Volunteered Geographic Data is the Future
GIS continues to evolve and be applied to many complex problems around the world. The technology itself plays three main roles - as an application platform technology for geospatial applications, as an information management system for geospatial content and as a framework for integrating many different types of geographic information. This framework supports cross cutting analysis, science and increasingly affects the way people think and approach problem solving. Today, the term geospatial is being used synonymously with geography. Personally, I prefer to use the word geography because it is basically the root science of what we do (e.g. the science of our world). A lot of integration is happening between GIS and imagery. What in your view holds the future in this aspect? The technology of producing and processing imagery is taking giant leaps. Will imagery be a branch of geospatial replacing cartography in the future? First, imagery data has become a foundation dataset inside of a GIS. Historically, there's a distinction between image processing technology and GIS. In the last several years, with the integration of raster data models in GIS, we have seen the full integration of image processing tools with traditional GIS technology. For example, at version 10, ArcGIS can manage, process, serve and visualise imagery data with the same speed and functionality as traditional image processing systems. At the same time, modern high-end image processing products such as ITT-VIS have been engineered to fully integrate with GIS. This merging of technologies is having enormous impacts on the marketplace. People don't want to acquire, learn and support two technologies. They want their GIS to manage all types of geographic data and support common tools and trade craft in a single user experience. The big trend from my perspective is the enormous growth in the volume, frequency and quality of imagery for use as standard background basemaps as well as advanced analytic applications. This imagery is also increasingly being pipelined into real time GIS applications for situation awareness and command and control environments. I think there is a strong role for both kinds of geographic visualisations (imagery and maps) and we increasingly see them mixed in various kinds of applications. The big trend technologically is in image serving wherein imagery is processed and served dynamically. This breakthrough happened only a few years ago and has changed the character of how people access and use imagery. Image server technology not only processes imagery in near real time but also makes it available as disseminated services to mobile phone, browsers, desktops and high end analytic users. This is critical in applications like emergency management. What will be the role of geospatial technology in sustainable design? GIS has a long history of applications related to sustainability. Geodesign is a new emerging area of interest that focuses on integrating traditional GIS and interactive design tools. It integrates interoperative maps (suitability modelling) with the ability to sketch land use proposals on top of these maps and in such a way these proposals can be immediately evaluated in terms of their consequences. The idea is to combine the science of GIS with the ability to quickly evaluate the sustainability consequences of a design. We are building these tools into core GIS technology. We think this will improve how users make design decisions on land use, business, public facilities and virtually every other type of location plan. The tools will help them evaluate the consequences of the decisions so that they can then ultimately make wiser choices. Right now GIS is all about describing the world. Geodesign will help people design a future that considers sustainability. They will incorporate all the knowledge and consider all of the environmental factors that will ultimately make us more sustainable. 
What in your opinion are the three most
disruptive technologies we will see in
the next five years?The first is the computing platform. GIS technology has evolved from mainframes to mini computers to workstations to desktops to client server technology to now rapidly being deployed on the Internet with Web services. With each of these historic stages, GIS has grown about an order of magnitude. This platform, in addition to reach, has the added characteristic of being much easier. Ultimately, I see the Web as the platform for a kind of distributed, global GIS. I see multiple orders of magnitude of growth reaching all corners of the world, from rural farmers in Africa to businessmen in New York. GIS servers provide the foundation for both enterprise GIS and Web GIS. GIS servers are evolutionary technology. The second technology is that of mobile. Mobile GIS is not stand alone; it is intermingled with GIS servers. Mobile GIS serves map and analytic services that help the mobile workforce connect back into the enterprise, capture data in the field and send it back. The interesting technology trend involves the concept and technology supporting volunteer geographic information (VGI). This involves users (via mobile devices and browsers) to contribute geographic data. Today, we see the beginning of this with simple sketching and dots on maps at consumer websites. This year, we will be releasing a Web application that does this directly on a GIS geodatabase. These transactions will be done with well organised data models in a DBMS. This approach is very powerful because it means that this type of observational data can be intermingled with all the other GIS layers and analytics applied to it so we can build new kinds of applications. This Web 2.0 concept will support many applications (i.e. citizen science, community feedback and crowd sourcing, etc.). Fundamentally, all three of these changes are enabled because of Moore's law. Computing is getting faster, pipes are getting bigger, storage is getting cheaper, etc. It is just the systematic and steady application of Moore's law. I have seen it through my entire career. How can the geospatial community become relevant in the context of world challenges today? The footprints that geospatial professionals have laid down are exciting and are contributing enormously. They are making organisations more efficient, helping people do more science based analysis and make better decisions. The next big step will involve GIS knowledge being available as Web services on the open Web. Today, GIS is already successful at and is delivering huge value across organisations and enterprises. The next big step will be to leverage these individual contributions to build a large framework of geospatial information that can be leveraged by all of society. If we go back to the fundamentals of geospatial, we would say one of the reasons that it has been successful is the concept of sharing data. This will require that each user who creates geographic knowledge, serves it out in open standards based services that can be easily discovered (like REST services), that can be mashed up with open APIs like the ones that ESRI now provides. This will mean the entire Internet will be leveraged for GIS. To realise this vision we will need to collaborate and share our work, datasets, applications and knowledge. The internet provides us the technical framework to do this. I have a lot of hope that GIS users and the concepts that we have built can be leveraged in that way to support advanced environmental applications, land use planning applications, health applications, making government transparent applications, and on and on. GIS developmenthas just completed 150 editions. You have been following GIS Development from its inception. What is your view about our publication? Are we meeting the aspirations of the stakeholders? What more can we do? This is an enormous accomplishment. To be able to pull this off from nothing to such a powerful knowledge dissemination publication has been very important for our field. Your work and your dedication on an ongoing basis has meant that people who didn't have access to both the fundamental technologies and applications and knowledge of how to implement them, had their eyes opened and had understood things much better. I am sure your readers as well as other stakeholders would agree that it has provided a kind of community that is unparalleled in the geospatial world. |
