Geospatial problem .. confused by your choice of potential solutions?
It would be wrong to suggest that I am the most organized person around. Just ask my wife. But I do not do well unless I can place thoughts and ideas into mental boxes. And when it comes to our geospatial world, that has been a struggle over the last few years.
Ten years ago it was easy. There were two main camps: GIS and Google Maps respectively. These were mostly non-conflicting since GIS served largely the public sector, while Google Maps was more consumer facing. But the growth of geospatial has created a degree of confusion, at least in my mind. An attempt to clear up some of that confusion, to help in choosing the right solution to solve a problem, is the purpose of this article.
3 geospatial buckets ..
For this discussion let's not consider consumer geospatial: Google, Uber, Airbnb etc. Our focus will be on enterprise geospatial. I think in terms of 3 buckets:
- Specialist Tools
- Location (Business) Intelligence - Smart Maps
- Digital Reality
Let's consider each in turn.
Specialist Tools
There are likely many tools that fall into this group. Four categories come immediately to my mind: photogrammetry, remote sensing, GIS and cartography. Many of us developed expertise in one or more of these areas at school. I remember well learning how to use remote sensing tools like Imagine, and diving deep into GIS while at the University of Utah. Specialist tools are focused. They require training. Staff are often based in the IT, mapping or GIS departments. These are expert geospatial tools.
Location (Business) Intelligence - Smart Maps
In my last article 'What are our Geospatial/GIS Leaders talking about??', two of the most commonly used words in the publication discussed were location and intelligence. New geospatial tools have recently been released which extend business intelligence by providing deeper location insight.
These so called location intelligence tools, are often dashboard powered web applications. They allow users to combine data from both inside and outside an organization. And, through configurable widgets, answer any location-based organizational question. These are non-expert geospatial tools used across departments.
Digital Reality
To me digital reality is where things get very interesting. We often hear reference to the term 'digital twin'. That is a digital representation of the real world. Thanks to advances in technology we now have new solutions which provide both 2D and 3D visualization of both static and real time data. A near-mirror image of our dynamic connected real world. Visualize, analyse any location-based data in a single interface: the possibilities are endless and enormously exciting.
I'll expand further on each of these areas in future articles. But segmenting geospatial in this way has helped me fit problem to solution. That is ever more important as the demand for answers to location-based questions continues to rise exponentially.