March 15

Contents

Editor's Introduction

This week I summarize the comments of eight distinguished panelists at last week's GITA Annual Conference. The range of topics covered and the speakers' deep understanding of geospatial technology made their presentations very valuable and stimulating. Plus, my usual selection of press releases (no longer news from press releases, now that I've stopped editing them).

—Matteo Luccio

GITA Conference Highlights

Last week, at the 30th Annual Conference and Exhibition of the Geospatial Information & Technology Association (GITA), two major themes were the use of the World Wide Web and consumer applications. The former was the subject of a seminar titled "Mapping Applications on the Web: Evolution or Revolution," the latter was the subject of a panel titled "Harnessing the Momentum of Consumer Applications," and both themes were discussed by another panel, titled "Extending the Reach of Geospatial Technology." Both panels were moderated by Matt Ball, editor of Geoworld.

The members of the first panel were

• Dr. Bill Gail, Director of Strategic Development, Microsoft Virtual Earth
• Michael Lawless, Product Manager, Yahoo! Maps
• Tim Nats, Product Manager, MapQuest Business Solutions

The members of the second panel were

• Peter Batty, CTO, Intergraph
• David Maguire, Director of Products, ESRI
• Styli Camateros, Vice President, Geospatial Software Division, Bentley Systems Incorporated
• John S. Eason, Director, Global Utility Solutions, GE Infrastructure
• Geoff Zeiss, Director of Technology, Autodesk.

In what follows, I bring you the highlights of the two panels. With a few exceptions, starting with the section titled "General Trends" I have not attributed these statements to particular speakers because, frankly, I lost track of who said what. On the other hand—with the benefit of my digital recorder, my editing skills, and, most of all, time—I have organized and edited them to be a little more coherent than they were when spoken extemporaneously at the conference.

The interplay of consumer and professional applications is very dynamic. Functionalities developed for professional applications sometimes percolate, in simplified form, into consumer applications—while, in other cases, products developed for the mass market are adopted and adapted for business use. Between full fledged GIS and digital maps for the consumer market, an intermediate layer, which some call "light GIS," is emerging. The boundaries between these areas are permeable and constantly shifting.

Some companies, such as Bentley and Intergraph, focus on professional users; some, such as Yahoo! and MapQuest on the mass, consumer market; while some, such as Microsoft and Google, cater to both.

Microsoft

Microsoft's Virtual Earth, Gail said, is "being built as a platform that cuts across consumer and enterprise applications," based on the company's experience with the MapPoint Web service. "The emergence of the consumer demand," he continued, "is really going to change the geospatial field. Local search is about a $60 billion market and that is a huge amount of resources that can be brought to bear on this problem. What you are seeing as a result, across all the companies here, as well as Google, is the build-up of databases of both vector and raster data that could not be done without that kind of resources. That is eventually going to pay off on the enterprise side. Microsoft's model is … to bring the power of the consumer investment back into the enterprise, to build out Virtual Earth as a platform that supports not only the consumer search and the consumer-oriented activities, but also the more enterprise-based activities, some of which will draw upon the same tools that consumers use, perhaps in simpler forms."

Besides driving demand and generating large revenues, Gail explained, the consumer side also serves as "the last mile" for the enterprise—the connection between specialists and those, inside and outside the enterprise, who don't use geospatial tools on a regular basis. "That last mile," he said, "goes within the intranet, within an enterprise, and out to the constituents, if you are a government organization, or to the customers, if you are a business."

Microsoft provides a geospatial platform but does not build geospatial solutions, Gail pointed out. Rather, it has "a very large program ecosystem" that builds solutions for particular customers. "I am constantly amazed," he said, "at the kinds of things some of our partners are doing. Within that, we have several services that are available to the enterprise that are in many ways similar to [those] that are available to the consumer. There's a big issue as to what you call these things: as soon as you call them GIS, it scares people away, and yet in some ways they are sort of 'light GIS.' We are in the process of learning that boundary between GIS and what I might call geospatial intelligence; sometimes people call it location intelligence, just to get away from the geospatial name altogether. In the end, consumers don't know the word geospatial and they don't know the acronym GIS and they don't care."

Yahoo! Maps

Yahoo! Maps doesn't have an enterprise solution. It both provides driving directions and supports searches, such as "find me the best margarita in town," Lawless said. The latter, he pointed out, "is a really big component of where Maps lives and breathes." While the mapping aspect has a much larger user base, the local search aspect generates the revenue, via advertising. According to Lawless, Yahoo! is the largest media network for banner ads. "We do a lot targeting on those to try to make them more relevant to the user, so that they are less annoying," he said. Yahoo! maps are also used on Flickr, Travel.Yahoo.com, and Realestate.Yahoo.com and Yahoo! allows major national companies, such as Hertz and Holiday Inn, to use its maps but brand them as their own. Additionally, Yahoo!'s APIs support mash-ups and the company recently released Yahoo.go, an application optimized for mobile phones.

