GISCafe Geospatial Technology Industry Wrap-Up 2020

While many industry markets saw a decline during 2020, geospatial and GIS remained steady and are projected to grow. According to Research and Markets’ report, “Geospatial Analytics Market – Global Forecast to 2025”  the Geospatial Analytics Market Size is Projected to Grow from USD 52.6 Billion in 2020 to USD 96.3 Billion by 2025, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 12.9% During the Forecast Period.

Quoting that report,

“The major factors driving the growth of the geospatial analytics market include the increasing number of AI and ML based GIS solutions, the development of smart cities and urbanization, increased deployment of IoT sensors across locations, and advancement of bid data analytics for organizations by improving the workflow.

Based on the component, the solutions segment leads the geospatial analytics market during the forecast period.

The geospatial analytics market is segmented into solutions and services. The geospatial solutions included in this segment are geocoding and reverse geocoding, data integration and ETL, reporting and visualization, thematic mapping and spatial analysis, and others (Data Base Management System (DBMS)and data storage software).”

Some topics that grabbed the headlines this year:

• Covid-19 and disaster recovery and relief
• Climate change
• GIS education
• Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML)
• Cloud
• Image Analysis
• Smart Cities

Solving Covid-19 and Climate Change

IDB president Luis Alberto Moreno & Jack Dangermond, president of Esri, discussed at Esri User Conference 2020 how GIS can help solve some of the world’s biggest problems, namely, Covid-19 and climate change at the recent Esri Virtual User Conference 2020.

Luis: We were able to provide free access to technology for Covid-19. Esri’s disaster program is used in the Caribbean for the specific needs of IDB countries. Our governments are using Esri’s analytical models to identify where best to do an intervention. Johns Hopkins Covid-19 modeling receives 3 million hits an hour. IDB is working with Esri on several important projects, for example, tracking hospital beds, respirators and many other needs. They are also using GIS in Honduras.

Jack: This partnership with IDB has been very powerful enabling our technology to get up. Our main focus is to help users do their work better. We work on building in advance. This situation took everyone by surprise and we implemented technology quickly. This is a local issue. The main focus is to create understanding. GIS technology is an understanding technology that helps you understand processes. In this case it’s done by grad students. Johns Hopkins put the system together as a dashboard, using the  best open source data, assembled it in a dashboard and published it. The world grew to understand what was going on via this dashboard.

WHO wanted a dashboard like that for themselves so we made if for them. There were millions of maps being made every day. A modest means person was able to assemble data and change the world with the dashboard.

People saw the world through a map, the science of geography, integrative science through a map. All the science came together through this visual medium. Once that happened, ministries of health could take a feed and mix it with their own data of cases. So it started with understanding the information. They could understand it locally but also how it trended. Once they got the pattern of geography, seeing how it spreads, the epicurves, seeing how to forecast, and capacities of hospitals according to what the curve is going to do also to forecast and put patients in hospitals and/or close down the economy, it became a framework for policy for people to understand and act appropriately.

Luis: Because of data sets you produce you look at the economics profession; datasets set in time, with live data you begin to think of solutions. Looking at datasets I produced I think that is going to revolutionize how we make wiser decisions in different professions.

The public sector demand data driven policy making and decision making. It brings up a lot of issues about transparency – being able to be transparent in the context of data driven policy. Every movement is tracked, every change in forestry, every tree that’s lost in the Amazon can be measured within a day or two. From a policy perspective people may try to hide that. SDGs with the UN are highlighting this, measuring within the SDG frame change, whether economic, environmental, and are made available in dashboards. This is not all together yet but the UN is active in making this occur.

Jack: If people see the world like they did with Covid, the world is a living world and we’re part of it and we’re changing and evolving. A generation of kids learn geography at an early age and we’re part of a larger ecological system that will cause social transformation. They must demand of their leadership that they make the right decisions in geography and communicate them.

Rational spatial mapping became available through President Obama, who had a holistic understanding of where the needs are. Economics and geography have never gotten along. We care about forecast with literacy. The lack of spatial literacy in economics have led to innaccuracies. Jeffrey Sachs understands this. It took him 20 years! Bolivia has high elevation and no seaports. It is handicapped, seen through the lens of geography. I want economics to get the science of relationships. The bank needs this lens as well – to combine the sociological challenge we have.

Luis: The big equalizer is that digital literacy has increased significance, and we have no option but to learn.  We are moving into some kind of hybrid system.

Jack: The cost of externalities – in economics they optimize for one sector and then they ignore the rest and say external influence. Geography brings this all together holistically.  You can do it holistically by putting all costs together into one holistic modeling capability.

Education is about building the next generation of spatially literate children. Geography brings all sciences together into a whole.

We have been experimenting with kids in K-12 and helping kids in 5^th or 6^th  grade become spatially literate, and give them GIS tools for spatially based learning. They look at a problem in their neighborhood, develop a program using maps to target the area of need. In Detroit, they worked on finding lead paint in neighborhoods and then joined together to get rid of all the lead paint. All of them became more literate, went to college, and got a degree.

