Peter Batty spoke about trends in the geospatial industry at last Friday’s Rocky Mountain GITA Luncheon at the U.S. Geological Survey in Denver. Peter’s talk touched on the Innovator’s Dilemma, and the rise of the new class of companies that are meeting consumer demand, such as Google, Microsoft and Open Source technologies. Peter’s recent trips to conferences that address the application of these technologies (Where 2.0, Open Street Map, GeoWeb) solidified his feelings about this trend. In particular, Peter noted that while many traditional GIS users dismiss these technologies as simply map display, these conference are increasingly containing content that would be thought of as traditional GIS, such as data creation and maintenance, analysis and cartography.
Cartography in maps strikes me as the most likely element for rapid explosion. I’ve been impressed with the continuing quality improvements with OpenStreetMap presentation, and the related CloudMade site will expand on cartographic quality for this data. The presentation of map data is fast becoming a point for competition, and I think that OpenStreetMaps has the jump on attracting artists and those graphically inclined.
Peter recorded the presentation live via his webcam and promised to post it on his GeoThought blog, but it’s not up yet as of today. It’s worth viewing Peter’s thoughts on many trends, including data sharing, the cloud, and the smart grid.
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Hi Matt, thanks for the nice writeup. Unfortunately my laptop had a disk crash the day after the presentation, and the last good backup I restored to was just before the presentation, so the video is lost I’m afraid
. But I’m sure I will be talking about some of the same themes again soon, so I will try again (and there is some discussion of these topics in recent blog posts also). Cheers, Peter.
Thought-provoking post. I’ve referenced it at http://spatialityblog.com/2009/08/12/multi-layered-cartography/
Cheers!
The above “Cartographic Explosion” including OSM and CloudMade, Google mashing, OS OpenSpace, OS Geovation and OpenLayers is being focussed on at the Annual Summer School of the Society of Cartographers (SOC), Southampton, UK, 7-9 September 2009. http://www.soc.org.uk/southampton09/program.htm
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