Page 1 of 2 Next  Geoff Zeiss Director of Tehcnology Autodesk Geospatial Has Joined the IT Mainstream First and foremost the geospatial industry is undergoing an unprecedented transformation because of the widespread recognition that geospatial is no longer special and has joined the IT mainstream. As just one example, this was the theme of the last MapIndia conference in New Delhi last year. What this means in reality is that geospatial has become one of the core enabling technologies that is available to everyone in IT, not just to GIS specialists. An important example is relational database management systems (RDBMSs). RDBMSs used to be restricted to numeric and text data types. Now virtually every RDBMS including Oracle, PostGIS/PostgeSQL, MySQL, DB2, Informix, (and I expect in the near future, SQL Server) have spatial capability, typically spatial data types, a spatial index, and spatial extensions to SQL. Mass Market Geospatial More people are using spatial data and capabilities in their day to day life than ever before in the history of GIS, though most of them probably wouldn’t recognize what the letters GIS stand for. Well-known examples include MapQuest, Yahoo Maps, Google Earth and Maps, Windows Live Local, A9, and the many mashups that people have built on these platforms. The most incredible statistic I have heard recently is that Google Earth had 100 million downloads in its first 12 months. I doubt that there are that many people on the planet who would recognize what the three letters GIS represent. Open Source Geospatial Software Has Matured Another dimension of this remarkable period in the history of geospatial is the maturing of the open source geospatial community. There is a parallel between what happened in the emerging internet phenomenon in the late 90’s and the current situation in geospatial industry. In the mid 90’s eight core contributors supporting the NCSA HTTP Server, which was an implementation of the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) HTTP web standard, got together for the purpose of coordinating their changes (called "patches") and formed the original Apache Group, which was at that time little more than a shared mailing list. The industry, including major IT players like IBM and others, was trying to decide how to develop and support their own proprietary web servers and compete in this arena. In 1999, with IBM encouragement, the members of the Apache Group formed the Apache Software Foundation, a legal entity, to provide organizational, legal, and financial support for the Apache web server. The rest is history. Since then the Apache HTTP Server has been adopted by IBM and others and is running on over 70% of the world’s web servers. There is a similar situation in the web mapping sector. On the first hand there are clear signs that web mapping is becoming commoditized. Open standards create a fertile environment for open source, and open geospatial standards from the OGC, such as the Simple Feature Specification for SQL (SFS) and Web Mapping Service (WMS), have been widely adopted. Secondly, there already exists a large and active open source geospatial community around web mapping. For example, many people believe that MapServer, an open source web mapping server, is already running 50% of the world’s web mapping servers. Thirdly, there is a commercially successful geospatial sector providing support and services that has formed around open source geospatial software. Recently people active in the open source geospatial community decided that the community needed to make some major organizational decisions to move to the next stage in the development of open source geospatial software. This effort culminated in the formation of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation in March of 2006. The OSGEO currently includes MapServer, GRASS, GDAL, GeoServer, Mapguide, and other geospatial tools and libraries and, analogously to the early days of the Apache Foundation, is supported by a major commercial software vendor. Open Spatial Interoperability At the 2005 GITA Conference, over 290 utilities attending the conference were surveyed about their GIS usage. Over 60% reported that they were using more than one GIS. Many also reported that file translation was the most common mechanism for sharing spatial data.  
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