December 17, 2008
I sat down to write my annual list of "10 events,
ideas, themes, products, etc. that stood out over the preceding 12
months" but found it more difficult than usual. There were some things
I "could" talk about (John King and the Magic Wall, the iPhone,
geotagging as mainstream, warehouse appliances and XML databases), but
they really weren't standouts. There were some "continuations" of
existing trends (open source, cloud computing, Web 2.x/3.x) but again,
nothing that shook the foundations of our industry. In the end, I
deemed the list "lame." My editor-in-chief, Joe Francica, agreed with
my description and noted a few things that I might have added (spatial
regression, SQL Server 2008 with geo support, GeoEye-1), but even those
felt like "more of the same." Don't get me wrong, I see progress, but
nothing like the things I'd identified and felt strongly about in past
years.
So, what's going on? Is it me? Am I, and I hate to ask this question
because it makes me feel old, getting jaded? Have I reached a "there's
nothing new under the sun" view of geospatial technology? I don't think
so. Some things excited me quite a bit this year, including ESRI's
vision of data finding via Google tools and the introduction of
FortiusOne's
Maker!. I'm guilty of not following up much on these.
Still, they are both having an impact of sorts. Regarding data
"findability," I was jazzed to see GeoServer's
new tools for making
geodata findable via a Google search, which launched this past week. As
for Maker!, I'm happy to report that the reporter from the Boston Globe
who called about a "Year in Maps" article, found the Dataset
of the Day
series on the Off the Map Blog terrific.
Am I looking in the right places? Certainly my "sources" for news about
geospatial have exploded in the past year or so with more e-mails,
press releases, blogs, tweets, podcasts, videos and, thankfully, fewer
phone calls. Is it possible that the variety of communications channels
has spread the "news" so thin that none of it achieves "critical mass"
such that it makes an impression on me? I would not discount that
explanation, but it's certainly not the whole story.
Or is it, as Joe Francica noted in a recent editorial,
that we've
crossed a chasm and are now in a mode of "diversity, segmentation and
focus"? And if so, what do those three terms mean for finding "10
events, ideas, themes, products, etc. that have stood out over the
preceding 12 months" that speak to our entire community? In pondering
this situation further, I think the diversity of uses and users, from
those who mash-up to those creating new spatial algorithms for vector
and raster data, reinforces that we are less likely now, perhaps than
ever, to point to the same "big events, launches, trends." The
segmentation Francica points to does the same thing. The implementation
of an enterprise GIS may well include a geospatial appliance, but only
the system administrator may know about it. The analyst at her desk may
be querying data faster but analyzing data in ArcGIS as she always did.
Thus, the selection and implementation of a solution from a Netezza or
Teradata may not be on her radar. Similarly, those geospatial
practitioners who manage the datastore in those databases may not
really notice that data being fed in aren't from a commercial vendor,
but from OpenStreetMap. To him, there's no difference; it's just
"data." Francica's ideas regarding focus are applicable here, too. At
one time it seemed ESRI, Autodesk, Intergraph and MapInfo (and others)
were in the same business, GIS. Today, they most assuredly are not.
They deal in (these are my terms, not the vendors) broad geospatial
technology, infrastructure, security/military/intelligence and
business-focused location intelligence, respectively.
What does all this say about the state of geospatial technology? I
think Francica has it exactly right - it's mature. I know that I miss
that users can't all sit in a room together and get "wowed" by the same
new technology, as perhaps we did even five, let alone 10 or 15 years
ago. On the other hand, we can still appreciate that advances in
other corners, while not directly touching us now, may in time, or via
new connections between our data, applications and hardware.
The analogy I'm holding in my head as I write this involves my running
club. We are some 400 strong. Some like to race short distances (less
than a mile), others longer (six to ten miles), others even longer (26
to 50 to 100 miles). Some don't race at all. Some like to run in the
woods; some wouldn't ever try that. Some like to run alone, others in
large unwieldy packs. What holds us together? We all like to run.
Within geospatial, we may be pulled to a particular disciplinary use of
the technology (forestry, health care, agriculture), or part of the
technology stack (database, middleware, application), or hardware
solution (desktop, field unit, mobile phone), but we are all pulled to
this technology by love or money. So, perhaps it doesn't matter that we
don't now, and may not for some time, identify the same year-end
inventory list of great steps forward.