They learned all about economics, and different neighborhoods, and geography through the lead project.

There are ¼ million students in the country, and now through the rest of the world, where every K-12 school can get access to our cloud-based tools anywhere in the world. They can build curriculum in various languages to address this work.

There isn’t the leadership overseas to transform as we do in the U.S. However, we are making stuff easier to learn and more accessible. It is helpful to have a geo-mentor, and/or adopt a teacher to help them to get going. Once kids get a sense of what this is about, they get excited and work on their own.

11,000 universities around the world use Esri GIS. Teachers aren’t keeping up with the technology. Kids in Detroit learned computing on their own, they learned math, communications skills and for $300,000 the city could hire kids to scrape off lead paint. They learned how to become citizens and participate in democracy. This is what we call “Project based learning.”

STEM is integral in this.

SDG statistical reporting to the UN from some countries to create a global view.

Luis: Why are we not seeing more GIS in traditional media in Haiti?

Jack: Some of it is happening but some shifted over to the web. Dashboards and maps are showing what’s going on with Covid. Covid is one example; the economic wave comes as a result of Covid, then climate change, then loss of biodiversity waves. I see it that it is going to rob us of our future, there’s a movement to set aside 50% of the planet and keep it in a state so we can be sustained.

Understanding precedes action, and understanding language precedes action.

Luis: Climate change has been here a long time, in terms of the health of our oceans. What is GIS capable of doing to help with those problems?

Jack: GIS helps us understand the problem and communicate the problem. The geographic target is diversity, stimulate NGOs and governments to put areas in conservation. We are targeting the most important areas. We need to go to a no-carbon society. We must move to sustainable energy usage in our society. Stop polluting, use maps to create broader understanding.

With urban mobility all capitals in Latin America are challenged. We need to find out how you’re helping have better traffic, and better ways for mayors to deal with urban mobility and pollution.

We’re wiring up everything that moves and changes, making better decisions about better transportation alternatives,  work with trucking companies, Fedex, UPS,  $400 million using tools to optimize routes and supply chains will be critical. Every bit helps.

We have put machine learning and AI in our main product. All GIS users should be able to have them, with forecasts and statistical analysis available.

It’s going to take all our technology, and people who are creative to move into action to solve these problems. At Esri, we have a sense of people who are interested in doing something for the world.

Community Outreach and Empowerment

Location-based modeling can help states efficiently and equitably inoculate their communities. Esri partnered with modeling startup Epistemix to develop intelligent, hyperlocal estimates about the quantity of vaccine doses needed in a given area to achieve herd immunity from COVID-19. Using the agent-based FRED model from Epistemix and visualization, analysis, and demographic tools from Esri, researchers and decision makers can model viral spread in states and communities under various levels of vaccine-induced immunity to calculate the minimum number of vaccinations in a community to reduce the R0 reproductive rate below 0.9, effectively limiting viral spread of COVID-19. Combined with Esri’s Vaccine Distribution Tools, leaders can easily map out distribution centers for vaccines in each community and the number of doses needed.

You can explore a sample scenario for Iowa in this story map:  The story map walks through distribution sites, various levels of vaccine-induced immunity, gaps in the network, and ultimately arrives at a recommended number of doses for each recommended vaccine distribution facility in the state.

James Webb Space Telescope, NASA L3Harris

Using Aerial Imagery and Image Analysis in a Post-Covid World

Each part of the geospatial industry has come forward to assist in the Covid-19 pandemic from various perspectives. The customer City of Grapevine, Texas used Nearmap aerial imagery to create a comprehensive map of a potential community testing center at the city’s local recreation center. Without having to leave their offices, the GIS team were able to gather aerial images and get exact measurements to figure out how many cars they could accommodate in the drive-through testing line, as well as viable traffic routes and potential road closures to and from the testing center. Nearmap made it possible to create detailed maps in a couple of hours and execute this plan seamlessly.

The Geospatial Distancing series from L3Harris Geospatial recently conducted a panel discussion webinar entitled, “How will image analysis get done in a post-COVID world?”

James Webb Space Telescope, NASA, L3Harris

The questions arose, If remote work is the new reality, what are the challenges for an industry already drowning in big data? The previous pace of small and long-term incremental steps within the geospatial industry are no longer enough to keep up with the fast-tracked technological shifts happening right now on a global scale.

Panelists Beau Legeer (Esri), Zachary Norman (L3Harris Geospatial) and Andrew Fore (L3Harris Geospatial) discussed what it’s like to work in the geospatial industry now and how data is stored and consumed, and what to do in an industry that consumes and analyzes as much data as the geospatial data industry does.

