There’s a growing interest in highly accurate mapping, and a corresponding need for training about geodetic principles. I spoke recently to Patrick Cunningham, president of Blue Marble Geographics about these developments, and the expanding market for their tools and solutions for data quality management.
Blue Marble recently combined their Geographic Calculator and Geographic Transformer into one desktop product. They also rewrote their underlying software and the coordinate definition library to make it more comprehensive and flexible, and easier to integrate into data management workflows.
Blue Marble is concerned with highly accurate mapping, and the underlying data integrity issues that come from interoperability and data conversion, whether that data is raster, vector, LIDAR or something else. Their tools allow controls over the use of geodetic datums to ensure accuracy and coordinate control when transforming geospatial data. Geodetic datums define the size and shape of the Earth and the origin and orientation of the coordinate systems used to map it. New functionality within the Geographic Calculator allows users to create project envelopes with defined polygon extents, and specify the preferred datum for that area for workgroups working on the same project. This workspaces feature makes datum guidance available to all workers for enterprise collaboration and assured data quality.
Many of the user challenges revolve around workflows and having checks and balances on data quality— because there’s always a human component. In past iterations Geographic Calculator could be a bit of a loaded gun, with the ability for all users to define or alter the geographic definitions. If an individual user got the definition wrong, there could be costly mistakes for the entire project. The latest version limits access to data source, with an administrator making a view that deals only with the coordinates for a specific project. This brings checks and balances to the data workflow, assuring data quality.
Blue Marble is actively involved in the Open Geospatial Consortium’s data quality working group. Cunningham refers to this work as the womb to tomb geospatial data lifecycle. This group is concerned with providing software solutions to data quality issues.
While Blue Marble products are used often in academic coursework, there’s a growing interest in teaching the basics of coordinate systems and geodetics. Some academic programs are beginning to dedicate full courses to geodetics, because there’s a need to get the fundamentals straight, particularly when students are coming to mapping from so many diverse fields.
Blue Marble products are used by surveyors and GIS and engineering firms. Government at the federal and international levels also are good customers, with EU’s INSPIRE initiative driving a good deal of business. INSPIRE requires some normalization of coordinate systems, and the Geographic Calculator helps greatly where there are local coordinate systems that need to be converted to a standard, because it offers thousands of datum shifts and allows for custom definitions.
In addition to desktop products, Blue Marble also offers Software Developer Kits (SDK) for integration into other tools for customized applications. The three main SDKs that Blue Marble offers are GeoCalc, Geotranslate and GeoTransform. GeoCalc is the most widely used SDK, with broad adoption for seismic surveying software for oil and gas exploration.
There’s an increasing need for highly accurate mapping, and Blue Marble is pushing forward to expand their products beyond coordinate and geospatial data conversion to data quality management.
