Technology Tracks

The volume, variety and velocity of geospatial data is continually expanding. Storage, analysis and serving the information within an organization is becoming a challenge. The cloud’s increasing ability to store and distribute data has made it possible for organizations to better utilize their geospatial data, and for businesses to create products which describe our changing world in close to real-time. On top of this, cloud has made it significantly easier for geospatial data to be moved around, accessed from multiple places, pushed into manipulation pipelines and visualized at scale.

IBM has reported that about 2.5 Quintillion bytes of data is generated every day and a huge chunk of this data is ‘location-tagged’. As more and more people go mobile, more ‘location-tagged’ data will be flowing into geospatial big data systems. On top of this, there are more and more satellite-based and sensed data becoming available. The key will be how to link geospatial data with other data and create application that can contribute to socio-economic growth.

Internet of Things is the inter-networking of physical devices, vehicles, buildings, and other items — embedded with electronics, software, sensors, actuators, and network connectivity that enable them to collect and exchange data. When integrated with geospatial technologies, the end products are transforming the way people work, move, live and play. Geocaching, fitness apps and Pokémon Go are a few popular examples of geospatial-IoT integrated products. Businesses use GIS and IoT technologies to combine a device’s location with its status and other important information. The IoT device can be placed on a valve, a switch, or any other asset, and those assets can be displayed on a map that provides context at macro levels as well as enabling users to extract high levels of detail. The approach delivers key inputs to support informed decisions and efficient business processes.

Blockchain is a continuously growing list of records, called blocks, which are linked and secured using cryptography. The Chain in Blockchain is the chain of transactions in the form of ledger entries about assets which could be money, imagery, data, maps, documents, etc. However, what actually is transacted in reality are tokens containing the metadata of the assets with the actual physical transfer happens separately. One area where Blockchain will find major use along with geospatial technologies is the Internet of Things. Today, IoT conjures up a mental image of a complex network of humans and objects all passing data to each other. For example, could an autonomous delivery van, which depends on sensors be hijacked and driven to a wrong location? Consider the data carrying the instructions as transactions. If the network is on a Blockchain, then the process of consensus would help validate the transactions and weed out the wrong instructions because the illegal transactions would be trapped. Other domains where Blockchain could play a role in geospatial terms are land transactions and data repositories.