GIS Alley celebrates local industry at event

Fort Collins has a storied history in the geospatial sciences, one that can be traced back to the earliest days of the technology, and one that is still leading to growth and linkages for local companies.

At the inaugural GIS Alley GIS Day celebration on Nov. 12, the legacy of the local industry plotted by one of the preeminent developers of the technology. Carl Reed of Fort Collins serves as the chief technology officer of Open Geospatial Consortium Inc., an international standards setting nonprofit. He was inducted into the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association GIS Hall of Fame in September. Reed is wholly qualified to discuss the history of geospatial technology in Fort Collins because he was part of it.

Reed came to Fort Collins in 1979 after graduating from the State University of New York at Buffalo to take a position with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The agency formed the Western Energy and Land Use Team – or WELUT – at what is now the Drake Center development to analyze and mitigate habitat issues related to mining operations.

One piece of that puzzle was the development of a geographic information system to support those activities. Thus, the Map Overlay and Statistical System, or MOSS, was born and ported onto a mini-computer here in Fort Collins. It was the first open source GIS, deployed for production use on mini-computers.

The development of MOSS led to more projects, more contracts and more companies in Fort Collins. The concentration of companies remains intact today.

GIS Alley is a cluster initiative, much like the Larimer County Bioscience Initiative or Northern Colorado Clean Energy Cluster. The basis for the clusters came out of a 2006 core competency study, explained Kelly Peters, COO of the Rocky Mountain Innovation Initiative, which administers both the bioscience and GIS clusters. The cluster identified was originally software, but it was soon realized that the huge local industry had another focused subgroup.

“We decided to pull (the GIS) niche out and focus on that cluster,” Peters explained. Today, GIS Alley has around 50 members.

“Many of the companies, if you trace the history back, will be attached to one of the original contracts,” Reed said.

Technigraphics Inc. is one of those companies. The firm was founded here as Technicolor Graphic Services, one of the early support contractors. Today, the Wooster, Ohio-based company still counts Fort Collins among its 10 international locations that employ around 650. Locally, it employs around 170.

Scott Simmons, an executive vice president at Technigraphics, took to the stage at the GIS Day event to describe how the company has teamed up with another local firm to develop technology that would be deployed half a world away.

Technigraphics is working with Loveland-based Numerica Corp. on a Small Business Innovation Research project awarded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The partnership is a bit unusual, since Numerica has not historically worked in the geospatial realm, instead developing custom advanced algorithm and software solutions for clients. The two do have in common a heavy concentration in Department of Defense work and now a project aimed at condensing the immense amount of data contained in a digital elevation map without losing accuracy.

Randy Paffenroth, a computational scientist and program director at Numerica, explained that there is a specific algorithm that will allow compression of a DEM file without the risk of losing pixels. For regular digital images, the loss of a pixel isn’t a big deal, but the loss of a pixel in a DEM could mean the loss of a building or a mountain. The technology has specific application for the Army to allow soldiers in the field to send and receive information quickly.

The companies were initially awarded the contract at the end of 2007 and are starting work on Phase 3 of the three-phase process – commercialization.

“We’re actually ahead of schedule on everything,” Simmons said.

Kristen Tatti covers technology for the Northern Colorado Business Report. She can be reached at 970-221-5400, ext. 219 or ktatti@ncbr.com.

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