Mobile Devices, Content, and Other Top GIS Trends

July 20, 2010 By: Eric Gakstatter

ESRI International User Conference Summary

I spent a strong six days in San Diego this year trying to stay on top of geospatial developments and trends. I spent the first two days (Sat/Sun), as I normally do, at the ESRI Surveying and Engineering GIS Summit (SEGS) and the balance at the International User Conference (UC).

The SEGS is a niche conference of about 300 people, primarily of surveyors, engineers and GIS folks. They are the infrastructure people that many GIS depend on. As GISs are pushed towards higher-accuracy applications, this group will play a more important role in establishing an accurate and maintainable spatial foundation from which GIS applications are built. ESRI president Jack Dangermond made a brief presentation, by pre-recorded video, at the SEGS and referred to a conversation he had with National Geodetic Survey (NGS) geodesist Ronnie Taylor more than a decade ago. At that time, Dangermond stated that, and I’m paraphrasing, “accuracy didn’t matter” in a GIS. At the SEGS, Mr. Dangermond sincerely, albeit light-heartedly, apologized for that remark so many years ago and emphasized that accuracy IS important for GIS.

I encourage you to view my Live Event blog posted during the SEGS. At the Sunday luncheon, I had the honor of presenting the keynote address. You can view the pdf of my presentation by clicking here. Land surveyors and engineers have a significant role to play in the future of GIS.

On to the User Conference

First, some User Conference facts as reported by ESRI:

30th annual ESRI User Conference
Largest gathering of ESRI users in history
UC participants are from 134 countries
More than 6,000 organizations are represented

The opening plenary by ESRI President Jack Dangermond is always interesting and will hold your attention. However, I have to admit this is the first time I’ve ever attended his plenary in person. In years past, even though I’ve been at the conference, I’ve chosen not to attend. I guess I’ve always viewed it like watching the Superbowl on television rather than being at the live event. There’s a much better view from my couch than there is at the event. Nevertheless, there is a certain aura when attending the live event.

If you’re interested in viewing Mr. Dangermond’s plenary presentation, you can do so by clicking here. It’s a bit long (~90 minutes), but worth the time even if you have to split it up into a few viewing sessions.

A few points in his plenary presentation that I want to touch on.

The theme of this year's conference is "GIS - opening the world to everyone"

Courtesy: ESRI

Google, with their Google Earth product introduced years ago, made a significant contribution in making the world more “geography-aware." ESRI’s initiative to take it to the next level is the introduction of ArcGIS.com. While Google Earth has always been a simple tool with limited functionality, ArcGIS.com brings a lot of potential in introducing true GIS capabilities to the general population of the world.

Courtesy: ESRI

As the graphic above illustrates, GIS is beginning to evolve from a tool used by researchers to a mainstream technology used daily by society. How far will it evolve?

Leveraging on this, Dangermond says, is ArcGIS Mobile.

“Billions of smartphones are on the horizon," he said, which will “expand our community rapidly." He commented on the recently-released free ESRI ArcGIS iPhone app that was downloaded 30,000 times in its first week.

Dangermond said the "explosion of mobile devices" is like having "Cray computers in our hands."

Courtesy: ESRI

He's right about the mobile GIS movement, which is directly related to crowd-sourced data, a term thrown around very often at the conference. Whereas outsourcing is the act of contracting tasks to an outside person or organization, crowd-sourcing (or citizen-sourcing) is a loosely organized method of capturing large amounts of data at low cost from people who volunteer to contribute.

Another term thrown around a lot at the UC was "The Cloud." While the term may be relatively new, the concept has been around for years. The Cloud is the internet and where the software and data reside on servers instead of your desktop computer. The following slide illustrates how web-based geospatial applications are developing.

Courtesy: ESRI

Combine crowd-sourced data and web-based geospatial cloud computing and you have something like CitySourced, who was invited on the stage to present their idea to entire plenary audience. CitySourced is a free service that empowers residents to report civic issues such as graffitti, cracked sidewalks, etc. to local government. Its CEO co-founded MySpace so it's got some serious horsepower behind it.

Courtesy: ESRI

Mr. Dangermond also touched on the concept of Community Basemaps which I find is particularly intriguing, as it seems I'm always hunting for good quality data. His concept: contribute to the community basemap and you get a better one served to you. I like it. You can view a video I shot of his presentation on Community Basemaps by clicking here.

What impressed me most about the conference.

My first thought is that there was a lot more excitement and buzz about the future of geospatial applications than in recent years. We are nearing the end of a very long hike up a towering mountain. We are still not at the summit, but it's in sight and everyone's rejuvenated and energized.

As Dangermond stated, the availability of mobile devices is exploding. This has added a new dimension for geospatial application development. Sure, mobile devices, smart phones and ArcPad have been around for years, but we need to thank Apple, Nokia, RIM and Moore's Law for the recent wave of mobile device adoption. This has created a huge amount of development activity and raised awareness in society about the power of location-based services (LBS). Thus, it gets my nod as the largest contributor to this year's buzz.

The other major factor at this year's UC, content, has a brilliant flash and a slow percolation component. The brilliant flash is crowd-sourced data that is just beginning its rapid ascent to stardom in the world of content. Without content, GIS software is just an engine with no fuel. Crowd-sourcing is a low-octane fuel for geospatial, but it's available in huge volumes.

The slow percolation content is imagery and GPS. Both have been around for years, even decades, and both have made slow, steady progress in becoming more and more useful for generating content. Over the next five years, they will make major leaps.

Lawrie Jordan, ESRI's Director of Imagery and founder of ERDAS (which was later sold to Leica), spoke about this being the most exciting time of his 40-year career in imagery. He said that in the next five years, every square inch of the Earth will be imaged (by satellites) constantly.

Jan Van Sickle, in his presentation, said that imagery "is raining down on us" in volumes that are hard to comprehend.

On the GPS front, I've written and spoken a lot about where it is today and where it's going. Today, GPS is cheap. It's a $2-3 chip in your cell phone, but it's not very accurate. It's still very useful though. How accurate does it need to be to report graffitti, a broken water line or a damaged tree? But in 5 to 8 years, it's going to be cheap and accurate. Either way, GPS plays a critically important role in the crowd-sourced and community basemap schemas.

Phew! Lots to digest and report on. I didn't include some other items I wanted to discuss. Keep checking the Geospatial Solutions website for new videos and blogs.

Thanks and see you next week.

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