Evolution of User Demand and Co-creation of Fit-for-purpose Geospatial Knowledge

BACKGROUND

In the 4th industrial revolution, geospatial data has become ubiquitous and an integral component of workflows of users across sectors. The sectoral users increasingly seek to generate geospatial-enabled knowledge quickly for enhanced decision-making. The traditional geospatial infrastructure is supply-driven and data-centric catering primarily to professional spatial users. The Geospatial Knowledge Infrastructure aims to enable the transition to a demand and user-driven infrastructure which is knowledge-centric and caters to non-spatial users as well for geospatial-enabled decision making.

The transition to a demand-driven infrastructure necessitates the development of a collaborative and inclusive geospatial ecosystem, where the technology and data providers engage and collaborate with the user industry to understand the evolving needs and develop products as per the demand. In order to meet the evolving needs of the users in the 4IR and to guarantee impact, the production economics need to change by capitalizing on the explosion of source data, combined with machine intelligence, analytics and user applications. The state of adoption of geospatial technology in the sectoral workflow along with the associated benefits and challenges need to be understood to identify the gap areas and to develop the strategies for better integration of geospatial knowledge in the workflow through the co-creation of fit-for-purpose geospatial products.