I recently had the good fortune to attend a GeoDesign workshop presented by Bill Miller, who is the Director of GeoDesign Services at Esri, and one of the people credited with coining the term. It was a fascinating morning, and it was a reflection of how important this topic is becoming that Alex Miller, president of ESRI Canada (and no relation to Bill), attended....

The LAS format - introduced in 2004 by the ASPRS - has become the de-facto international standard for storing and exchanging point data acquired by airborne LIDAR scanners. It has wide acceptance and can be read and written by almost any LIDAR processing software. There now exist Exabytes of LIDAR that can easily be exchanged via the LAS format thanks to the...

GIS has its roots in what a geographer or cartographer might call “small-scale” information, information primarily related to issues of land management and the environment.  In the early days, there were many competing acronyms for what is now known as GIS, such as Land Information Systems (LIS), and Facility Information or Facility Management Systems (FMS). ...