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Service is becoming more important than physical data

Ray Williamson
Editor-in-Chief, Imaging Notes
rayw@gwu.edu

From my standpoint the major milestones are the following (not necessarily in order): the development of GPS and its availability and open access to everyone. And along with that a major secondary milestone was the removal in 1995 of the selective availability, though people tend to forget about it. It was by the order of the then President Bill Clinton. Doing that improved the accuracy of the GPS signal which was a major step in the development of marketplace of all kinds of location and navigation equipments.

The second major set of advances was the development of commercial remote sensing satellites which spurred a competition in US, and I believe around the world; a competition between satellite makers and data providers who were providing ever better resolution in their data.

Aerial photography industry too witnessed a change. Earlier the players of the industry were generating different data for different clients of the same region. They then realised the importance of linking data collections and provide them as a whole. So the competition and innovation have been strong in the aerial industry for providing data that can be used by the GIS industry. Along with that, of course, the proliferation of GIS software packages that makes remote sensing data much more user friendly.

What has happened over the last few years in the Indian remote sensing arena is also remarkable - in terms of high resolution government supplied systems and proliferation of similar systems around the world and that has made GIS and GPS more pervasive.

Another exciting development is the GoogleEarth and its imitators. This is an step in creating what we may call 'Digital Earth'. The ability to develop datasets and analyse them simply and quickly on Google platform is wonderful thing that has happened to the Geospatial industry.

What I have witnessed in all the major developing countries is that these have been moving fastlyin domain of remote sensing technologies. During my visit to many Chinese remote sensing research institutes, I was surprised to see how quickly they were advancing in this technology domain and in terms of quality of data they generate and provide. There were many institutions coming up in areas of GIS, remote sensing, GPS and working towards a common goal of development. Similarly, South Africa too is working a lot on remote sensing technologies for betterment of its communication infrastructure. You can say that developments in remote sensing have aided in growing up the geospatial industry.

Over the years we have come from the situation where we used to analyse Landsat pictures on papers to present times where we have high-end software for analysis. So I think the market trend is towards more systems in space and right along with that are developments in aerial photography. Geospatial cannot continue to rest on its past laurels and there are opportunities that still exist for the community in terms of developing set of tools. I was a part of study during which I found that real estate was not using geospatial tools. Similarly insurance sector can be a good growth area for the industry. So there is a lot of scope of going beyond the usual products on public good uses and going into other commercial avenues.

I believe service industry will grow. On one hand we have GoogleEarth for common man who is not familiar with GIS, there really is a lot of scope for developing specialised tools for specific industries and that is the service industry. I think service is becoming much more important than physical data and application software. Though you need both, finding companies that can provide fast and efficient services will always be needed. My feeling is that innovative use of the available products is quite possible.

There is a potential for creating your SDI at a given level. In my country (US), and I think this will be true with other countries as well, organisations often use moderate resolution data (Spot or Landsat) as backdrop for deeper investigations of problems so that you can look at the overview. There is a scope for broad-based SDI.Then the business model would be, developing applications at higher resolutions starting from those datasets. Different countries are developing different SDI at their own levels but I would like to see a routinely-developed broad-based global dataset and this is what Digital Earth is working towards. Data archiving is another problem. The datasets generated should match with the storage capacities of the systems. From the standpoint of global change issues it is very important to have datasets that are of very moderate resolution; where the datasets' limit comes in storage and usability, is a question which experts need to look into.

I don't think that blogs and internet are hurting publication tremendously (in our case). We find that our readers really like to have hard copy of our journal and they read it while they commute. We get letters where readers request for hard copies after they see the soft copy. In specialised niches there exists scope for new publications.

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