October 25

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Contents

Editor's Introduction

This week, I summarize two recent reports: one by the market research firm LDC on current attitudes toward location-based services (LBS) and one by the RAND Corporation on the sharing of geospatial data among U.S. military organizations. Plus a quick follow-up on a story I wrote last week and 22 press releases.

— Matteo Luccio

IDC Releases LBS Study

Last fall, I wrote: "For years now, location-based services (LBS) for consumers using cell phones have been just over the horizon… which is that imaginary line that recedes as you approach it! Now, however, that might be finally changing, as wireless carriers and software companies begin to make full use of handsets' GPS capabilities." A year later, a study by IDC, a market research company, paid for by True Position, an LBS company, concludes that the rapidly evolving field of wireless LBS, is now "ready to emerge as an important new opportunity for the wireless industry." After being "kept alive" for several years by the enterprise market, wireless LBS is finally "on the cusp of mass-market adoption for both the consumer and the enterprise."

The 20-page study, Opportunities for Location-Based Services in Consumer and Enterprise Markets, to be released next Monday, contains no striking new revelations, but serves to confirm well-known trends. Written by Carrie MacGillivray, it is based on a recent on-line survey of 5,000 consumer and enterprise decision makers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Spain. With a few exceptions, the differences in responses between the countries were insignificant. Also, in most categories, the respondents gave high ratings (on a scale of 1 to 10) to most of the options they were given, with little differentiation between them.

The study starts with the bold assertion that the technology challenges associated with LBS "have been resolved." To support this claim, it cites three factors:

• 2.5G and 3G networks are now consistent
• higher-speed coverage is widespread
• more GPS-enabled handsets and handheld devices are available

According to the study, consumers have always been very interested in wireless LBS, but mass adoption was delayed in part due to the fact that service providers struggled with how to handle customers' privacy concerns and the transition from voice-only offerings to more complex data offerings. Meanwhile, it points out, growing end-user awareness of LBS is driven by "advances in other industries, such as [the] growing popularity of automobile in-dash navigation systems."

The study identifies several trends:

In the consumer market:

• the key drivers will be personalization and convenience — especially the ability to perform local searches and obtain driving directions without the need to first enter location information
• consumers are comfortable with advertiser-supported navigation and local service
• consumers expect LBS to work wherever a cell phone works — specifically, indoors and in dense metropolitan areas — and to offer a high level of specificity and accuracy and fast response times
• for mobile users, security is a key concern
• the area of greatest immediate opportunity for consumer LBS is that of local search services using customer cell phones
• point-of-interest information accessed through local search will largely be an advertising-supported business model and probably the most popular consumer LBS application
• navigation represents the largest available category in the wireless LBS space and consumers will be willing to pay for such services; users of maps and navigation services will demand high levels of accuracy and reliability; they are highly receptive to having navigation services bundled with point of interest and traffic applications
• parents are interested in child monitoring solutions that can deliver high accuracy in a variety of environments (including indoors and in vehicles) and are secure from unauthorized usage
• while wireless users are interested in being able to search for local points of interest, promotions, etc., the industry is still struggling to develop user-friendly and reliable systems; such services are also "an ideal opportunity for mobile advertising / promotion"
• interest will increase in services for elderly and disabled people, as long as they are easy to use, and for pet location services, as long as the devices are small and comfortable
• wireless location of stolen vehicles and social networking are two other consumer applications that have market potential.

In the enterprise market:

• potential enterprise customers are most interested in improving productivity and reducing costs, through such services as wireless fleet tracking and workforce management
• it is essential that solutions be easy for companies to implement and maintain and for employees and managers to use
• in the past, fleet management space and field force automation tended to be purchased by large enterprises that had the resources to invest in specialized devices; however, new GPS-enabled devices and services encouraged LBS use by smaller businesses and in a wider range of vertical markets.

RAND Report on GIS in the Military

From the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) to workcenters on military installations in the United States and abroad, the Department of Defense (DoD) uses a vast amount of geospatial information — to support everyday business functions (such as environmental management and emergency response), intelligence, and warfighting. Both the White House's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and DoD have issued guidelines and directives stressing the need for coordinating, sharing, and integrating these geospatial data assets, most of which are in the form of GIS datasets, across DoD and other federal agencies. To this end, in July 2004 DoD created a new organization, the Defense Installation Spatial Data Infrastructure (DISDI) office, reporting to the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Installations and Environment, and, in April 2006, it designated the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) as the lead office for DoD geospatial information management issues.

A recent report, Installation Mapping Enables Many Missions: The Benefits of and Barriers to Sharing Geospatial Data Assets, by the National Defense Research Institute, a unit of the RAND Corporation, assesses the net effects of sharing geospatial data within and across the business, warfighting, and intelligence mission areas of DoD's Global Information Grid. It also recommends how DISDI could maximize the benefits of such sharing. To identify the range of missions for which DoD uses geospatial data and its current and potential future effects, RAND researchers interviewed more than 100 producers and consumers of geospatial data, reviewed literature on both geospatial technology and effect assessment, and examined sample geospatial data. They also developed a complex methodology for assessing the effects of sharing geospatial data, then used it to estimate some effects across the department. In addition, they identified barriers "that limit the widespread use and sharing of such assets within and outside DoD" and made recommendations for how DISDI could help overcome them.

