Geo-spatial and Location pie — Choose your slice !
I have been meaning to write this blog on a Pie day, however I realized, many of us would not mind having a Pie on a random day or a slice every so often, that is why finally sitting down to take a cut at it.
(Note that all of this content is from my readings, experience and industry insights.)
While I have been writing, fixing, ideating and creating solutions for Geo-spatial industry for a half decade now, there was always a curiosity about the mapping products even before that, but being consumer of tech, my exposure was up to use of paper maps, Maps on CDs for education purposes, navigation maps, car maps (embedded), places and business data and some county information.
Thankful to TomTom, Google and other GPS and navigation players for not letting us (at least me and my friends and family) getting lost and also making us make most of our travel wherever we go.
This time we were in Mumbai, our maps worked there wonderfully and seemed like the navigation and data is updated frequently there, algorithms are taking into account non-grid infrastructure, local language of navigation and approached with the local perspective. As INDIA government does not allow its StreetSide Imagery to be shown in mapping platforms (Note that individuals can do the 360 degree panorama and share as a place data as a contribution to the Google Maps platform.) Also Google Earth and other 3D maps are not allowed to show high res imagery of INDIA, it is difficult to get the feel of space before navigating there. Thanks to crowd sourcing , it just worked for Google and people - both.
From this personal use case to using various enterprise (specially open source ) mapping software, databases and APIs. From understanding the need of enterprise data security and consumer data scale issues, to putting things down in my WorldView — Location tech always drives me to deliver to my customers.
The Navigation aspect
The entirety of navigation services and public maps however does not start and end with Google, Apple, Bing or other players that provide navigation to the consumers. The Navigation for specific places where people cannot go (even with their street view cars, sensors and crowd sourcing platforms — think war fields, refugee lands and borders, classified buildings and territories, honoring different coordinate systems like MGRS for military ) has a major role in industry — hence the tech that advances compute and algorithms. The point goes to prove that now Navigation SDK has become an integral part of organizations dealing with the applications and operations on land. And that software is different than what we use for our driving navigation.
GIS Software — Open Source vs paid
While there are leaders in the market such as ESRI and AutoDesk and FME and Envi, none of them are getting started type of softwares that we can vouch for if there exists a online university for Mapping. Lots of GIS professionals around the world do heavy lifting with the help of same toolset and do not shy away from spending thousands of dollars and training the same tools skills for years to come.
I simply believe maps training and thinking GIS could start much early. By the time a high school student had decided their medium of expression and tools — Web, Mobile, Media, Science, Research or some different cool technology, GIS and map making rarely makes to this list although it’s as fun as making a gaming app. That, I hope will change.
I researched many GIS courses, online and on campus in USA, and it’s clear that ESRI like players have early entry in the Geo education field. There are less universities making GIS as a Open Source oriented course or specialty. Wouldn’t it be nice that same people using the software would get a chance to improve it early on? Or same people filled with brilliant ideas can make a better value proposition using Open Source tool set ? — ultimately saving some county tax payers dollars?
Mapping and Education
When I was visiting Reggio Emilia based preschool for my son’s admission two years ago, one of their project (student selected and voted) was putting the road signs around the play yard, and yet another project — again student selected, was to bring the pictures of landmarks around the kid’s neighborhoods and map them on real map of the city on one of the classroom walls. It was eye opening for me to know how much kids want to participate in forming the community around us and the habitat we live in ! How much spatial interest they have !
We succinctly should be able to define what opportunity it would be for school aged kids to improve on their spatial and creative skills together, that should be a part of STEAM curriculum. There seems to be a lot of opportunity for those SCRATCH developers to create their WorldView and educate us in the process.
So there is definitely this opportunity for online Geo school or Map workbooks, Mapping based games and simply the general Mapping courses on the MOOC like platforms to make mainstream. Who knows where our Augmented Reality Map of Mars come from next ? who would be the provider of intelligent maps that are conversation enabled ? And why would world not have a map of every place accessible to local public there ? — believe it or not there are places like that even today.
GeoSpatial, Location data and AI
Have we not realized yet that location data is integral part of any data ? From the Customer and Product/Inventory databases that we used to create in RDBMS till today where SPARK and Hadoop managing BigData queries, all the data stored in all forms across the globe have some location aspect to it. And how better it can get to have a perfect timing for data availability and our foray into AI at the same time?
We have been seeing a trend that small satellites are for real, they are not just capturing images but catching the momentum and dynamism of earth’s surface. With many new players in the market backed up by scientist, environmentalist and other experienced people still, I would say, hoarding all that data in one place, define and solve meaningful problems and be part of platform making it easy is not one big company’s job.
So it’s also good time to focus on your WorldView and care about the problems that deeply matter to you and see how that location data of many years can help guide you?
Aerial imagery explorers, labeling and feature extraction and industry specific indexes from imagery such as NVDI for vegetation together Open data platforms — S3, Satori, SpaceNet, Google Open Data, Google Earth Engine are all good to start exploring, building what Location Intelligence would look tomorrow.
Some of the extended ideas I have are — 1) location dimension when searching people, places and their connections 2) Auto summarization of any map 3) integrate your organization with local community to achieve better outcomes — community driven location apps 4) Location and mapping integral part of any survey platform to drive more hands to show up when it affects your local community 5) Streetside imagery collection and analysis for causes like waste management by regularly scheduled fleets — educating people to reduce the footprint 6) using public campaigns and visual location experiences built around digital cloning of ideas, smart cities can leap forward making right decisions. 7) Assistant platform for conversational geo answers for your organization’s data. 8) Use of Localization as a tech in so many ways — not just the self driving cars.
Organizational Productivity
As it has come last in my list, I hope it’s not the last thing mapping providers and software tool makers are thinking about. While the efficiency and performance of your layers, assets is also a function of how much data you have, there are also not very intuitive tools around maps integration that has moved the needle for developers. MapBox Studio might stand a chance.
There are not very compelling stories and successes to tell that use templates, workflows and plugins to help you integrate with any of the JavaScript Maps API, WebGL API, Maps canvases and Web Mapping software in same development studio — kind of like Xamarin for Maps APIs.
There are certain other problems like data stuck in proprietary databases that without much expensive tools and learning curve you can not possibly transfer, Offline Maps for enterprises ( even when they have paid for data are surprisingly less intuitive and clumsy.), Lightweight apps and progressive web apps for mapping experience is the area still needs to be thought of.
While everyone in the rideshare and self driving cars business is trying to build their maps we would probably have many mapping tech to use with no real developer community control over the industry — so developers need to think how they want it to be done, 10X development speed is 10X usage of the location to drive 10x or better location intelligence !
With those thoughts, we are here to choose our slice and not have the entire pie because its huge — some $20 Billion for another couple years to come, or even more combined with location analytics ( from online sources and reports).