GITA/ACSM Conference Wrap-up

May 5, 2010 By: Eric Gakstatter

With presentations ranging from crowdsourced GIS data to forensic surveying, and a lot of fascinating stuff in between, the co-located American Congress on Surveying and Mapping (ACSM) and the Geospatial Infrastructure & Technology Association (GITA) provided plenty to chew on. In this column, you’ll find lots of photos and links to videos taken at the joint conferences.

If you missed last week’s newsletter, I covered the first couple of days of the conference. The discussion panel on Surveying/GIS Collaboration is particularly worth reading along with the video clips.

Also, you may want to take a look at this week’s Survey Scene newsletter in which I cover some of the surveying-related issues discussed at the conference. It’s chock full of text and video taken at the conference.

GITA 2010 Exhibition Hall

On Tuesday, I attended a 90 minute Panel Discussion entitled “Driven by Data: Who Pays, Who Plays?"

Robert F. Austin, GISP, City of Tampa
James Fee, GIS Blogger
Robert L. Young, RPLS, Young & Assoc.
Rudy Stricklan, RPLS, AMEC Earth & Environmental

The first line of the abstract captured the essence of the discussion.

“In the world where digital data paid for by taxpayers is driving navigation systems and other consumer and commercial uses, what is the right balance of free vs. fee?”

This is a complex topic and is far from being settled. In California, Santa Clara County lost a lawsuit and they were ordered to make available, at cost of reproduction, their GIS data. Personally, I’ve probably made more than 100 requests for data at the local government level all around the US over the last 10 years. I wrote last Fall and it stands true today, that for as long as I can remember, this issue has been solidly ambiguous among state and, more so, local governments. One entity would email (or make available via FTP) GIS data at a moment’s notice. Another entity would have you sign away your first-born child. Even another would not entertain the thought of releasing “our data” to anyone. Granted, it’s not usually the consultant such as me who’s requesting two-foot contours of a 500-acre area to generate a 3D visualization that local government is concerned about. It’s the organizations looking for volumes of data, such as Navteq and TeleAtlas, which repackage the data and turn it into a handsome profit. Should those organizations bear some of the cost of data acquisition?

Even after the panel discussion, I’m not sure where this issue is going. Some organizations count on revenue from data sales to help recover costs of data acquisition. Without that revenue, some of the data acquisition would not be possible.

My gut feeling is that local government shouldn’t be in the business of selling data. They should acquire data to meet their needs and that data should be made available to the public at a fair cost of reproduction. Maybe that’s naïve, but it seems the most logical.

Speaking of free data, there was an interesting panel discussion on Geodata Creation and Sharing.

Panel members included:

Peter Batty (Ubisense)
Andrew Turner (FortiusOne)
Ron Lake (Galdos Systems)
James Fee (WeoGeo)
Steve Coast (OpenStreetMap)

The attitude of some of the panel members was that Navteq and TeleAtlas will eventually cease to exist because OpenStreetMap (or something similar) will eventually be the preferred geodata source. I think that was said with tongue-in-cheek, but community-contributed type of geodata source definitely has a significant place in the future of digital geography.

Discussion about geocommunity data and OpenStreetMap

On the Exhibit Floor

Berntsen’s was showing off their yet-to-be-released RF (Radio Frequency) ID system. A few weeks ago, I wrote an article about this technology. As I wrote before, I think this is a game-changing technology. It’s still early, at least in the geospatial industry, but as this technology begins to mature and the geospatial industry understands its value, it will become commonplace. It just makes too much sense.

RF ID Tags RF ID Scanner

I also stopped by the Intergraph booth at the GITA. They gave me a demonstration of their outage-management system, mobile-workforce management, power systems analysis suite.

A look at Intergraph's Mobile Resource Management system

Let’s discuss conferences for a minute

As good as the content was for both the GITA and ACSM conferences, the attendance was horrible. If there were 1,000 people there (for both), I’d be surprised. At this pace of decline, something’s got to give. I attended the annual GITA conference in Seattle in 2008. If I recall correctly, there were about 1,400 attendees. This year, in 2010, there were maybe half of that including exhibitors. Next year, the GITA conference is operating as a stand-alone conference in a suburb of Dallas, Texas. I predict it might be even worse than this year. The ACSM annual conference is not doing any better, but rumor has it will co-locate in 2011. The two conferences won’t be co-located next year. It’s a time for conferences to start working together.

Size Matters

It’s a vicious cycle. The fewer attendees there are, the less interested vendors are in exhibiting and sponsoring the event. Each year, attendance erodes until it doesn’t make sense any longer. Now is the time for conference consolidation, especially in the GIS industry. GIS is tough to segment because it stretches across so many industry boundaries. In April alone, there was the GIS-T (GIS in Transportation) conference in West Virginia, the GITA/ACSM co-located conference in Phoenix and the ASPRS (American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing) conference in San Diego. All of these are small conferences that are becoming increasingly difficult to justify, financially, for both the operators and the attendees. I can safely say that attendees and vendors certainly would prefer to attend one conference in one location that includes GIS-T, GITA and ASPRS rather than three separate conferences spread out all over the US. They need to consolidate at the same time in a single location. Consolidating would attract a reasonable attendance level that would justify vendor participation.

Thanks and see you next week.

Follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/GPSGIS_Eric