MapQuest

MapQuest, according to Nats, is the mapping site most used by consumers. It built its own geospatial platform, he explained, and uses it to supply all of its business units as well as the two dozen companies owned by its parent company, AOL. Like Yahoo! Maps, MapQuest focuses on providing maps, driving directions, and places search for the consumer market. The company's wireless group includes a website that, Nats said, is among the top five in the world—while MapQuest mobile, a downloadable subscription-based consumer site, provides a higher level of interactivity. The wireless group a few weeks ago made available MapQuest Navigator, another subscription-based service that provides turn-by-turn, voice-enabled directions on GPS-enabled devices. Finally, MapQuest Business Solutions, which has been around for about ten years, provides mapping for 1,400 brands, "from store locators to insurance and back end and front end customer applications," Nats said.

The "Google Earth Effect"

The prodigious popularity of Google Earth, which has been downloaded more than 200 million times thus far, has hugely boosted the visibility of and demand for geospatial products—because people who play with GE at home, soon wonder how a more powerful version could help them at work. However, to a much lesser extent, it has also had the opposite effect, as some people have concluded that they need not spend large sums to purchase professional geospatial services when those available for free will meet most of their business needs. I asked the panel to comment on this dynamic.

"I think you hit on a very important issue," Gail responded. "Some things become commoditized. Some things that were considered traditionally GIS and traditionally required customization and tailoring will be replaced by commoditized solutions. But I believe that demand is going to drive the overall market, so [GIS] is going to change. In changing, the core elements of GIS that need to be done by specialists will be retained and those that can be done in a very simple manner will be done by consumer tools. The two things will be combined in enterprise solutions, and the customer will be better off for it. The whole market is going to grow as a result, I think."

Just as the steadily decreasing price and increasing ease of use for digital photography and video have enabled most people "to edit photos and produce short movies," Nats said, so on the geospatial side we will "see a trend toward a couple of levels of access to the technology by non-developers. The barrier is lowering every year."

Data Accuracy

Yahoo! worries much about the accuracy of the user experience, according to Lawless, and takes "a lot of pride" in the accuracy of its product. "Users don't understand why [bad driving directions] happen," he said. So, one of the company's "core doctrines" is reducing the problems that users experience. One way in which they are doing this is by constantly "tweaking the engines"—their routers and geocoders. They are always collecting reports on problems and trying to solve them. "We also do a lot of work with our data partners, especially NavTeq and TeleAtlas, and report everything back to them, so that we can get the data from them as soon as possible. We work on the timing with the data. We are probably the first people to market with a particular data set, so, when we get updates from NavTeq and TeleAtlas, we try to really get them on line as soon as possible. While we can't control everything about accuracy, I think that freshness is something that is entirely within our control, based on what we are getting from the data providers."

"In order to have an accurate global data set," Gail said, "we have to go beyond being an aggregator of the data to being an active creator of data—because the data sources that are available today are of different quality, different resolution, different dynamic range, taken at different times of day in different seasons. … When you start to put them together in a global data set, you need to add some value on top of the different data sets that you get from different sources. … So we have a very aggressive program to build the tools that allow us to identify flaws and gaps in data sets." Currently, he pointed out, data is considered current if it has been acquired in the last couple of years. "That's going to change, as demand increases for these data sets." As users expect ever fresher data, approaching real time a few years from now, the problem, Gail argued, will be ensuring that data is current without re-flying everything.

Microsoft is building its 3D models, "with an accuracy of within a meter at each vertex and edge of a building," according to Gail. That degree of accuracy, he explains, will be required when adding building interiors from different sources than the exteriors, "or things will not line up." However, because this accuracy requirement is not driven by GIS functionality, the question arises, Gail says, as to whether one can ever have sufficient confidence in these global worlds to do GIS. "It's not clear yet," he answers. "That is still something that is being understood. So, at this stage, what we have is global worlds that will add to GIS in certain areas and not replace GIS in other areas."

Errors in positional accuracy "have not impacted the consumer too much," according to Lawless. "We are working with spatial data in a very cost-effective manner. We will use basically whatever data is available and adjust it in a cost-effective manner. … We have great API's that allow people to do great things with maps, but at your peril."

General Trends

• This is the most exciting time in the geospatial industry in the past 15-20 years.
• Camateros: "The fact that we have a digital model of the whole planet is pretty powerful stuff."
• The percentage of people using multiple geospatial systems went from about a third to more than two thirds in just a few years— i.e., people use whatever works best for any given task.
• Online and offline experiences are becoming increasingly integrated.
• Many small capabilities on mobile devices will add up to powerful applications.
• Mobile phones are also mobile sensors that can capture location, sounds, and images.
• The ability of users to customize maps and add content to them will continue to increase.
• Search engines will increasingly be spatially-enabled—and the map data layer will be used to search the rest of the data.

The World Wide Web

• Web services are not a fad—they are here to stay.
• The most exciting thing happening in Web services is that, as of this year, all of the geospatial vendors adhere to at least the minimal OGC standards for open Web services.
• While most of the attention is focused on visible Web services, such as mapping, the trend is for Web services to be increasingly behind the scenes, machine to machine, transparent to the user. Their real strength is in connecting disparate systems in a very elegant, standards-based way.
• Batty: The Web is no longer just about publishing data; the Web 2.0 model is about participation. An example is Wikipedia.

