Maneesh Prasad
Managing Editor & Chief Operating Officer
maneesh.prasad@gisdevelopment.net


Change is a relative term and is bound to have conflicting views from the members of the same community. From the 'publishing in the vertical domain' point of view, there are parameters within the publishing domain and those in the vertical domain of geospatial which have changed in last of couple of decades.

But somewhere I get a feeling these changes have more or less affected the operational issues of geospatial domain and there has been hardly any change in the last couple of decades, except that we have overgrown from vendor specific technology and tools to more generic issues like data infrastructure, interoperability and standards. The economic compulsions are yet to reach the level which will compel the players who matters to 'walk the talk'.

Success for the geospatial industry has been scanty and more of serendipity. The accidental discovery of success further owes its existence to the 'disruptive technology - Internet'. I do not feel that anything related to maps or satellite has been as successful as Google Earth or Google Maps. Yes, they are not the last word in the geospatial domain. But they have created the 'Bottom of the Pyramid' for the geospatial industry to capitalise on.

The key driver for the geospatial domain, which I personally feel is significant is the ability to provide the basic tools for the converging technologies (Mobile Technologies), emerging systems (GNSS) and new market opportunities (sustainable infrastructure, climate change). Of all these already geotools possess a 'Must Have' tag for the former two and would be beneficial for the new opportunities. Fortunately, the market need and scale of economies have been able to 'Bull- Doze' the issues of 'data policy and standards', while we (the publishing house) have been harbouring and nourishing them for quite some time. Both the large business houses and the government agencies with 'Will', have created data sets for their infrastructure development, logistics and telematics division with great ease, in many of the growing economies like Malaysia and India.

The increased frequency of data capture with resolution and south-bound price for procuring them indicate to their prolific use in future. But I feel there are huge opportunities to be tapped, in this domain for the geospatial science enthusiast. The data capture and processing may have gone on-board but intelligent processing and information delivery from huge mountain of imagery data-set is still far away. Perhaps what is more desirable that the information processing is not based on data from single satellite-imagery but from a constellation of data capturing satellite, each covering a part of the large spectrum of data capture from space.

The awareness, need and economic viability are all pointing to some exciting days in geospatial industry, but the exclusivity of this community appears to be creeping into the history of this domain.