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| I think you've hit it with Joe Francica's quote above. While I might agree that "GIS Science" is quite mature, there has been an explosion of new applications in the last 3-4 years. Can you believe that 4 short years ago there was no such thing as Virtual Earth and Google Maps? What we are in now is the evolution after the revolution. At AWhere.com, we refer to it as the "shift to the right" in usability. For nearly 40 years, GIS has primarily been relegated to the back office... to the cartographers that pull data and push printed maps. GIS is mature there. However, Google Maps, VE, Yahoo!Maps and MapQuest have made more approachable applications of mapping available to "the rest of us". MapInfo, AWhere, FortiusOne, among many, many others are seizing the day and bringing more sophisticated applications that can INTERACT with the rest of the corporation and population. The first level of the evolving revolution is "done". A tremendous number of people now routinely find their next Starbucks Fix, or book thier next hotel at the business conference or spa location while visualizing on an embedded web map. That was the geoWeb explosion 3.5 years ago. Now we are in the evolutionary groundswell phase. It will take a while for "the rest of us" to all move to the next level of heuristic understanding of what location intelligence can add to the Business Intelligence mix. The myriad of 'heat maps' and data sets that FortiusOne has published are great examples of what will enable the 'push to the right'. IDV and ESRI are assisting corporations with newer server products to dissimenate LI throughout the corporation. For ourselves at AWhere, we recently introduced an interface into Walmart's Retail Link(r) Point-of-Sales system. We are consistently getting "wows" when category managers 'see' their sales data at the store level of 3600 Walmarts and 600 Sams Clubs for the first time. They've always looked at regional summaries and "Top 10, Bottom 10" analyses. Pretty amazing to see it ALL at once and the inevitable patterns and new questions that arise. We experienced a geoWeb explosion shortly after 2004. Now we are in the learning curve. I think we'll start seeing some VERY interesting new adoptions in 2009 and 2010. Happy New Year!!! Jim |
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| Letters from the Spatial Analysis Laboratory blog seems to agree: http://letters-sal.blogspot.com/2008/12/remote-sensing-industry-outlook.html I know the updated resolution seems to have no impact on what I do. Just more pretty pics for Google. |
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| With too many products, technologies, tools, and data sources that are quite mature, we are in a way getting saturated - the root cause of Adena's dilemma to pick the Top Ten 2008. However, I see a bright spot (or rather a vacant slot!) for a product that can make it to the Top Ten, if not this year, but possibly next year. I feel that, for many GIS practitioners today we do not have a product to put all these mature pieces together and come up with a solution that can be utilized by a Municipality (or another organization that predominantly uses maps) to carryout its day to day business processes. What I mean is a work flow product that can handle GIS tasks. (The industry uses the term workflow to mean the automation of a process that flows mainly between people; the one that coordinates both human tasks as well as system tasks is termed business process management - BPM). There is one product I know of in this category – JTX, Job Tracking for ArcGIS. JTX offers good functionality to define, organize, and standardize individual tasks within a workflow, as well as to automate tasks, track the status & progress of jobs, and allocate staffing resources. However, with characteristic GIS-centric view of the world the folks at ESRI built this product to work from within ArcGIS, and not the other way around! While there are many BPM products out there, what we really need is a BPM product that can handle business processes involving GIS tasks. I am not aware of any other similar products. Given such a product, there is lot of scope to re-engineer and improve the existing complex business processes of such organizations. Only when we can accomplish this, can we really say that geospatial technology has matured; a point I beg to differ with Joe Francica. Cheers! Unni GPC-GIS, Abu Dhabi, UAE |
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| While there may be little that's head-turning for the cognoscenti, I still stand by my statement that John King,the election cycle, etc. have made thematic mapping a much more mainstream mode of data visualization. And seeing thematic maps pop up on general interest blogs, etc., is a significant step forward. Somewhat related is with the smart phone competition heating up between iPhones, BlackBerrys, Android-based phones etc, almost every review spends time on the map capabilities. So while it may seem nothing much has changed down in the weeds, I'd humbly submit that "geographic thinking" is well on the march in the public consciousness. Brian |
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| Adena I agree with you about the increasing differentiation between the 4 traditional vendors. What might be interesting would be to rank the different markets that the vendors are targeting and predict which markets will support stable and growing revenues and which may suffer decline over the next 2 fiscal years. Then we could perhaps anticipate the shape of our industry in 2 years time. There will be some big changes. Seasons greetings Steven http://giscussions.blogspot.com http://www.twitter.com/stevenfeldman |
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| Brian, As Joe will attest, John King and his wall and your statement about it back in April was indeed in my discarded list. While I do agree to its importance, and it did get quite a lot of coverage, I think we are still too hung up on the "gee whiz" rather than the analytics it offered. Perhaps the Wall itself needs to be mundane so we can get folks to think about what it shows and how the process can be used for other things. Thanks as always for your considered opinion. Adena |
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