How to use GIS for the Best

Starting with this issue, the editorial is dedicated to notes from members of our editorial board or authors, reflecting on the issue, the profession or an article they’ve been working on, giving an insight ‘behind the scenes’. I hope you enjoy it and I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts and suggestions.

Joost Boers, Content Manager

Almost halfway into 2017, this year is shaping up to be one of the most exciting in the geospatial industry's history. Highlights so far include the recent Google Earth upgrade, Planet's miniature satellite launches, Amazon's free satellite imagery offering on AWS, while the forthcoming release of QGIS 3.0 is likely to excite many in the open-source community.

On the topic of GIS, one of the big discussions among the geospatial community in 2017 concerns the changing nature of the GiS Professional's role. Augmented reality and machine learning are already having a massive impact on the industry while advances in the data science field (thanks to the growing popularity of tools like Tableau and statistical programming languages such as R) suggests that geospatialists should redefine their unique value. Finally, the two fields which are likely to see an increased demand for geospatial skills this year are transportation and cybersecurity.

Niall Conway, Contributing Editor

"Maps keep fascinating me. Not just because they provide a visual way of communicating complex information, but also because maps can be full of surprises. Read all about trap streets and phantom settlements in this issue's big maps story."

Sabine de Milliano, Contributing Editor

As head of stakeholder engagement at one of the world's largest intergovernmental organisations focused on geospatial topics, I spend most of my time meeting parties investing in and using Earth observations.

I travel a fair amount and have a privileged position of seeing trends across organisations, sectors and even continents. Figure 1 was part of my plenary talk at the recent ISRSE37 conference in Tschwane, South Africa in May. It was created as a result of input from the commercial sector organisations participating who told me what they thought was important in the short to medium-term. Organisations including ISRSE exhibitors: Airbus, CloudEO, Deimos Imaging, DigitalGlobe, Esri, Hexagon, PCI Geomatics, Planet and others.

This – and more events like SatSummit in January and DisruptSpace in March talked about going from data to decisions via insight and intelligence. This is where GEO sits; we convene the global EO community to offer insight for policy development and decision making. www.earthobservations.org

Steven Ramage, Contributing Editor

This article was published in GIS Professional June 2017