It has become apparent to many people in geospatial IT that 2005/2006 is a watershed period for our sector.  It’s not just one thing, but a constellation of things that have enabled and will continue to enable many more people, both users and developers, to use geospatial technology.

Ubiquitous Geospatial Data

Access to inexpensive geospatial data is available to anyone with an Internet connection or with an inexpensive GPS and a portable computer.  The cost of acquiring geospatial data continues to drop because of GPS, satellite,
and other technology.  One of the most
innovative approaches I have come across recently is Mapping the Neighbourhood ,
which is a project that relies on school children equiped with a GPS
and a handheld computer to map rural villages in India.  In the US a government initiative, TIGER,  paved the way, but in the last year the private sector including Google Earth and Map, MS Virtual Earth, and others have dramatically increased the quantity and quality of inexpensive geospatial data available.  Whether geospatial data should be free is a topic for discussion, but when geospatial data is inexpensive, as with TIGER and now with other technologies, it seems to create new opportunities. 

Mass-market Web Mapping

About eight months ago Google Earth, followed by others, did two things to provide access to inexpensive geospatial data.  First Google provided a simple web user interface to allow users to access and navigate through world-wide geospatial data. Secondly, Google provided a web services API and a simple exchange format (KML) to allow anyone to develop geospatial applications.  Web services are not new and follow in the footsteps of web services APIs have been available from other major web-based vendors like Salesforce.com, eBay, Amazon, Fedex, and others, but when Google Earth created a web services API for geospatial, it really opened the floodgates.  I have heard rumours that there are 800 developers building applications on Google Earth.

Open Spatially-enabled Database Management Systems

By 2005 most of the best known traditional RDBMS vendors and open source projects were spatially enabled to some degree (typically, the OGC Simple Feature Specification) including Oracle, PostGIS/PostgreSQL, DB2, Informix, and MySQL (with the ISAM engine).  But 2005 saw the introduction of Oracle10g, which extended suppprt to most types of spatial and topological data including topological polygons, linear referencing systems, georeferenced rasters, and linear topology.  That all of these data types are now accessible using SQL creates the basis for the open spatial enterprise where applications from multiple vendors share spatial and topological data.

Geospatial becomes Mainstream

Oracle is just one example of the benefits of spatially-enabling existing IT tools rather than relying on traditional GIS systems.  Dave Sonnen, who helps prepare the annual IDC report on spatial information systems, has been predicting for years that when the spatial-enabling market takes off, it will be much larger and grow more rapidly than the traditional GIS market.  2005 is when many people saw unmistakable signs that this was occurring.  This really hit home for me several months ago when I participated in a conference in California.   One of the speakers, who had obviously been a traditional GIS user for many years, explained how he had performed a geospatial operation using Oracle’s geospatial analysis tools and then concluded by saying “I didn’t even need a GIS.”  The key point is that geospatially-enabling standard IT tools and applications makes solutions conceivable for a broad range of business problems for which solutions were previously considered unimaginable.

Ubiquitous Wireless Broadband

In 2005/2006 we are on the cusp of ubiquitous high speed Internet access.  At least a hundred cities are planning to to completely Wi-Fi themselves.  If you visit Union Square in San Francisco and have tea in one of the restaurants near Union Square, you can enjoy free municipal wireless broadband.  Between 3G (UMTS for GSM or EV-DO for CDMA phones) and Wi-Fi, and in the future Wi-Max, wireless broadband access is going to be available just about everywhere.  What this means for utilities, telecoms, and municipalities is that facilities data is going to not only be directly accessible in the field, but that field staff will be increasingly directly responsible for maintaining facilities data.  In a nutshell, wireless broadband will enable Web 2.0 (participation) for the millions of staff out in the field.

Widely Adopted Geospatial Standards

The web would not have been successful without open standards supported by the world-wide IT community.  The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is responsible for the the key underlying standards of the modern web such as  HTTP, HTML, and XML.  The IEEE is responsible for standards such as 802.11x.  By 2005 broad government support internationally was achieved for the geospatial standards developed through the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) such as WMS, WFS, and GML.

Open Source Geospatial Foundation

2005/2006 saw the recognition that the open source geospatial community had reached a level of maturity, especially in the area of web mapping, where in order to move forward the community decided to form the Open Source Geospatial Foundation.  This enabled a major geospatial technology vendor, Autodesk, to announce support for the foundation and at the beginning of March 2006 to contribute a major code donation, MapGuide Open Source, to the Foundation.   The impact of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation will be significant because it will enable a large worldwide community of open source developers to integrate geospatial technology into their applications.  MapGuide Open Source provides the open source community with a next generation Web 2.0 geospatial platform for enabling participation.  For organizations responsible for managing network infrastructure,  this will enable field staff not only to view and markup, but also to
update spatial, attribute, and connectivity data from a handheld in the
field.

Inflection Point

Each of these is important on its own, but putting them all together suggests that 2005/2006 represents a major inflection point for the geospatial IT sector.  Specifically for organizations responsible for maintaining network infrastructure, these things create opportunities for major advances in how facilities are managed.  There are human issues that need to be addressed, but at this point it is difficult to point at technology as the reason for not moving ahead.