Beau Legeer: Over the years in geospatial our workflows remained relatively consistent even though we have tried to embrace new technologies. A lot of us were coming into the office, downloading data, and consuming data that way for image analysis and exploitation. Everybody went home. That data can’t be on your desktop PC with lots of power and space, so you can’t do that at home. What I’ve seen is people go home and still perform geospatial analysis and embrace new technologies. We’re coming out of the really strict lockdowns, and realizing life did go on. We were able to do our analysis with similar vigor and results. Is this the new normal? Can we still embrace techniques and patterns that don’t require that we be in the office, and how can we help them?

Apart from geospatial, thinking about remote sensing and raster and imagery, and really large datasets, do you see this an opportunity to take the plunge into the cloud? A couple of years ago people didn’t access it.

Legeer: Yes, it’s happening because it has to happen. The cloud is available anywhere. It’s a great place for organizations and individuals to put data. It doesn’t require significant hardware just comms. We were sent home at a time when comms were pretty good, but a lot of us have infrastructure at home where we have streaming videos. If we can do that we can stream information from the cloud. How can I actually consume data from cloud, desktop or web-based analysis tools?

It forced the hand of something the industry was trying to do for so long.

Using AI/ML with Commercial Content

Keynote Address of the USGIF GEOINT Community Forum was presented by Stacey Dixon, Ph. D., Deputy Director, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). The theme of the conference “The Convergence of Commercial Content with AI/ML to Provide Clarity” shaped the narrative for the week ahead. Dixon said that Covid-19  provided an unexpected opportunity to reimagine their mission very quickly.

GEOINT is a discipline that will ensure geospatial superiority for generations, Dixon said.

“As we look at national intelligence strategy, we look at national security strategy, national defense strategy and then look at national intelligence strategy,” said Dixon. “This summer we wrote the NGA Strategy 2025 as well as our strategy for a national system for geospatial intelligence strategy for 2021-2025. What ties this all together is we developed according to our director’s intent. We find ourselves in an historic inflection point, the nation, our agency and GEOINT community. We are in a time of great change and challenge as well as great hope and opportunity. There is great power and competition testing our prosperity and security. At the same time new technologies and commercial capabilities are redefining GEOINT. Our great power competitors are trying to press their advantage in every domain, not just with sophisticated weapons, but they are pursuing technology to make themselves better than us at GEOINT.”

Dixon noted that at the same the Covid-19 virus has accelerated the rate of change in the strategic environment, and presents new challenges and opportunities. “We will take every opportunity to sustain our GEOINT advantage so we can hold at risk the strategic forces our adversaries use to project power and threaten the U.S. and our allies. In order to sustain GEOINT, we need to do three things: maintain primacy of our core mission, be the world’s premier GEOINT force, and relentlessly pursue a whole enterprise approach which is where USGIF comes in. Our strategy remains focused on people, partnerships and our mission. We continue to emphasize people first mission always. We invest in maintaining and recruiting a world class workforce, and that advances our tradecraft and finds innovative solutions to meet our mission needs. Our goal is facilitate the transformation of our analytical workforce into a data literate technology adjacent workforce of the future that partners every step of the way with our data savvy and technologically adept workforce. So the analysts themselves don’t have to understand and be practitioners of all the data science, but they need to be able to work in close proximity with those who are.”

Smart Cities

At INTERGEO.digital this year, Professor Thomas H. Kolbe, Geoinformation Specialist at Technical University of Munich, spoke in an opinion leader interview on the topic: Smart Cities: Geodata Provides the Basis.

Geodata and high-resolution city models are important for smart city applications and are meant to make life better, they want to make urban planning more sustainable, said Kolbe.

“To achieve these goals, to provide citizens with better data and make cities a better place to live, information is needed on electricity or traffic but additional value is sometimes only created by combining a wide variety of information. Geodata provides a structure, because structurally it represents and subdivides space. Everything that exists in reality has a counterpart in the spatial data set.”

What is meant by that is “If a building a street or a tree exists outside, there are corresponding models in the city model. And now we can assign different information to these objects in the model.”

Summary

The bottom line for all these topics this year is geospatial data. Each analysis relies on data and generates data. The need for reliable data to solve the world’s most critical problems such as Covid-19 and climate change and and the challenges associated with them is compounded by the need to be able to access and use the data and technology in a pertinent way.

In January, 2021, we will look at GIS predictions and the resilience of an industry that is responding valiantly to the world’s most critical problems on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis.

May you all have a safe and joyous holiday season and prosperous New Year!

Tags: cloud, data, ESRI, geospatial, GIS, imagery, Infrastructure, laser scanner, location, mapping, maps, mobile, satellite imagery, social media

Categories: 21st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21/CMP11), 3D Cities, 3D designs, aircraft tracking, airports, analytics, ArcGIS, Big Data, climate change, cloud, cloud network analytics, Covid-19, data, drones, election maps, emergency response, Esri, Esri StoryMaps, geocoding, geospatial, GIS, government, image-delivery software, LBS, location based sensor fusion, location based services, location intelligence, mapping, mobile, remote sensing, resilient cities, satellite imagery, sensors, spatial data, survey, transportation, UAS, utilities

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