The creative destruction of GIS

In the past 150 editions, GIS Development has provided a platform to reflect on the emergence of GIS and broader geospatial information market unrivalled by any other publication. During this period of continuous change, the industry has responded to technological developments, economic ups and downs and societal change in equal measure. Rarely have developments in the GIS industry conflicted with broader trends; instead the GIS industry has consistently responded to wider changes by adapting to them. This trend is most clear in the movement of geospatial data and tools onto the Web, from the enterprise perspective – a natural evolution of client server systems of the late 1990s but this trend has also resulted in geospatial information finally reaching a 'mainstream' audience. The migration of GIS tools to the Web has been as disruptive to geospatial industry as similar moves have been to many other industries such as music and the press. In many cases, well established business models have been made irrelevant as economist Joseph Schumpter described capitalism as 'creative destruction' – a term that is also well suited to the force that is Web innovation.

Without doubt, the Internet and the Web will be seen as the most important technological development of the 20th century. As with the industrial revolution of the 18th century, the information revolution of the 21st century will also have significant economic and cultural impacts. The key characteristic of this information revolution and something of particular importance to the geospatial industry is the value associated with access to information. There is a simple relationship between the ease of access to information and economic activity which dates back to the development of the printing press and which has thus become know as Gutenberg's law. Each technological advance that increases the effectiveness of publishing and distributing information has provided massive economic activity allowing new markets and business to be created. Just imagine the economic impact created by the steam ship, the telegraph, the jet airliner and of course the Internet.

The impact of the internet in terms of the ease by which information can be made available and be distributed to a global audience is clear to anyone who is a regular user of the Web. The underlying economic impact of having useful information instantly accessible has not been quantified though. Few would argue that the internet has a major deflationary effect on the cost of services over the past decade. The European Commission has looked at the economic impact of the wider ICT industry in Europe which contributes around 5% of GDP, confirming Gutenberg's Law and the value of information as an economic catalyst. ICT is responsible for 25% of the communities' economic growth and 40% of Europe's increased productivity.

What do these broad trends mean for the future of GIS? The focus of the industry is moving away for the creation/ maintenance of geospatial information to its exploitation. This is evident in the increased focus on the information products of GIS and their value. There are two important consequences of this. Firstly, tools and services that are critical for publishing and distributing geospatial data will become dominant in the industry. It is not that we don't need creation and maintenance tools but their relative importance will decrease. Secondly, beyond the technical changes of making geospatial information more widely available on the Web, views on policy and value of intellectual property will need to be reassessed as these are seen as preventing wider access to information.

The end of GIS?
Since the 1960s, the development of GIS and GIS software tools has been dominated by users with a requirement to create and manage geospatial databases either as a core activity of the organisations (mapping/cadastral agencies), or as an important supporting component to existing business processes (utility companies, planning departments etc).

The use of GIS within an organisation has remained a specialised niche activity, often very complex and requiring integration of existing enterprise business systems. Users of GIS within enterprises require post graduate training in IT or GIS and become domain experts within their organisations. While the development of GIS within the enterprise has been influenced by broader trends in IT, in particular the emergence of client server systems and the development of service orientated architecture, the 'rush' to the Web has not had a major impact. This parallels the experience in the other 'content creation' industries where for example publishing systems, desktop video editing and CAD systems have developed isolated from the Web. This is understandable and is likely to remain the situation for the foreseeable future. In other words, the core GIS industry will remain a highly specialised and complex area, requiring domain expertise. The one area where we may see more innovation is in the development of improved functionality to publish geospatial information.

The process of publishing geospatial data is still a relatively immature concept. It is important to note that here we are not talking about just making a layer of GIS data available on the Web, publishing is a more complex process involving editorial input in choosing 'how' data is to be published, and the necessary steps to make sure the published data is both findable and easily accessible on the Web. The conventional approach of creating metadata catalogues and deploying OGC WxS services has not been particularly successful, as the issue of findability and discoverablity of information has not been covered. In the future, tools will allow the publication of geospatial content from enterprise systems in the same way that word processing tools allow the export of pdf documents. Today, the creation of metadata to document geospatial datasets is a highly manual and therefore a non-scalable process. This has to be automated in the future. The 'publish to…' command used by a data owner should make this a transparent process.

A crucial factor in the success of publishing geospatial data will be in the use of standards and tools like KML, which not only allow geospatial information to be encoded in an open fashion, but also allow metadata to be crawled by conventional Web search engines. User should and will expect geospatial data to be discoverable using search engines in the same way that almost all other information is discovered.

Set the information free
Information is like liquid mercury. By it very nature, it wants to flow, it wants to spread following the path of least resistance, and shares the disconcerting characteristic of mercury in moving in unexpected ways. For the last few years, access to information and particularly geospatial information has been the topic of heated discussion. Much geospatial data has been created by or developed specifically for public bodies and in some countries its reuse has been severely restricted. I believe we are beginning to see a consensus form around the concept that public sector geospatial data should be freely accessible for use by citizens and commercial organisations who can in turn add value to the raw data.

