The latest GIS news includes an image showing the drift of sulphur dioxide from the Puyehue-Cordón Caulle eruption in Chile, announcements from Esri, Topcon, and Maponics; also, the OGC is seeking public comments.
ESA
The latest “image of the week” from ESA shows the huge plume of sulphur dioxide that spewed from Chile’s Puyehue-Cordón Caulle Volcanic Complex. The volcanoes lie about 600 km south of the city of Santiago in the Andes mountain range. The area had been dormant for 50 years before erupting on June 4th. A plume of volcanic ash and sulphur has risen as high as 10km. Of the more than 3000 Chilean volcanoes, 80 are currently active.
The pattern of the plume was captured using Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer on Eumetsat’s MetOp-A satellite.

Esri
TK Telekom, a modern and rapidly growing telecommunications operator for Polish Railway, plans to improve its fiber network by implementing SunVizion Network Information Management, an application developed with GIS technology from Esri by Suntech S.A., an Esri partner.
Topcon
Topcon Positioning Systems (TPS) has purchased a significant ownership interest in DynaRoad Oy, a software company located in Helsinki, Finland. DynaRoad develops project management software for civil engineering and infrastructure construction.
XYGO, based in Santiago, Chile, is using Topcon Positioning Systems’ (TPS) IP-S2 to map all of central Chile’s main cities with LiDAR.
OGC
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) seeks public comment on the candidate standard “Earth Observation Metadata profile of the OGC Observations and Measurements Standard.” The Earth Observation (EO) profile of Observations and Measurements is intended to provide a standard schema for encoding Earth Observation metadata to support the description and cataloguing of products from sensors aboard EO satellites.
Maponics
Mark Dykstra has joined the company as the Director of Sales with Maponics: “Mark comes to Maponics with more than 20 years of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) industry experience in senior sales and operations roles”.