GISCafe Industry Predictions for 2023 – MariaDB

By Glenn Stowe, product manager for Geospatial at MariaDB

Glenn Stowe

Here we are in 2023, kicking off what’s sure to be an exciting year in the geospatial world and looking  to see if we can tell what’s coming down the technology pipes.

Predictions are tricky things. Often the most significant changes are the ones no one saw coming. But if we look at the current landscape and its big movers, there are a few major trends that can give us a pretty good idea of where things are going. We are seeing:

1. The increasing use of geospatial data and technologies for location-based services, such as ride-hailing and delivery services.
2. The integration of geodata with the Internet of Things (IoT), allowing for real-time tracking and monitoring of assets and individuals.
3. The use of geospatial intelligence for environmental monitoring and natural resource management, such as mapping land use and predicting the impact of climate change.
4. The growth of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones for mapping and data collection, which can be used to gather data quickly and cost-effectively in a variety of settings.
5. The development of new data platforms and tools, such as cloud-based platforms and open-source software, which make it easier for organizations to access and use geospatial data.
6. The increased use of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze and interpret geodata, enabling new insights and applications.

Many of these trends are well underway. Individually, they won’t be driving major change in 2023. As our industry continues to grow and mature, the most sweeping innovations going forward will not be individual technologies or disruptive “game changers.”

Instead, new innovations and disruptive solutions will be born in the combination and synthesis of these technologies with each other.

Data and analytics platforms are nothing new, but combining them with hyper-scalable cloud computing and machine learning drives the development of entirely new and improved applications and services that were simply not possible before.

While storage solutions don’t get a lot of attention, cloud object storage and “cloud native” geospatial data formats like Cloud Optimized GeoTIFFs (COGs) open entirely new capabilities for the processing of geospatial data at scale. Allowing hundreds or thousands of computing nodes to access the same resources simultaneously creates opportunities for innovation that would otherwise have been unthinkable.

Access to space is cheaper and easier than ever before. UAVs have become highly autonomous and effective data collection platforms. Big Data from the IoT is pouring in. Data collection and production used to be the hard problems in geospatial. Now, high-quality data is a given, but the volumes have grown exponentially. And with Cloud Computing, ML and many emerging new data platforms, we now have the technology to handle it. If the major technology trends are the sparks, then data is the gasoline that will feed an explosion in innovation over the coming year.

If, as the great computing pioneer Alan Kay once said, “the only way you can predict the future is to build it,” then we in the geospatial world are uniquely positioned to create our future. We have the tools and data that we need to make the next great leaps forward. It’s an exciting time. Here’s to doing great things together in 2023!

About Author:

Bio: Glenn Stowe has over 30 years of experience in the geospatial industry with a strong focus on standards-based web services and scalable solutions to big-data problems. He is the product manager for geospatial at MariaDB and before that was co-founder and vice president at CubeWerx, an industry leader in developing standards and software for open geospatial web services. He lives and works in Val-Des-Monts, Canada with his wife Pamela and their rottweiler, Rocky.

Category: Industry Predictions

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 21st, 2023 at 4:42 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.