Last week I attended the ESRI Petroleum user group in London. I think just over 200 people attended. I missed last year’s event but I have been present at this regular event many times in the past. Many thanks to the organisers – they do an incredible job. Pleasingly, there were plenty of Earth Observation… Read More »GIS Petroleum User Group
How to consume news/information? If you are not on the first page of a Google search you are effectively nowhere; perhaps if you are not in the first three search results you don’t stand much chance of getting viewed. This presents a problem of trust; we have to trust that the Google search algorithms are… Read More »Keep up to date
This week I attended “Geo-Tech Masterclass: Introduction to satellite APIs” given by Planet (formally Planet Labs) at the Geovation hub in London. The Geovation hub is run by the Ordnance Survey with the “intention to be a centre of collaboration and inspiration in the UK geospatial industry” – exciting times! Earth Observation data can be… Read More »Temporal EO (Planet and the Oilfield)
What changes can be measured using Landsat and/or Sentinel-2 data? In large areas change detection (land use for example) is commonly used for these data sets. If companies like Orbital Insights are counting cars, using shadows from floating oil tanks to determine capacity and measuring levels of construction, what smaller objects and data analytics can be… Read More »Machine learning Landsat / Sentinel data
September 2016 was a busy month for the launch of Earth Observation satellites. Terrabella launched 4 more of its SkySats, bringing the total to 7. We’re excited to share the first light images from our four newest high-resolution imaging satellites, SkySat-4-7! https://t.co/RV5GyaZMPF pic.twitter.com/WbMOGjaG78 — Terra Bella (@terra_bella) September 27, 2016 On the same launch vehicle… Read More »EO data deluge
Have you ever been given the advice to have loads of bad ideas before? It might sound ludicrous but it stands to reason that working through any idea that comes to mind, even something that seems crazy, and getting it down on paper, could lead to something that actually makes sense. This week I gave… Read More »Have loads of bad ideas
I heard on the radio this week that over 8 out of 10 British people do not know where Edinburgh is. Stop and think about that for a second. I went looking the following day for the source of this information and it was from a survey done by the Ordnance Survey for national map… Read More »The importance of Geography
I have a book that I bought during my master’s degree in 2001, entitled “Fundamentals of spatial information systems” written by Robert Laurini and Derek Thompson in 1992 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fundamentals-Spatial-Information-Systems-APIC/dp/0124383807, I have the 1999 edition. Chapter 1, Geomatics, begins with the following statement: “Today in Redlands, California, a group of people is building a digital data… Read More »Have GIS ‘things’ changed that much?
A Geographical Information System is ideally suited to manage many of the risks associated with exploration and oilfield activities. Risks such as, but not limited to – Accidents, dangerous roads, steep inclines and slopes – In project execution, doing something you were not supposed to do and not knowing you did it – Having to… Read More »GIS to manage exploration risk
A 3D land seismic crew has the potential to be a big operation. How big? “A land seismic survey conducted in 2005 had 400,000 sensors per square kilometer; by 2009, that number had reached 36 million. From 2005 to 2009, the average volume of data gathered on an eight-hour shift grew from 100 gigabytes to… Read More »Using GIS to scout a land seismic survey
I previously wrote about the Geospatial 2.0 workshop held earlier this year on the Space Campus in Harwell. http://www.acgeospatial.co.uk/blog/geoworkshop/ Ever since this workshop I have started seeing more articles and I have become much more aware of the ‘commercialisation of space’. In April this year The Economist wrote a leader on Space Exploration. machine-learning can… Read More »Commercialisation of space
I watched a video this week, a presentation given by Brian Boulmay of BP: It is well worth watching, he talks about BP’s One Map Platform. He wants to reach the whole community within his organisation with a map. There is an interesting quote mid-way through (I have paraphrased slightly below) “We queried all desktops… Read More »Reaching everyone with maps
This summer I have been reading “The first 20 hours – how to learn anything fast” by Josh Kaufman https://first20hours.com/. Kaufman references Dr. K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State university – his rule of 10,000 hours to achieve expert-level performance. This has been famously discussed in Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers”, but he has qualified it.… Read More »Rapid Geospatial Skill Acquisition
The IKONOS satellite, launched in 1999 was the first satellite to offer 1m spatial resolution imagery to the public. It was soon followed by QuickBird; launched in 2001 it provided 60cm imagery. These satellites were, at the time, the workhorses for anyone requiring high resolution imagery. What goes up must come down. #retrospective on #Quickbird… Read More »How low can EO go?
1 History, a chance to look again at EO EO data today should be a more attractive proposition than it has previously been. I looked at an article from World Oil this week, written in 2002. It is worth a read to see how the O&G sector was using EO 14 years ago. “Data prices… Read More »3 reasons to revisit EO again for Oil and Gas