The principle behind GPS technology is relatively simple, you have a network of satellites where their location is known to a high degree of accuracy, and you have a way to determine the distance between that transmitting satelite and the receiver. You need a minimum of 3 satellites to triangulate a location, and obviously the more you fix on, the better your accuracy. A company called Locata has a similar ground-based system that works on the same frequency as Wi-Fi and can be used to get location accuracy on the order of 1-cm! The military has been using it to track munitions on a missile range, but the technology is now being rolled out for civilian applications. I could see this being really useful on construction sites, in underground mines and perhaps for structural monitoring applications and probably more things. The units have a range of several kilometers. [Source: Slashgeo.org. Image: Technology Review]
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First, a presentation titled "State of the GeoWeb" given by Google Earth and Maps Director, John Hanke with some help from Jack Dangemond of ESRI. I think it gives you some interesting insights into the direction things are headed, particularly with some of the upcoming releases of ESRI GIS software and the interplay between location data that people have been producing for some time now and new ways of tapping into it using the web. Kind of a long presentation at around 30 minutes.
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