Geneva: “Is geospatial today an industry, a profession or ability?” That was Bryn Fosburgh, Vice President, Trimble at the inaugural session of the Geospatial World Forum 2014 in Geneva on May 6, 2014.
As speakers talked about the importance of geospatial information and technologies in making a smarter and better world, Fosburgh hit the nail right on its head first by raising this question and then answering it with: “Geospatial is a combination of all three. Converging forces have placed geospatial information at the centre of an evolving ecosystem.”
Drawing up on Trimble Founder Charlie’s Trimble vision of making GPS a utility, Fosburgh said today the technology has gone beyond that. It is not only GPS but an entire array of geospatial technologies have become a utility. Parallel technology trends have converged to redefine what was earlier possible with emerging trends such as sensor integration, processing power, Big Data, Cloud computing, and 3D visualisation and interaction changing the way we deal with data, he added.
While innovative technologies have redefined the capabilities and workplace for geospatial professionals, technology applied to the geospatial world have driven exponential changes in productivity and quality across businesses, he said.
Making an interesting point as to how consumer devices and innovations are moving into the professional world, which is a completely new trend, Fosburgh said the declining cost of geospatial technology is opening up new uses for high-accuracy geospatial data. “From pure data collection, the industry is moving towards modelling and analytics which is making us familiar with the industry we are serving. This in turn is increasing the market size of our industry,” he said, adding that going forward the boundaries defining the role of the geospatial professional will become equally blurred.
Source: Our Correspondent
