Geospatial is changing everything

..and everything is changing geospatial.

If I were to characterize the last five years, I would use the word?complex.

We have a changing climate, with seemingly more extreme events every day. We are seeing increasing international tensions break out into kinetic conflict. The pillars of entrenched economic systems are creaking under the weight of fragile supply chains and nationalistic political agendas—all painted on a canvas of technology with the brushes of AI and a palette of algorithms.

The one continuity in this changing landscape is geography itself. Geography is the framework of space; the scale that we measure change. The geographic industry has always been hidden in plain sight, with mapmakers creating the more prized economic treasures of both ancient and modern Nations.

Geographic treasures: Mercator’s World map, Thompson’s map of Canada, a Nautical Portolan (Wikipedia)

“Geospatial technology” is the modern expression of geography, encompassing geographic information systems, remote sensing, and surveying technology. It’s a convenient catch-all term for anything with a location component. The problem is that geography is quite literally everywhere, and modern geospatial technology is, in fact, changing everything.

At Sparkgeo, we first used that phase four years ago, and it’s more true now than it was even then. The complementary assets of cloud computing, new space, AI, openness and smart devices have created a new set of capabilities that we have not yet scratched the surface of.

Yet, so many of our geospatial brethren are siloed into small teams offering limited insights. While geospatial is changing everything, the thing that has not changed is our industry’s ability to describe ourselves – and our value. While geography is changing in front of our eyes, both physically and politically, the very practitioners of the art have found themselves sidelined.

How could this have happened? More importantly, how can we flip the script to take a leading role?

In a Monopoly, Innovation is Outsourced

It’s no surprise to anyone that the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) sector is a practical monopoly. In monopolistic structures, innovation is outsourced to the single dominant vendor. The market receives what is provided by that vendor. This is not quite true for GIS because the open-source community has always tried to keep up with community versions of GIS technology. But in a marketplace where the options are either open source or a single proprietary software vendor, enterprise technical leadership is abdicated to that dominant vendor. To a large extent, this is reasonable, as that vendor is collecting most of the revenue. But, this becomes a problem because innovation functions best with diverse thought and action within the presence of competition. However, in a monopoly, diversity is bad for business, and there is no meaningful competition. Monopolies are a margin play.

Unfortunately, this leaves the GIS sector in a position where it has difficulty demonstrating value precisely when it needs to be absolutely fighting for its life. Don’t forget that the US federal government is the single biggest buyer of geospatial technology, and I would estimate that most geospatial businesses are at most two degrees of freedom from national (federal) Government work, whether it be the US government or another nation.

GIS is a Silo

At this rate, given the innovation practices we can all see in other sectors adjacent to GIS, I see the entire practice of planimetric GIS being disrupted, in the classic sense of the word. How many drone teams are now in municipal governments? Those teams have natively 4-dimensional web-centric toolkits that are advancing at a lightning pace in comparison to the traditional toolkits of the GIS analyst. Those drone teams are creating astonishing amounts of overtly geographic data, which could be stored in a cloud-native manner for instant retrieval. Are those teams interfacing with GIS teams? Frequently, no. They emerge out of infrastructure maintenance and asset management, and because GIS is typically siloed, integration becomes a technical and personnel challenge (nightmare).

Of course, geospatial is not (just) GIS.

I agree; geospatial is broader than GIS, but GIS is a key component. I care deeply about extracting information from geographic systems, but I’ve been lucky enough to have a career that has challenged me to work in multiple operational environments, both proprietary and open. Proprietary tools are absolutely necessary, but an over-reliance on a single vendor is a tremendous risk for our sector, as is any industrial monoculture.

Create Comfort in Innovation

I am constantly told that enterprises can’t take risks. Having seen many take innovation seriously, I am inclined to believe that it’s people, not enterprises, that are the deciding factor. It is easy to blame a structure, and some structures are certainly more resistant to change than others, but our industry is at an inflection point – an existential crisis, if you will. The geospatial sector must learn to innovate or risk being siloed into obscurity.

Because, if you have difficulty describing your job at a dinner party, you’ll have a much harder time facing the inevitable departments of government efficiency that will permeate most major organizations and companies in the coming months.

Team, I don’t want to be the harbinger of ill tidings but be ready with your five bullets. While innovation comes with risk, it shows the motivation to improve and build.

Beyond the Analyst

While GIS is important to the geospatial landscape, it is an increasingly limiting concept. In many ways,?GIS is a single-purpose data exploration and visualization tool. Modern geospatial use cases are moving towards?monitoring because data is being served as streams, and time is becoming a first-class citizen. This doesn’t mean your master’s degree in GIS is useless, quite the opposite! But you will be challenged to think about additional dimensions. With those dimensions comes interesting problems of visualization, which will change depending on the phenomena being mapped, but might easily not be a map. One could argue that the lack of a map in complex scenarios is why the dominant vendor hasn’t engaged effectively in non-map geospatial technology.

Pixel Problems, Analytic Solutions

I’ve long suggested that?every pixel or point cloud captured is a problem to solve. The primary use case of EO is still likely situational awareness, for which human eyes are an excellent solution. However, for more scalable applications, algorithms are critical, and increasingly, those are powered by AI. We are now seeing Large Language Models (LLMs) drive specific?geospatial foundation models, a workflow that is both deeply modern and fearsome to those used to interpret imagery manually.

As my team will tell you, I am an AI curmudgeon. So, while I see numerous flaws in the above workflow, I am also acutely aware that the speed of innovation in AI is?uncomfortably?fast.?EO today is a problem of software; EO tomorrow will be a problem of AI. But those AIs will need to be trained by increasingly complex models, and that training will be done by experts – geographic experts who are drawing boxes around landscape phenomena. GIS people, I guess? Don’t feel that this is some kind of diminishment, robots are good at doing repeatable things, and we should teach them to do those well. this is just about a sensible division of labour.

Risky Business

While the GIS sector may need an injection of adrenaline, I still contend that geospatial technology is changing?everything. Location is being extracted and exploited in almost every software, web property, and smart device. Geography is intrinsically valuable, and geospatial tools measure and report on that value.

• When you pull out your phone and can navigate like a local around almost every location on Earth – that’s geospatial, giving you intrinsic knowledge.
• When you’re delivered with a more competitive insurance quote because your house is further from weather risks – that’s geospatial saving you money.
• When you measure the distance and speed of your run or bike ride – that’s geospatial helping you measure your gains.

These are just personal benefits. The biggest impacts are the ones that you may never see but will most certainly feel: food on our shelves from logistics and agricultural support technology, safer journeys from better weather forecasting, and resilient city planning from climate monitoring.

Geospatial touches almost every industry because almost everything is?somewhere!

My advice to anyone in GIS who may be concerned about the vortex of complexity we are working in is to stop and take a look at how geography is in everything we do. Take a fearless step out of your echo chamber and engage with other professionals because geography and geographic knowledge are, and always have been, one of the most prized and valuable commodities. How we measure and describe that value may change, but the core of the message remains the same:

Where landscapes change, and people move, there is value – we can measure it.

So, while everything is changing geospatial;?geospatial is also changing everything.