, and educate people about the Earth with the cross-platform, Java-based NASA World Wind. (NASA World Wind)
974. Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) – Supporting the collaborative development of open source geospatial software, and promoting its widespread use. (OSGeo)
975. ArcGIS Open Data – Exploring tens of thousands of data sets around the world from thousands of organizations around the world. (ArcGIS Open Data)
976. Real-Time Collaboration – Collaborating in OpenStreetMap with multiple user entries. (Real-time Collaboration)
977. Natural Earth – Producing public domain data with beautiful cartography layers.
978. Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) – Harnessing tools to create, assemble, and disseminate geographic data provided voluntarily by individuals (Citizens as Sensors – Goodchild, 2007)
979. QGIS – Pioneering the #1 option for open GIS software. (QGIS Founder – Gary Sherman)
56 Weather GIS Applications


Weather GIS Applications


980. Real-time Lightning – Capturing real-time lightning strikes in a map with monitoring stations located around the world. (Real-time Lightning)
981. Global Wind Vectors – Displaying gusting winds with vectors as directions. (Global Wind – Null School)
982. Albedo – Measuring albedo for Earth’s heat budget using surface reflectance satellite data – bright areas reflect more than dark areas.
983. Solar Irradiance – Harnessing the power of solar energy with the Global Horizontal Solar Irradiance. (Global Horizontal Irradiance)
984. Night-Day Boundary – Illustrating which parts of the Earth that people are fast asleep and are wide awake with the night-day boundary map. (Night-Day Boundary)
985. Rainfall – Illustrating rainfall in NOAA’s National Weather Service web map. (Spatial Rainfall)
986. NASA Ocean Color – Downloading chlorophyll-a concentrations and sea surfaces temperature data sets for studying the increasing risk from ocean acidification and hypoxia. (NASA Ocean Color)
987. Historical Weather – Discerning weather patterns by studying old weather. (Old Weather)
988. Temperature – Mapping out temperature with multi-dimensional NetCDF which includes dimensions of latitude, longitude, altitude, and time. (NASA Temperature NetCDF)
989. Snowfall – Knowing how much snowfall occurred where. (NOAA Snowfall Data)
990. Azimuth – Calculating solar elevation, solar azimuth, and sun hours in the sky for each location (R.Sun – GRASS GIS)
991. Weather Anomalies – Tracking weather events in a spatial database such as snow in the Sahara desert or southern Algeria.
992. 3D Snow Depths – Plotting out 3D snow depths at ski resorts using Golden Software. (Snow Depth Map)
993. Pacific Ocean Blob – Mapping the extent of “The Blob” – an anomalous body having sea surface temperature much above the normal.
994. 3D Atmospheric Data – Visualizing layers of the atmospheric features as a vertical profile.
995. Ocean Surface Current Analysis Real-Time (OSCAR) – Delivering near real-time global ocean surface currents. (OSCAR Data)
996. Weather Warnings – Feeding out live warnings with physical locations from National Weather Service. (Weather Warnings)
997. Historical Precipitation – Observing historical precipitation from ground stations and radar in NetCDF with MapWindow Meteobase.
998. Cirrus Clouds – Detecting cirrus cloud with Landsat’s Cirrus band.
999. Hovmoller Diagrams – Plotting meteorological data with latitude and longitude as axis. (Hovmoller Diagrams – ILWIS)
1000. Doppler Radar – Predicting rainfall using Doppler Radar.
1001. Sky View Factor – Considering the visible sky and topographic influences to estimate radiation balances, temperature and evapotranspiration.
1002. Weather Stations – Obtaining the latitude and longitude positions of weather stations around the world.

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