Data providers abound in the GIS and geospatial industry. Choices range from mapping, built and natural terrain modeling, survey, GIS/LIS technologies, geospatial web, asset inventory, mapping, geodetic and engineering surveying, photogrammetry, satellite imagery and real-time satellite data, remote sensing, aerial and ground-based LiDAR surveys, geographic and land information systems (GIS/LIS), and spatial computing and analysis, data provided by drones, and much more.
McMurdo Station Iceberg, Antarctica, NASA, taken from a small sat.
A look at what is being demonstrated on the Exhibit Floor is a great way to see what is trending in the geospatial industry. Location, navigation, GIS positioning, sensors, geospatial intelligence, UAS, 3D, emergency response are just a few of the areas covered in the vast offerings seen throughout the week.
The exhibits at GEOINT Symposium 2015 this past week in Washington D.C. reflected the direction the government is heading with regard to new products, technologies and services.
The new government initiative of doing more with less has generated interest among a group of vendors in partnership with the Centralized Super Computer Facility (CSCF) program. Lockheed Martin, one of the vendors, has developed a Multilevel Secure ecosystem (MLS) using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5+ for both single system image and for a cluster configuration. The focus of this system is to use MLS to enable data fusion and/or consolidate hardware systems rather than promote duplication.
The companies partnering in this endeavor include Lockheed Martin (Multilevel Secure Ecosystem), Seagate (Multilevel Secure HPC Storage), Red Hat (Open source operating system), SGI (Secure high performance computing solutions), CRAY (multilevel security (MLS) capability), Bay Microsystems (global high-performance fabric extension), Mellanox ( 100 Gigabit per second scalable networking), 35ViON Years (MLS-Ecosystem for Mission Data), Altair (PBS Professional, – job scheduling and management) and new at the conference this year, Crunchy (open source Crunchy MLS PostgreSQL extends PostgreSQL with Multilevel Security support), and Splunk (universal machine data platform).
What has been an un-announcement in the geospatial industry is the fact that Google Maps Engine and Google Earth Enterprise are to be discontinued by Google. It’s possible that Google didn’t send out a press release about this because their customers, who are mainly consumers, may mistake the message to mean that Google Maps and Google Earth will be discontinued by Google, which is absolutely not the case.
The Esri/Google architecture in the post Google Earth Enterprise World
In a discussion with Dale Lutz of Safe Software he talked about the latest version of FME, FME 2014.
“For every user we try hard to make the whole experience of using the product more effective and smooth, and that comes down to making use of streamed real estate,” said Lutz.
This has involved changing the interface out to new technology that is faster, with a nicer graphical look, and FME now works on the Mac as well as Linux.
“A lot of web developers work on Macs, and many want to work with spatial data, and in Europe especially there is a lot of interest in Linux, and they are happy to be able to use it directly. This isn’t a big commercial opportunity but many university people are Mac or Linux.”
As with every release of Safe Software’s spatial data transformation technology FME, the release of FME 2013 Desktop and Server versions offers support for more data formats, in this case over 300 of them, including across point cloud/LiDAR, 3D, raster, database, vector and XML. Notable new formats include the ASTM E57 point cloud format, X3D, Autodesk IMX, PostGIS raster, SpatiaLite, Salesforce, and many more.
The amount of data that is being collected by sensors (remote sensors), terrestrial sensors, and personal sensors is going to explode. Today, everyone with a smartphone is carrying around a very sophisticated sensor. We are going to see the data from these sensors being used more and more. With all the sensors that are coming on line, we are quickly approaching the point where we can see what is happening anywhere at anytime.
3D GIS
The level of interest in 3D GIS is definitely on the upswing. With new data sources like LiDAR and the ability of tools to combine these different sources to make immersive environments – it’s going to take a big leap forward. Augmented Reality is just one technology that is on the cusp of breaking out. 2012 could be the year when it moves from a curiosity to a real must-have application. 2012 could also see a large adoption of 3D GIS technologies, as Autodesk continues work with its Infrastructure Modeler and Esri rolls out the fruit from its acquisition of Procedural and its CityEngine technology.
Web Mapping
We are really seeing a lot of excitement on the mobile platform. In today’s world, a mobile workforce is still a connected workforce. No longer is it the case that field workers are disconnected from their office systems. As a result we are increasingly seeing the need for real-time data movement. With workers always being connected, the line will continue to blur between the office, the field, and the home. Smartphones are really “pocket” computers with more processing power than that of desktops only a few years ago. The challenge now is more about bandwidth than anything else, and this is only going to get better and cheaper in 2012. In 2012 more people are going to run “mobile” web apps from their smartphones/iPods/iPads than from their computers on the desktop.
Social Media and Authoritative Citizen Data
The importance of social media to business is only increasing. Now people use social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook to follow topics and keep in touch with their customers and industry trends. Social media has really changed the way that organizations get the word out. At Safe now we see ourselves spending more and more time on “content” marketing so that we have the content that users need. Through social media we are also in constant communication with more of our users than ever before.
On the topic of authoritative citizen data we are going to see more applications where citizens can help their cities and countries run better. Whether it is helping cities identify potholes, or graffiti locations by simply sending in geo-tagged photos, or helping authorities prosecute “rioters” by taking video and pictures with their phones – the trend is clear. Citizens are going to be more engaged than ever before.
Cloud
The cloud is everywhere in 2012. At Safe for example, we do almost everything in the cloud. We run our demo machines in the cloud. We train in the cloud. Our website is in the cloud. Our customers can evaluate using the cloud. From a technology perspective cloud technology is ready to host everything.
We are also going to continue to see more and increasingly powerful cloud-based systems out there. Take Google Fusion Tables for example. This technology makes it trivial for anyone to publish and share any kind of data, including spatial data, and share it with the world instantly! It’s amazing, and the cloud makes it possible.
The cloud is also a great equalizer. It used to be that organizations that wanted to create world class web-based solutions had to spend huge amounts of capital to purchase their own server farms to host these applications. With cloud services now, such as Amazon’s AWS, anyone can now create web-based solutions and simply leverage the scalability it inherently provides and only pay for what they use when they use it. This moves CPU usage for these organizations from the “highway” model; (build and pay for infrastructure to handle peak loads), to the electricity model in which you only pay for what you use. The cloud and its impact are still in early days.
Integration
The integration challenge is bigger than ever. For us at Safe we are seeing demands for data to be moved between more different kinds of systems than ever before. For the first decade of Safe it was all about CAD<->GIS. Now we have Raster, LiDAR, XML, Big Data, and Web-based data sources such as Google Fusion Tables. Users don’t want to just move it either way; they want to combine it and then send it to new applications. Over this period the “data freshness” dates are getting shorter and shorter. In 2012 we believe we are going to see organizations want to leverage “real-time” data. We also are seeing an explosion of sensors and expect organizations to need to integrate this entirely new type of data into their workflows so that they can react quicker and more effectively to events. This belief was a driving force behind the “Event Driven” architecture which we have added to FME Server. With this we are ready to handle a whole new class of data integration challenge.
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