Over the past few years, the value of geospatial computing has become more evident outside the geospatial community! There are examples of using geospatial in the insurance industry, climate financing circles, autonomous vehicles and even the Metaverse!
Such industries making sense of the huge volumes of heterogeneous spatial data have become possible because of advances in AI/ML, the proliferation of cloud storage and processing, and the increased uptake of geospatial standards.
Evolution of geospatial technologies through climate change disruptions
Today geospatial technologies can accelerate our collective understanding, preparation, response, adaptation to disruptive events be it natural or man-made. As the geospatial community, we have been preparing for these moments. We have always dealt with large complex data, integrated data across organizations and domains, and built on the power of open standards for collaboration and innovation to Today geospatial technologies can accelerate our collective understanding, preparation, response, and adaptation to disruptive events be it natural or man-made. address disaster and emergency management.
Now we are at a time where those at the policy levels are also seeing that and that’s further pushing the need for interoperability. This has been a main driving force in OGC these days – to enable and accelerate innovation and problem solving by lowering the barriers so that ANYONE can leverage geospatial information via consensus-based user-friendly standards.
Key geospatial trends in 2023
OGC is perceiving a few key trends. We are focusing on domain-specific best practices, standards, and community resources – hence our focus on disasters, climate, and the marine domains. It’s become less about geospatial technologies (the what) and more about the problems they can solve (the why)!
On the technical front, there’s demand for cloud-native geospatial standards because a lot of the geospatial data collected (from space to sensors to IoT, from imagery to tabular) is hosted on the cloud.
The drive to deliver developer-friendly OGC APIs to the world is at its maximum. It’s our responsibility to deliver easy to use building blocks for geospatial use and those are the OGC APIs to easily get Maps, Tiles, Routes, Features, and even Environmental Data! We continue to support the growing EO ecosystem by providing the standards for tasking, ordering and comparing data quality and developing the standards for space including space Coordinate Reference Systems!
From an abstraction perspective, the transition is requiring open consensus-based models to represent the world around us and to support urban digital twins which is accelerating the development of standards related to underground infrastructure, indoor mapping, and cities at various levels of abstraction.
Also Read: The Changing Face of GIS
Intensifying growth of the geospatial imagery market
The growth of the geospatial imagery market is intensifying the need by customers to have open standards for imagery tasking and ordering, and for data quality/fit-for-use comparison as customers increasingly need to mix and match imagery from multiple sources.
We are also seeing the rise of interest in standardizing Analysis-Ready-Data – satellite data that have been processed to a minimum set of requirements and organized in a form that allows analysis with a minimum of additional user effort and interoperability both through time and with other datasets.
There’s a rise in professional services offering geospatial know-how to more industries than ever! Also given the expansion of geospatial usage, there’s a rise in businesses offering services to help customers from data acquisition and integration to building analytics platforms. We are seeing an ecosystem where the services are built on building blocks (pieces of the solution). Hence our drive to ensure that the building blocks are interoperable via open standards.
(Nadine Alameh is the CEO of Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). The views expressed in the article are the personal opinions of the author.)
Disclaimer: Views Expressed are Author's Own. Geospatial World May or May Not Endorse it
