I always look forward to Joe Francica’s talks at various events. At this year’s GIS in the Rockies he offered words for the wise in the geospatial world that will be considered by some revolutionary and by others evolutionary.
Don’t call yourself a GIS analyst, call yourself a data scientist
The reasoning behind this is that geospatial technology which used to be an isolated technology, often with its own group within the organization, has become integrated with the broader IT technology. This translates into IT professionals increasingly knowing how to used geospatial technology along with other IT tools, and GIS professionals including general IT technologies in their quiver. For example, data science professionals who use SQL databases, Hadoop and Spark, and JSON to manage data are also using spatial extensions such as Oracle Spatial, SQLServer Spatial, PostGIS, GeoMesa and GeoJSON as well as Google Maps. GIS professionals have broadened their use of general IT tools from SQL databases to non-SQL databases, Python, Java, and Javascript APIs, and HTML5. Another dimension to this is that whereas geospatial professionals used to focus their attention on data acquisition, their focus nowadays is on data quality, visualization, and analytics – converting data into information.
Don’t major in GIS, get a degree in forestry, engineering or data science first.
The corollary to this is that folks responsible for setting curricula for non-GIS major and professional undergraduate programs should ensure that geospatial technology is included. For example, nowadays it is essential that architects and engineers be familiar with geospatial technology. A number of years ago Anne Kemp, then head of GIS at Atkins Global, the design and engineering firm, asked the question ‘BIM isn’t geospatial — or is it?’ and argued that integration of geospatial and BIM was essential to address the challenges of the 21st century. The need to integrate geospatial and BIM has since rapidly gained traction in the construction industry as evidenced by the partnership developing between GIS and AEC market leaders ESRI and Autodesk.
Joe’s advice reflects the integration of geospatial technology into general IT that dramatically broadened in scale in 2006 with the release of Google Maps and which since has accelerated driven by modern web applications’ ability to integrate data and tools from multiple APIs and data sources.
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