The U.S. Department of Labor’s Employment & Training Administration has recognized the geospatial industry as one of fourteen important emerging industries — along with advanced manufacturing, automotive, biotechnology, construction, energy, financial services, health care, homeland security, hospitality, information technology, aerospace, retail, and transportation. This designation reflects both the explosive growth of the geospatial industry in terms of sales as well as a perception of its increasing importance in the context of the post-9/11 focus on developing national disaster response capabilities.
Today, tens of millions of people are aware of a few products of this industry — especially GPS-based car navigation systems and on-line maps — but very few understand the range and complexity of technologies involved and how they interact.
The geospatial industry consists of individuals, private companies, non-profit organizations, academic and research institutions, and government agencies that research, develop, manufacture, implement, and employ geospatial technology (also known as geomatics) and gather, store, integrate, manage, map, analyze, display, and distribute geographic information — i.e., information that is tied to a particular location on Earth. Geospatial technologies include the Global Positioning System (GPS) and other global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), total stations to measure angles and distances, light detection and ranging (LIDAR), remote sensing (RS, which includes multi-spectral satellite imaging and aerial ortho-photography), location-based services (LBS), computer-aided design (CAD), and geographic information systems (GIS). The industry includes basic and applied research, technology development, and applications to address all types of planning, decision-making, and operational needs of government, the private sector, science, and individuals. The market for geomatics products can be divided by level of accuracy into three segments: consumer grade, resource grade, and survey grade.
The geospatial industry produces knowledge (such as the geographic distribution of cases of malaria or of social service centers), products (such as hand-held GPS receivers or ortho-rectified digital aerial photographs), and services (such as turn-by-turn directions or storm tracking). While consumer geomatics products are very user-friendly and may require as little user input as entering an address, professional uses require significant technical training. Therefore, the educational and training activities of colleges, universities, and professional organizations are a key component of the geospatial community. Geospatial disciplines include surveying, geodesy, mapping, cartography, remote sensing, and geographic information science.
Geospatial technology is used in the vast majority of industries and professions — from agriculture to oil & gas, from transportation to land use planning — and these areas of application are known in industry lingo as vertical markets or just verticals. Ultimately, however, all geospatial technology aims at helping people make decisions — from ones as simple as where to go for dinner to ones as complex as where to locate a new hospital.
This broad mix of technologies and applications is always bubbling with exciting new developments. Here are a few:
The shift toward enterprise GIS. During the past decade, GIS has grown from a “point solution” serving specialist users to an enterprise resource. It is now beginning to grow through a second generation of applications that deepen and broaden its use throughout an organization, increasingly integrating it with other enterprise systems in support of a wide range of business applications. Moreover, widespread consumer use of on-line maps by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Mapquest, and other providers has raised demand and expectations in business settings as well. While most consumers do not know what GIS is, in the workplace they increasingly expect line-of-business applications — such as asset-management, job scheduling, customer relationship management (CRM), and enterprise resource planning (ERP) — to incorporate geographic information. Consequently, organizations are increasingly making lightweight GIS accessible to a wide range of knowledge workers. GIS is being used to optimize the use of corporate resources across multiple sites, support remote workers, reduce overheads, and reduce the cost and environmental impact of business travel.
The convergence of CAD and GIS. For decades, CAD has been an essential tool in engineering, architecture, and construction to draw objects, from the tiniest individual parts to entire buildings, and then rotate them and view them from different perspectives. GIS, on the other hand, allows users to integrate data from a wide variety of sources over a wide range of scales, from single plots to entire continents, and analyze them using many tools — some, like buffering, used across all applications and some very specialized, such as those used to analyze water demand or electric networks. During the past few years, all the major vendors of CAD and GIS software have been focusing a lot of their development efforts on enabling users to easily take advantage of both the precision of CAD and the analytical capabilities of GIS in a single software package. The key benefit of this convergence is the intelligent simulation of urban environments for urban and emergency planning and for economic development and one result is the growth of building information modeling (BIM).
The launch of several new and more powerful imaging satellites. Earth observation satellites continue to be constructed and launched at breakneck speed, with more than a dozen launched last year alone. Last September, Digital Globe launched WorldView-1, a panchromatic imaging system with half-meter resolution imagery. It has an average revisit time of 1.7 days and is capable of collecting up to 750,000 square kilometers (290,000 square miles) per day. On April 14, the European Space Agency (ESA) and Thales Alenia Space signed a €305 million contract to provide the first Sentinel-3 earth observation satellite, devoted to oceanography and land-vegetation monitoring. Sentinel-3, scheduled to launch in 2012, will provide crucial data for information services in climate change, sustainable development, environmental policies, European civil protection, development aid, humanitarian aid, and the European Common Foreign & Security Policy. On August 22, GeoEye is scheduled to launch its GeoEye-1 satellite, which will have the highest resolution of any commercial imaging system — 0.41-meters, or 16 inches, for panchromatic (black and white) imagery and multispectral (color) imagery at 1.65-meter resolution. However, due to U.S. government licensing restrictions, commercial customers will have access to imagery at half-meter ground resolution. According to GeoEye, the satellite is designed to offer three-meter accuracy, which means that end users can map natural and man-made features to within three meters of their actual locations on Earth’s surface without ground control points.
The development of the European Galileo GNSS to complement GPS. Stymied for years by tangled issues of risk, budget, and governance, Galileo, Europe’s contribution to GNSS, is still proceeding. On May 7 the constellation’s second satellite, GIOVE-B, began transmitting the GPS-Galileo common signal, in accordance with a 2007 July agreement between the European Union and the United States. GIOVE-B’s signals will provide deeper penetration for indoor navigation and higher accuracy in environments made challenging by multipath and interference. They also demonstrate that Galileo and GPS are truly compatible and interoperable. Then, at the beginning of July, the European Parliament, while reiterating its strong opposition to the militarization of space, recognized the need for Galileo to serve the European Union’s defense and security — a change from its earlier stance on the issue. This, coupled with the decision to pursue public funding for the project — also a reversal from the original plan for a public-private partnership — greatly strengthen the chances that the system will eventually be completed. Full deployment of the Galileo constellation will roughly double the number of available GNSS satellites, greatly improving the accuracy and reliability of satellite positioning and navigation. Meanwhile, China is continuing development of its Compass/Beidou Navigation Satellite System (CNSS), the Russian Federation is expanding its Global Navigation Satellite System (GLONASS), India and Japan are working on putting navigation satellites into orbit and establishing GNSS augmentation services, and the United States is modernizing GPS with new satellites and signals. Consumers and professional users of satellite navigation are seeing new applications, falling prices, and better performance. Besides the more obvious applications, such as in mobile phones and car navigation systems, GPS also provides precise timing for banking transactions, television broadcasting, and the Internet.
The development of 3D models and virtual worlds. Google recently announced that it is expanding to Europe its Cities in 3D Program, which it launched in March in the United States and Canada. One example is an architecturally detailed 3D digital model of Holbeck Urban Village, Leeds, U.K., produced by AMT3D using long distance laser scanning technology. These three-dimensional models, made available via Google Earth servers, are owned and/or created by a multitude of people and organizations — from individual home owners to municipalities.
By Matteo Luccio, President, Pale Blue Dot Research, Writing, and Editing, LLC
For the MetaCarta Blog