This monograph — commissioned by OSD and written by Beth E. Lachman, Peter Schirmer, David R. Frelinger, Victoria A. Greenfield, Michael S. Tseng, and Tiffany Nichols — provides a window into a world that is mostly separate from the civilian world. It should be of great interest to the larger GIS community, for three reasons. First, because this 285-page report — with 22 figures, 22 tables, and more than 150 examples, covering a vast range of applications, from department-wide, long-term planning to managing and monitoring janitorial services at Langley AFB — is one of the most detailed ever written on all the ways in which geospatial data is used within a single large organization. Second, because it provides analysis of the barriers to sharing information and recommendations as to how to overcome them. Third, because its methodology for assessing the value of sharing geospatial data is noteworthy.

Most of the basic digital geospatial data maintained by each of the armed services are created, updated, and maintained at the installation or regional level, typically by those who need them the most, such as public works staff tasked with building roads and facilities. "Many installations develop and maintain hundreds of GIS data layers, with datasets at different levels of scale and time periods, often maintained because of different needs," the report authors write. However, because of recent advances in enterprise software and a growing realization of the benefits of sharing data, the services have begun to centralize the development and maintenance of basic geospatial data — such as base boundaries, roads, buildings, imagery, and training range areas — and have identified (or are in the process of identifying) data layers to be shared by staff across an installation in a Common Installation Picture. This process of centralization is taking place at all DoD levels. For example, DISDI has created the DISDI Portal web site, for internal DoD use.

In addition to warehousing and managing geospatial data, each service has set up a central geospatial organization tasked with setting that service's geospatial data policies, responding to external requests for geospatial data, and developing service-wide geospatial data web viewers. Each of these service offices also participates in DISDI's efforts to establish a DoD-wide geospatial community and contributes to developing a spatial data infrastructure for each service. Similarly, DISDI fosters that process at the department level. Its first major initiative was developing the Installation Visualization Tool for the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure process, which provided a way to view imagery and geospatial data in a consistent fashion for 354 sites, including training ranges, meeting established threshold criteria.

The report lists several reasons why the development, use, and sharing of geospatial data continue to grow:

• the data and technology are now more user-friendly
• the implementation of standards and interoperability conditions help facilitate use and sharing
• increases in efficiency and effectiveness due to sharing geospatial data helps facilitate investment in these resources
• OMB has mandated sharing
• centralized military organizations are now facilitating the use and sharing of these data.

Despite these trends, however, the report identifies several remaining barriers to successful sharing of geospatial data, including:

• security concerns and other data restrictions
• different IT system, firewalls, and policies
• lack of communication or collaboration between different functional organizations and disciplines
• lack of knowledge about, interest in, or expertise to use geospatial data
• lack of data-sharing policy, standards, and contractual agreements
• reluctance of data stewards to share assets, fearing that they will lose control over access to their data
• lack of on-going high-level program support and investments
• risks from sharing undocumented, poor-quality, and out-of-date data.

To remove these barriers, the report recommends that DoD consider temporarily expanding DISDI's staff, perhaps borrowing personnel from other DoD offices, and that DISDI, in turn

• collaborate with NGA to provide more OSD policy guidance on these issues
• use the methodology developed by RAND to help assess its success in promoting data sharing
• establish processes for managing future investments by applying the maturity model developed by the Government Accountability Office.

The positive mission effects from the use and sharing of geospatial data, the authors argue, are seen at all levels within DoD. They define the effects broadly, to include "the attainment of desired outcomes by the individual organization developing, using, or sharing the assets and any other outcomes experienced by any organization from that asset development, use, and sharing." In other words, these effects accrue not just to the organizations using these data but also to other organizations, both across and outside DoD. They report that using and sharing geospatial data generates changes in efficiency and effectiveness, process changes, and other mission effects.

To evaluate these changes, the authors developed a new methodology. Most of the effects, they write, are difficult to quantify and, therefore, do not lend themselves to strictly quantitative methods. However, they argue, their methodology captures the full range of effects and exploits available data by using three complementary approaches in combination:

• an information flow model, to understand the range of organizations using and sharing each geospatial dataset
• a set of logic models to map out how the inputs, activities, and outputs of an organization's data development, use, and sharing lead to outcomes for different customers
• to the extent possible, when the data are available, a variety of methods for quantifying the logic models.

Follow-Up

Last week I reported on which desktop GIS products support Microsoft Windows Vista. According to Moshe Binyamin, global product manager for MapInfo, MapInfo Professional version 9, which was released in June, is fully compatible with Vista.

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