The Evolution of Technology

It’s interesting to see how technology evolves and how important geospatial data has become. The difference between how simple it may look to link data together and how difficult it sometimes can be, are two different things. It’s the technology – but we can overcome that hurdle. The most important challenge is often in the organisation or organisations. They may work together well, however, it’s eye-opening if you hear about a project related to INSPIRE where a project manager saw a tweet related to the project along the lines: ‘Thanks to INSPIRE I can use the data that is created in the office next door’. At the same time, I am really fascinated with autonomous learning, this leading to roadmaps being updated automatically with data collected and transmitted by self-driving cars in real time. I can’t wait for this to be daily practice!

Joost Boers, content manager

The past few months have been exciting ones in the geospatial world. From the 7th annual UN-GGIM conference in New York in August to the 10th annual INSPIRE conference in France and Germany last month, there has been lots of collaboration among the international geospatial community. The OGC hosted Location Powers: Underground Infrastructure event at the Geovation Hub in London was followed by its Technical Conference the following week. QGIS revealed some exciting new 3D features in advance of its upcoming QGIS 3 launch, Pitney Bowes announced some software updates and Big Data solutions which are sure to interest the business intelligence community, while Australia committed its future to Earth Observation and Remote Sensing by announcing that it will launch its very own national space agency.

Niall Conway, contributing editor

Open data stimulates innovation and provides many opportunities for the development of new products and services. I am a happy user of open data, especially open satellite data such as Sentinel images (from the Copernicus programme) and the extensive Landsat archive. However, in my experience, it can also be a real challenge to discover and use the right open data. Combined with potential political and commercial obstacles for open data in general, one can conclude: open data is definitely a great movement, but not as simple as it seems.

Sabine de Milliano, contributing editor

"The global open data movement has helped governments make inroads into solving problems with a data-driven approach. Open data provides a new kind of glue to bring governments and citizens together. It facilitates interaction, provides the means to rally around shared objectives, and helps everyone stay connected and informed as improvements take place.”

Jack Dangermond, founder of esri

This article was published in GIS Professional October 2017