GMES Sentinel Data Policy

Sunday, 29 November, 2009

ESA recently announced the data policy for the GMES Sentinels. And as they say:

“The Sentinels comprise five new missions being developed by ESA specifically for the operational needs of the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security programme (GMES).”

For geomorphologists, perhaps of most interest is Sentinel 2 which is a tandem mission of satellites with a repeat pass of 5-days (constellations are the thing at the moment!) encompassing sensors: a Multi-Spectral Imager (MSI). This is slated to have a 290 km swath width and 13 bands (VNIR and SWIR). These should be 4 bands at 10m, 6 bands at 20m and 3 bands at 60m spatial resolution.

The exciting part of the data policy announcement is the following:

“The new data policy ensures free-of-charge access to all Sentinel data as well as the products generated via the Internet to anyone interested in using them, mainly for GMES data use but also for scientific and commercial use. Other access modes and the delivery of additional products will be tailored to specific user requests, but not necessarily within ESA’s remit.”

Location now in Twitter API

Friday, 20 November, 2009

Location has finally been incorporated in to the Twitter API. Have a look at the news item, but basically not from the main interface as yet. You need to use a third party app. Will be interesting to see the applications of this over the next few weeks.

GIS Skills for a GIS career

Friday, 20 November, 2009

Nice post on the essential skills for people to have in order to pursue a career in GIS. Worth seeing how this matches a GIS curriculum for any program you are looking it. It is very technology driven and perhaps emphasises the “technician” as opposed to an “analyst” but none-the-less its an interesting list. Worth a look.

Government data to be freed

Tuesday, 17 November, 2009

The Guardian covered the news piece today on the government announcement to release over 2,000 datasets for public consumption, including (some) Ordnance Survey data down to 1:10,000. As ever the detail will be interesting to read and it probably won’t include MasterMap. That said the sheer scale of the announcement is remarkable and “possibly includes all legislation, as well as road-traffic counts over the past eight years, property prices listed with the stamp-duty yield, motoring offences with types of offence and the numbers, by county, for the top six offences.” Will it include address data for geocoding?? Who knows, but that’s a biggie.

The Guardian page, funnily, also has a picture of a surveyor out with an (Leica RTK?) GPS hooked up to a laptop with the following caption:
“A cartographer out and about while mapping for the Ordnance Survey”

Whilst at its broadest definition cartography does include this (“science and art of map making”), I sure most cartographers wouldn’t think of this as their Raison d’être.And perhaps more funnily the DCLG page notes the date as “17 noviembre 2009.” What are people drinking today?!