Taxpayer-funded public institutions gather many types of geospatial information, not only maps but also traffic information, socio-economic data and meteorological updates. All of this information is potentially useful to citizens. For example in Singapore, a wide variety of publicly funded data sources enabled Google to launch Google Transit, merging public transport schedules, up-to-theminute traffic updates and intelligent routing with the location-determining capabilities of today's mobile phones.

Unfortunately, it has often been difficult to get access to the information required to develop such cool, innovative and useful services. Despite being public, open access to this data has not been automatic, and in Europe in particular, complex licence agreements are common. The European Union recognised in 2003 the potential for innovation and economic growth that easy access to publicly funded information could unlock, and adopted a directive setting the conditions under which public sector bodies should encourage re-use of their information resources. The PSI directive requires that member states "will encourage the reuse of public data by third parties to develop enriched services that maximise the value for the public."

From a very personal perspective, I am encouraged that the UK government has taken an important unilateral first step towards freeing public data: from April next year, UK's Ordnance Survey mid-scale maps will become freely available – and re-usable – online. This represents an important victory for The Guardian's laudable 'Free Our Data' campaign which has been running for the last three years. UK joins Canada, South Africa, Australia, Norway and the United States in making core geospatial data freely available. The momentum behind increasing access to public sector geospatial information will continue to improve and will allow innovators everywhere to create cool, useful products.

Mainstream adoption
Although GIS, as described previously, is and will remain the domain of specialists, the use of geospatial information and simple geospatial tools have already entered the mainstream. For example, there are more than 500 million users of Google Earth, every hour users make over 10,000 corrections or additions to Google Maps and every day, Maps and Earth users spend over 1 million hours browsing geo content. What has driven this huge uptake in the use of geospatial information has at one level been the introduction of easy to use tools like Google and Bing maps, but perhaps more importantly these tools have allowed access to comprehensive geospatial data sets of the globe. Google Maps and Earth share a common map base which provides detailed street maps in more than 100 countries around the world, transit information for over 400 cities worldwide, with traffic information for cities in seven countries. Together with an imagery base layer of high resolution aerial and satellite imagery, it is the most detailed global map every produced for consumption by the general public.

Important in the wide scale adoption of Google geospatial data tools has been a focus on making the content easily accessible across many services, many of which are not Google owned or operated. This syndication strategy is a well understood part of many Web-based businesses but is unfamiliar to mainstream GIS vendors, rather than expecting people to visit your particular website for exclusive access to your content, recognise that your content is more valuable within the context of other sites. This syndication has been achieved by developing an API to Google tools. This has been very successful, so much so that presently more people make use of Google maps through more than 150,000 API sites than directly coming to maps.google.com.

This trend towards embedding geospatial tools and contents within websites and online services will accelerate, often the geospatial components may be embedded within the application logic of the service without a visible user interface, in other words geospatial technology without maps. A great example of this in the UK is an iPhone application that has a single button, which finds for the user the 'next train home.' This hides functionality which locates the phone using GPS or cell tower databases, overlays this information with a national database of railway stations, and carries out a schedule query to find out the next train between the station and your home station stored as part of your user profile.

Location-based services and mobile
The iPhone train schedule application is a valuable indication of the most important trend in the geospatial industry, and that is the expansion in mobile or context aware applications which make use of geospatial information. Before making a journey or visiting an area we were not familiar with, we used to have to gather information to plan a journey before we left, we would print out maps of routes, perhaps write down the address of our destination and the telephone number of the place we were intending to visit. Now, through the increased capability of mobile devices, we have all this information at hand wherever we are, and more importantly our mobile device knows where we are so can automatically suggest not only the most relevant information to the user based on their location, but also the time of day, the contents of their calendar, the location of friends or colleagues or even the type of restaurant we prefer. Behind this capability is a massive business opportunity known as local search. Imagine how valuable to a store owner is the potential to be able to inform potential customers for a particular product who are near to your store that you have the product they are looking for on sale. Both parties in this case benefit, the customer searching for a particular product finds it and a good price, and the store owner gets to communicate with a 'qualified' lead.

The post-GIS future?
s GIS as we recognise it today will not disappear. The creation and maintenance of core geospatial databases will continue to play an important role for many public sector and commercial organisations. However, the role of these organisations will change as a result of the mainstream adoption of geospatial technology. Many other organisations and individuals will have the ability to create geospatial information. Projects like OpenStreetMap and Google's Map Maker have proved that it is possible for Internet users to contribute to the creation of high quality geospatial databases in this brave new world which reflects the situation on the Web as a whole.