Our Head of Data Insight recently made an appearance in an article published by the Environment Agency (EA), promoting the use of LiDAR data in startups. We use a lot of the open data outputted by the EA as part of their Open Defra programme and this was a great opportunity to showcase some of it and thank the EA for their work.
The article links to our recent building heights work that was featured in the Guardian last week and reflects our wider open data initiative we recently launched through this blog.
It is superb for start-ups like us that the Environment Agency is making its LIDAR point cloud available as open data,” said Jonathan Smith, head of Data Insight at Emu Analytics.
Point cloud data is a step up in terms of the level of detail we can achieve in modelling infrastructure and the natural environment. We are able to define the shapes of buildings and vegetation and even discover temporary infrastructure, such as cranes.With the detail that point cloud provides we will be able to open up new use cases and offerings such as providing clutter data for line-of-site broadband companies or calculating the shadows nearby buildings would cast on a proposed array of solar panels.
Jonathan Smith, Head of Data Insight, Emu Analytics
All of our opendata work is available for download on our ‘Emu DataPacks’ page, including building heights derived from the Environment Agency LiDAR data.