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Huibert-Jan Lekkerkerk Editor-in-Chief, GeoInformatics hlekkerkerk@geoinformatics.com  As I have only been involved in the geospatial industry, and more specifically hydrographic surveying,from about 1993 onwards I can hardly say that I have witnessed all major milestones in the geospatial industry. I do however have a reasonably good overview of the surveying industry in general and hydrographic surveying in particular. When looking at the surveying market the most important milestone must have been the introduction of GPS. In the hydrographic survey industry before the 1990's all positioning was done using either land survey techniques or radio positioning systems such as Decca, Hyperfix and Syledis. The major drawback to all these systems was the amount of attention (and investment) involved in keeping such a system running. 
Positioning accuracies varied from a meter or so to tens of
meters depending on the distance from shore.
With the introduction of GPS, which was soon adopted by
the hydrographic surveying community a positioning system
was introduced that, if properly corrected, could give
meter accuracy (almost) anywhere in the world without
extensive support.The use of GPS became of course even more widespread in the surveying community with the introduction of the Real Time Kinematic versions that made it possible to achieve centimeter accuracies over distances of up to 15 kilometers. Another important milestone has been the development of swath remote sensing systems such as Lidar in land survey and multibeam echo sounding in hydrography. With these systems a large tract of land (or seabottom) can be surveyed in just a few days giving accuracies that are similar to more traditional techniques. As a result our understanding of the world around us and the associated geospatial models has increased tremendously. Finally when looking at the geospatial industry as a whole I would have to say that the most important development has been the widespread introduction of computers and software. These have reduced the time needed to acquire data and create a map from weeks to hours or days. Without the software (and hardware) maps would not have been so widespread in today's live with about everybody using tools such as Google Earth or personal navigation devices. Computers as well as GPS have in that sense revolutionized and democratized geospatial data. What your see more and more is that on one hand the geospatial industry is controlled more and more by just a few major players.On the other hand there are many small companies or start-ups that bring interesting new products to the market. As far as emerging markets are concerned we will probably see more and more (new) hardware and software coming from developing countries that will hit the market at competitive prices. 
What the effect of these products on the current market
will be is hard to say. In my opinion the geospatial industry is
a very traditional industry that will not very easily trade in
their current equipment for unknown but cheaper alternatives
without extensive testing and reassurance. As such
companies from emerging markets will have to create a stable
home market before they will be able to compete with
the current products.In my opinion there are two key drivers. The first (and potentially the most visible to professionals) is in making geospatial information mainstream.Instead of geospatial information being the domain of a few specialists within the organization one sees that more and more organizations are trying to make geospatial data accessible to the entire organization. As a result geospatial departments are merged with the traditional IT departments. Another effect is bringing GIS to the desktop of every employee instead of having to use specializes software and hardware. 
Another key driver is making geospatial data available to
consumers. In the past, with geospatial information being
solely for organizational or scientific purposes not much
attention was given to the consumer. With the introduction
of personal navigation devices, telephones equipped with
GPS and software such as Google Earth the geospatial industry
is turning more and more towards the consumer who in
turn is willing to pay for this sort of information.
What you see quite often is that the data collected by all these satellites is primarily intended for either scientific or intelligence use. 
What the
geospatial industry should try for is to combine all this raw
data into products that are interesting enough for both consumers
as well as
the professional
user outside the scientific
community.
It will in other word
be up to the geospatial community to bring added value to
these raw data products.In my opinion the industry will indeed move more and towards the Google type of commercial model. 
That does however not mean that there will be no
investment in data or applications software. I do think however
that data collection
(and processing)
will be
more and more the
task of either government
agencies or specialized organizations. We see even
nowadays with more and more governments making theirremote sensing data and geospatial databases available 'as is'. The geospatial industry can use this data and build services around it that are interesting for a specific user community. Take for example aerial photographs. Just as a photograph they are of course usable but to the average consumer they are nothing more than a pretty picture. It is the addition of extra information that makes the photograph interesting; seeing for example all houses on sale on the photograph gives the potential buyer an impression of all potential new houses in their surroundings without ever having to visit the location. This type of services will however also require new data to be gathered. As a result almost all information in the (near) future will be tagged with a geographic location. An early result is of course Google Maps that allow this combination in a rather primitive way. In my opinion it is incorrect to speak about an SDI as a business model.You do see more and more SDI's emerging with the European INSPIRE project being a good example. The goal of many of these SDI's is linking together data sources. 
Therefore there will be a need for intelligent services on top
of these data
sources. These
services should
cater to both consumers
as well as
for example policy makers that do not want to browse
through terabytes of geographic information. In other words,
the SDI will probably be nothing more than the infrastructure;
it is up to the industry to use the SDI and integrate it
into their own business models.
At this moment we are just at the begin of standardisation / interoperability in the geospatial industry.Even though most standards have been around for quite a few years it is only now that they are being implemented into mainstream software packages. 
As such it is hard to gauge the effect of standardization to
today's market place. Judging from the number of software
vendors that are
now building
these standards
into their products
one could however
assume that the effect should become quite large towards
the future. One of the main results of the standardization
will be the fact that much more data will become available
that should be easier to discover and use from a single software
package. The main problem is that it will be hard for
most people to find the right dataset for their specific purpose.The publishing industry is becoming more and more dualistic. In the past paper was the only medium used.
With the introduction of the Internet into
the main stream the first websites with news were
started which were soon accompanied by blogs and digital
newsletters.
In my opinion in the future the publishing industry will
still be using both paper and electronic media. At the
moment there is still no better medium than paper. Maybe
the more widespread
use of ebook
readers such
as those introduced
by Amazon
and iRex will change that but that will mainly be a change
from paper to electronic paper.
The main advantage of the Internet is in the speed with
which you can publish. As such it is ideal for news,
announcements, conferences and the like. It is also a good
medium for illustrating paper articles with for example digital
data sets and movies that accompany an article. Therefore
in my opinion the publishing industry will have to give
attention to both type of media. Page 1 of 1
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