It is an interesting time to be working in the GIS industry, and I feel grateful for having experienced the past 25+ years immersed in it from an editorial perspective.
Artificial intelligence, augmented reality, maximizing the value of Digital Twins, higher refresh rate on satellite data, and a new group of users: geospatial immigrants are among this week’s 2022 Industry Predictions. The industry needs to ensure two things for this category of users who don’t care if the data is geospatial or anything about it – firstly that users are getting the right data for their needs, and secondly that they are able to access it easily.
CEO Jensen Huang presented the keynote at the recent GTC21 NVIDIA Conference, November 8-11, sharing with the audience the importance of accelerated computing and much more. The announcements were so prolific and many of interest to the GIS/geospatial industry, thus I will share those that would be of most interest to our audience. One of the most profound announcements came at the end of the talk, wherein Huang announced that they are building a digital twin of the earth.
Danny Petrecca, VP of Business Development at Locusview conducted an interview with Sanjay Gangal, president of GISCafe, recently to discuss the topic of digital construction management that Locusview pioneered to address the challenges of telecoms and utilities worldwide. Primarily, the solution aims to get as-built construction information in from the field back to the systems of record on time.
Sanjay Gangal, CEO and president of GISCafe, interviewed Ross Smith, program manager at TCarta recently, to talk about the importance of TCarta and its satellite-derived bathymetry, or SDB to climate change, sea level rise and GEOINT.
In the plenary session held on Monday at the Virtual Esri User Conference 2021, Esri President Jack Dangermond spoke of focusing on creating a more sustainable environment for our planet. Users of Esri software and services come from 130 countries and different fields.
Francois Valois, vice president, Civil Engineering with Bentley Systems spoke at Bentley’s recent Civil Design Virtual Press Briefing about the current state of civil engineering and how we now need to do things differently. Civil infrastructure will continue to need to accelerate, according to Valois. “There has been an enormous infrastructure deficit over the years. Any time we stop accelerating we make the problem worse. Now we have social distancing, and funding challenges. Projects may be funded by a special tax on gas, for example. In addition to this, we have to stay home and when we’re onsite we must have less people onsite and find new ways to work. Our answer is the digital twin, and helping our users to go digital.”
In 2019, it came to my attention that there was more specific attention being paid to AEC and GIS integration, specifically two partnerships of AEC companies formed with Esri. In a conversation with Esri’s Kathleen Kewley, GISCafe Voice discussed the resurgence of interest of GIS in the AEC space from an Esri perspective. Kewley also worked at Autodesk at one time. In addition I have included information from a webinar conducted by Autodesk senior technical marketing manager Wes Newman and AEC Solutions engineer from Esri, Rafael Fernandes, about the partnership between Esri and Autodesk.
GISCafe Industry Predictions for 2020 move forward into February. Topics covered this week are cloud-based asset management systems, artificial intelligence, smart cities, citizen science, open source mapping and data, GNSS advancements, big spatial data analytics, drone industry, enterprise scale and dashboards and data visualizations.
We’re coming down the home stretch with our GISCafe Industry Predictions, so if you haven’t sent yours in, please feel free to do so until January 20th, for inclusion in a series of editorial articles to be published in January. This article is the third installment of those articles.