Last year, Urban and Regional Information Systems Association (URISA) held its GIS-Pro 2012 symposium, which featured a keynote address by geospatial visionary Michael F. Goodchild.
Although recently retired, Goodchild served as a Professor of Geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Chair of the Executive Committee, National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA); Associate Director of the Alexandria Digital Library Project; and Director of NCGIA’s Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science.
In his keynote address, Goodchild discussed how far the geospatial sector has come since Al Gore laid his vision for geospatial technologies in 1998, which promoted a virtual reality world where children could go to a museum and enjoy interactive exhibits that zoom in on the earth down to scale and be able to add layers. This was a full seven years before Google Earth came to fruition.
