While it may be hard to think about innovation given the current business climate, there’s a increasing cry for greater creativity as a means to compete in the global economy. My previous Perspectives column focused on the technological frontiers for GIS advancement, and this is a related post that takes a look at ongoing problems that geospatial tools can help solve.
All of the areas of growth that I’ll explore will require an expansion of the current geospatial toolset, and will likely involve new players. Given the focus of Vector1 Media on sustainability, I’ll look primarily at areas that stand to gain greatly by balancing the needs of the economy, the environment and society.
Urban Monitoring and Modeling
A growing percentage of the world’s population lives in cities, and cities present humankind’s best prospects for living more lightly on the land. The move to create more efficient cities points to a great many opportunities for geospatial application. While cities are currently among the most innovative and long-term users of geospatial technology, there’s still a ways to go in modeling their surroundings, and using these tools for more in-depth management of assets and services.
While cities have spent a good deal of time and effort on e-government initiatives very few have explored the true power of the technology to offer services to citizen and to monitor the effectiveness of their workforce. A few cities stand out for their placement of web-mapping as central in their IT strategy, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Both of these cities have created award-winning effort to use Web-based tools for greater transparency and accountability of their operations. Cities are particularly hard-hit by the current economy due to a dramatic drop in tax revenue. The tools that these two cities have developed provide a clear pathway toward saving money by increasing efficiency and reducing bureaucracy. The benefits from such systems makes them necessary investments whose justification only increases as the economic climate gets worse.
The development of highly detailed digital city models is now something that is within easier reach given the use of 3D laser scanning technology, highly accurate aerial images, and advanced visualization software. As the technology has come together, so too has come a need to think holistically about planning, and to incorporate elements of sustainable design that consider energy use and impacts. These high-resolution 3D city models provide great growth opportunities for all infrastructure projects, but most critically in highly dense urban areas .
Energy
Electrical transmission and distribution is very inefficient, with utilities maintaining power on their networks that represents a full 25 percent more than current needs in order to meet peak demand. The implementation of smart grid technology, that couples electric transmission with sensors and communication technology, will greatly improve transmission efficiency, delivering power as it’s needed on the grid. These reactive and distributed power networks will require a great deal of spatial information and real-time information of a spatial nature about dynamic elements such as weather and the movement of people from work to home.
The reality of peak oil has led to a realization that we must invest in renewable energy for economic and security benefits. The investment in hydro, geothermal, wind, solar and wave energy will require careful consideration about where to best site these investments, which is a geospatial problem. Geospatial companies stand to gain business by helping companies harness natural sources of power, and to connect these power sources with areas where this energy is demanded.
As energy sources become more scarce, resource companies will turn to geospatial companies for rigorous prospecting where the same 3D surveying tools will serve to heighten the success of the resource assessment effort. With much higher degree of survey accuracy, and tools like hyperspectral imagery and other element-oriented sensors, the details gathered in the field will speed the insight process and ensure a higher degree of success when it comes time to extract oil, gas or coal in an environmentally-sensitive manner.
Environmental Monitoring
As we gain a better handle on the impacts that humans have on the environment, the need for more holistic ecosystem management will feed advancements in geospatial tools. The sensor web, coupled with connected and distributed systems (systems of systems) will greatly improve our powers of earth observation. With the impact of global climate change more closely tied to economic and societal ills, we’ll need to increase our understanding of these linkages. Geospatial technology is uniquely capable of providing feedback.
Large enterprise computing players like CISCO have taken notice of these opportunities, noting that of the $2.8 trillion stimulus plans around the globe there is $450 billion targeted to mitigate and adapt to climate change. CISCO just launched a ‘Planetary Skin‘ project in collaboration with NASA that is meant to keep tabs on the impact of climate change through a decision support platform that incorporates readings from networked sensors. While this concept has been around for a long time, the firm’s far reach in IT sectors may give it a leg up on creating the technological infrastructure to pull this off. Geospatial tools stand to benefit immensely from this added data. The technological research and development that goes into the decision support side will likely accelerate the ability of GIS tools to handle this massive data with its incredible temporal and spatial depth.
I’ve been around long enough to have gone through a few burst of accelerated geospatial development and innovation. While the current pace is turning up some exciting technologies on a fairly regular basis, it’s nothing like the pace of just six or seven years ago. There’s still are enormous possibilities for this technology in a great many sectors, and there are certainly many available smart people to spur a new wave of geospatial innovation.
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