Dynamics of Changes Converging technologies and integration with mainstream IT The expansion of definition of what constitutes geospatial content is driven by tremendous innovation in the technologies used to generate them. Geospatial technologies grow with the technologies they depend on like faster processors, better displays, wireless networks, online databases, fixed and mobile sensors etc; they also grow new branches and spawn new hybrids as inventive minds seek new solutions. Today, convergence is the key at the core of which is the 'blurring of boundaries' between GIS and CAD. GIS analyses the world as it is, based on observations and representations of reality. CAD looks ahead with a focus on planning, putting designs for future features on the map. "Combining representations of current realities with the (alternative) futures of CAD-based designs probably holds the most important potential regarding convergence," opines Prof Josef Strobl. This trend is clearly visible as government agencies, utilities and other organisations adopt infrastructure modelling that is beyond a mere '3D shell'. "It delivers a visualisation with all of the intelligence we come to expect in a GIS and the precision engineering detail we find in CAD," says Lisa Campbell, VP, Autodesk. As CAD, facilities and geospatial site information exist in 'stovepipes' at each stage of a building's or capital project's lifecycle, virtually everything in our built environment costs more than it should to design, build, operate and maintain. Mark Reichardt advocates interoperable Building Information Models (BIM) to correct this situation. The list of converging hardware and software technologies keeps growing: wireless networks, computing devices, storage devices, sensor webs, distributed processing, grid processing, modelling and simulation, data discovery, imaging, location technologies, semantic processing and others. We really ought to do all we can to facilitate the convergence of geospatial technologies with developments in these supporting technologies. "The technical boundaries that separate these technologies are often bridged by consensus standards that define open standard interfaces and encodings. Standards also lubricate commercial roll-out of new offerings, because customers appreciate 'plug and play' components they can use in new combinations to solve their problems," analyses Mark Reichardt.
The convergence of imagery and geospatial data tools is occurring within the enterprise and vendor communities as traditional geospatial software vendors are adding more imagery capabilities and imagery software vendors are adding geospatial capabilities. "This is a natural industry progression and both geospatial and imagery software vendors are pushing the capabilities to make the import and manipulation of imagery a more seamless experience," says Matt Ball. What Google spawned was nothing short of the Great Awakening. The advent of Google Maps was not the 'GIS killer' or 'killer app'; it was a GIS promoter, according to Directions Magazine. It was the platform that allowed more people to see the utility of geospatial information, and that sharpened the focus of the companies that birthed the technology in the first place. We only have to look at the birth of the map mashup to see what happened. Mashups do one thing very well. They link a map platform with geographically referenced data. The availability of data, such as a Web service that results from the creation of geospatial standards, allows a simple display of information. From humble beginnings, a genie's bottle opened and basic mashups begat mashups 2.0, 3.0, etc. Both old and new geospatial software companies have embraced the mashup and have found new ways, and new data sources, to display information. Web GIS represents only one face of the convergence of technologies. Convergence can happen at device level, like GPS enabled cellular phones and GPS enabled PDAs for navigation; at data level, like maps and high resolution imagery at street level and at application interface level for mashups, says Prof AR Dasgupta. The convergence of geospatial technologies with the vast proliferation of mobile technology is opening up new vistas of business lines in popularly known fields of location based services. "This market has grown at a much faster rate than the rate of growth the last decade saw in mobile telephones," exclaims KCM Kumar, CMD, Speck Systems.
Substantiating this idea, Matthew O'Connell, CEO, GeoEye says, "All things digital are converging and they are 'flattening' the Converging technologies and integration with mainstream IT Web GIS represents only one face of the convergence of technologie Prof Arup Dasgupta Managing Editor (Honorary) GIS Development Combining representations of current realities with the futures of CAD-based designs holds potential Prof Josef Strobl University of Salzburg globe. While the technologies behind these individual technologies are unique and distinct, the products they produce are digital and can be merged and applied in a geospatial environment to help customers in business and government solve challenging problems". "What makes GIS different though is data," asserts BVR Mohan Reddy. He says a 'geo' database is increasingly seen as the underlying single corporate view of an organisation's assets. This is a fantastic outcome. The overall reason for nearly every IT solution - is to make a decision or support a transaction. "As technologies converge," says Jeff Akers, President, CH2M HILL, "IT users can focus on solutions that support transactions or decisions. Success will be a business success rather than simply the success of making technology work because we can. We will make better decisions, we will process more transactions, we will go about our business with better clarity - and success will be in the commodity of our own business instead of sub-optimum solutions within technology instead of within solutions."  Talking about emerging trends in convergence, Matt Ball says, "Some of the emerging trends in mainstream IT have broad implications for geospatial market. The first is open source software, which has a strong and growing footing in the geospatial arena that will continue to grow. In the broad IT market, open source is predicted to see continued growth, with some predicting that it will represent 40% of all software and IT jobs by 2020. The second is cloud computing, where ubiquitous access to data and processing power on remote servers is being fed by open platforms. GIS continues to deliver the tools for open services that will accelerate the adoption and importance of the cloud in coming years". Predicting the future of convergence, Ed Parsons says complex geospatial functionality will disappear behind great interface design and brilliant process engineering in the numerous applications it will build. Applications apart, Christian Heipke of the University of Hannover feels there is lot of methodological similarities between image-related and GIS/vector-related issues. He foresees a further integration in this arena. Extending this idea to business domains, Brad Skelton says imagery is now an integral part of decision support systems and it is expected that access to these systems be universal. Tools and technologies are now under development which will provide on demand geo-processing beyond simply viewing imagery. At the organisational level, GIS, which was once considered to be a niche technology, has now become a part of the IT strategy of several corporate CIOs, says Rajesh C Mathur, President, ESRI India. Many organisations are in the process of migrating their GIS to enterprise level implementation and integrating it with ERP, CRM, SCADA and other IT subsystems. This development has also redefined the role and profile of GIS professionals. They not only need to be proficient in GIS and its applications but should also have a good understanding of IT tools like RDBMS and ERP.Acknowledging the fact that geospatial technology is becoming part of mainstream IT, Maj Gen R Siva Kumar, CEO, NSDI-India, infers, "The day is not far when IT will become a subset of GT." |
