There has been a lot of talk regarding renewed funding for national spatial data infrastructure, with an acknowledgment of the gap between government-owned and commercial spatial data. Given broad spatial data coverage of street and address data, the general public predominantly perceives spatial data as a done deal. What’s the need to collect more data when my house is on the map in more ways than one, and I can navigate to where I need to go?
If we look only at addresses and the map-based view, then the effort is mostly done for the developed world, save standard updates for new roads and addresses. The commercial vendors have the navigation and routing market sewn up, augmented by OpenStreetMap. There isn’t likely to be another commercial entry into this market as the cost of entry for country-scale data is steep, and there’s too much catching up to do. So, if the commercial geospatial data market is saturated, what more is there?
The common perception is that spatial data only means what I can see on a map or a geo-referenced image, but geospatial data are much more than just a static snapshot. The geospatial industry needs to do a better job of education about the many data frontiers that are being explored, and the compelling applications that continued investments will enable.
Adding Dimension and Precision
There have been an explosion of technologies that improve the collection of precise geospatial information.
Laser scanning is a technology that will quickly revolutionize surveying. The ability to take a terrestrial laser scanner to a site to capture the entire area with accurate survey points frees up the surveyor to visit a site once for a specific project, and to take some subsequent measurements from the office, rather than having to know each and every point that will need collecting ahead of time. This provides a huge productivity gain to cut down on repeated visits to the same site. And these tools of quick precision can be harnessed to provide a wealth of new details about infrastructure.
The ubiquity of high-resolution imagery platforms means that much of the earth is imaged regularly. More and more countries are launching their own earth observation satellites in order to get a handle on the impacts of environmental change on their economies. And there are an increasing number of web-based tools that make it easy to manage and manipulate huge imagery stores.
The quick and automated capture of 3D city data from mobile platforms are adding a great deal of realism and currency to geospatial exploration systems. The utility of these realistic environments will only increase as the importance of the Internet increases for commerce, and it’s just a matter of time before our urban areas are accurately captured on an ongoing basis at a high degree of digital reality.
Data for Decisions
On another front, we need to remind ourselves that the data we collect is for vital purposes. There’s a classic video series that documents the original Canadian Geographic Information System that’s now on YouTube. The title of this piece is Data for Decision, and it’s a quaint but good reminder of purpose-driven data gathering.
While we’ve come a long way in our ability to collect and analyse geospatial data, there are pressing needs for more and better analysis. Our planet is facing increasing peril due to changes in our atmosphere that are leading to changes in climate. The repercussions of a warming planet are far reaching, and little understood. This growing crisis is coupled by our current economic uncertainty, with populations around the globe now faced with scarcity of resources.
These two compounding calamities raise the need for a greater understanding of dynamic issues that are affecting the whole planet. Geospatial data with increasing resolution and currency will feed tools to help us come to grips with both climate and economic pressures, and our current data sets and systems just aren’t capable of the kind of granular knowledge that is necessary. A concerted focus on the data needs around these problems would reveal a large number of gaps that exist between mature GIS data sets in some regions and glaring voids in others.
There’s a nearly limitless need for data quality and currency improvements in order to approach the modeling and measurement of our dynamic planet with real-time digital realities. Collectively, all of the technological advancements are fueling an appetite for more and better geospatial information. The saturation of the geospatial data market is nowhere in sight, as there is still a great amount of our planet to be captured, and a myriad of data types to be added to enhance our understanding and analysis capabilities.
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Nice article! Just as you mentioned about the dimension, temporal aspect of the geospatial data is very important for many projects. For such needs collecting data may not stop or even saturate as well.