GIM International. First edition in Spanish
With great pleasure I have leafed through my own fingers the first edition in Spanish of GIM International magazine, which after many years has become a Important reference In the geomatic environment.
This is what Durk Haarsma says in his welcome editorial,
The Spanish-speaking world is very diverse and large in itself, with challenges and opportunities alike and at an incredible rate of development, also in the field of geomatics. In recent years, I have met many readers from both Latin America and Spain who have told me that there would be a great demand for a magazine in their own language. Well, here it is!
And that is how we will now have a magazine that will be published three times a year, with a wide range of articles from both our own region and others in the world.
This first edition brings an interesting interview with Rodrigo Barriga Vargas, the current President of the Pan American Institute of History, which is based in Mexico. Rodrigo takes a tour to the rhythm of eight questions in the common thread of Latin American trends in the use of geoinformation. He talks about the antecedent and role of the PAIGH, some significant examples in the region, the development of the Cadastre and the challenge for SDIs within the framework of SIRGAS, GeoSUR and UN-GGIM.
Among other topics, they attract attention:
- GNSS Positioning. This is an educational article by Mathias Lemmens that can put any GPS enthusiast who has lost himself in the thread of so much novelty in context to understand the history that has led to global positioning since the first GPS was released. GPS devices in 1982, until the vision of 2020 when we will have four fully operational GNSS systems with worldwide coverage.
- The use of Drones to measure volumes in open pit mines.
This is in the experience of Chile, in the Chuquicamata sp mine, and explains how, taking advantage of autonomous controlled flight units, 266 images can be processed in less than an hour and a half in a flight at 250 meters high using the Pix4D softwarw. It is interesting that this, done with a terrestrial scanner (TLS), would have required the need to access the pit, 2 days of terrain, extrapolation to generate the digital model, and availability of data within 4 days. Apart from the mandatory blind spots, use of more vehicles, operators and the final result barely differed by 1%.
- On the same issue of UAVs, Lomme Devriendt expands in another article in which he talks about low-speed micro drones, which fly at heights of 70 meters, with a coverage of almost 29 hectares per hour.