Consumer Products vs. Professional Products

• You can augment a map originally intended for consumers, making it useful in a professional context.
• Traditional companies can incorporate elements from consumer-oriented vendors into their technology—especially in regard to data distribution.
• We are still going to need people who understand such issues as projections, datum transformations, and the importance of metadata. We should not throw out 40 years of GIS, geography, photogrammetry, and surveying.
• Just because you can use data for free at home doesn't mean that you can deploy it for free to 10,000 field staff. You need to look at the fine print on your licensing agreement—as well as the licensing agreements between the mass distribution company, such as Google and Microsoft, and the data vendors.
• Camateros: Assuming that we can deal with the licensing issues, which is not easy, the massive amount of data available via Google Earth will fundamentally change the way one can bootstrap GIS projects; one can then replace that data with better data later.
• ArcGIS is much more complicated than Google Maps because it does many more things.
• Lawless: Data without metadata, such as it provided in consumer services, "gives you a browse-level access, not a business solution. It doesn't really solve a major problem." However, he added, no user has yet asked him for metadata.
• Can utility companies upload their data to external mapping servers and "play" with it, in a secure, fire-walled environment? Gail and Lawless (or was it Nats?) said that Microsoft and Yahoo! (or was it MapQuest?) allow organizations to do this.

The Impact of Consumer Mapping Applications

• The greater public awareness of geospatial technology due to Google Earth, Microsoft Virtual Earth, Yahoo!, and other consumer mapping applications is good for the industry. It raises the bar for the technology and it is a wake-up call for traditional companies in the industry to move a little faster and continue to innovate as quickly as possible.
• Competition between Microsoft and Google is good.
• Probably fewer than one percent of the 200 million people who have downloaded Google Earth know what "GIS" means. However, they are now all thinking about new applications for geospatial data.
• While Google Earth is not a data provider—it buys the data from NAVTEQ, TeleAtlas, DigitalGlobe, etc.—it is an excellent vehicle for publishing spatial data.
• Virtual Earth, because of its 3D qualities, allows a convergence of architectural, engineering, and geospatial data. This enables emergency responders to access quickly a lot of data that is already available.

Data Creation

• Data contributed by consumers using APIs will continue to increase as a share of map content.
• About seven new satellites are going up next year, all claiming 1- to 3-meter accuracy. This means that there is going to be a huge volume of new data and the cost of data is going to plummet.
• Other interesting data that is becoming increasingly available includes real-time weather information, other sensor and diagnostic data, and customer information.
• "Data wants to be free," but if data creators don't make a profit they will have no incentive to continue to create data. For example, Microsoft is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to capture 3D models of the world but will stop doing so if it can't somehow protect its investment.
• The United States leads the world in making data available for free; South Africa and Japan are also making it available at a nominal cost. One of the reasons that there is such a large and vibrant GIS industry in the United States is because of freely available data, as a matter of government policy. You also get free data from a company like Google, which makes its money from advertising.
• In Southeast Asia, by contrast, governments are very restrictive about data, because of cost and "security" concerns.
• A volunteer organization has created very good road maps and directions for Malaysia and Singapore, which one can use with a Garmin GPS receiver. They did this by running around on the weekend with consumer GPS receivers, capturing this information. In India, the Map the Village project consisted of kids with GPS receivers. These are examples of how participation allows volunteers to create high quality data.
• Batty: "To some extent, you get what you pay for. In the United States you get data for free but, excuse me, it is useless compared to what you get in the UK. There is no good, accurate national map here. In the UK you've got topo maps everywhere and they are accurate to sub-meter and everybody uses those same common base maps."
• The Ordnance Survey guarantees that every change in the landscape will be reflected in its database within six months. It will cost you $50-60 million to import that data and incorporate it into your GIS.
• Camateros: The U.S. highway system was an investment in infrastructure; similarly, the U.S. economy would benefit from a good national basemap.

3D Modeling

• Gail: "As we build out these virtual worlds, as we move into 3D, the ability to bring cutting edge sensors to the table is very important. In addition to the 3D modeling, Vexcel brought [to Microsoft, which bought the company last year] a cutting edge aerial sensor that we now use. (We don't actually fly it ourselves; we sell it to companies that fly to acquire the imagery that is used to create those 3D models.)"
• Gail: "3D is really central to our strategy. This comes straight down from Bill Gates" who envisions everyone soon walking around in virtual worlds. A paradigm shift is beginning—from take the information to me, via a search engine to take my avatar to the location and it will explore it for me. "We are going to see very interesting interfaces between real and imaginary worlds."
• Nats: MapQuest focuses on real imagery, rather than on models and a "gaming" experience.

Data Sources and Formats

• Nats: "We work with 30 or 40 sources of data and bring those into our system and it is a real challenge to turn those things around in a timely manner. … There are no standards around this, so we spend a lot of effort building adaptors around these, the ability to adjust this data and make it a part of our core central service."

Governments and Consumers

• Gail: The mass market for geospatial data benefits governments. "This is a case in which the consumers are making these investments and governments are going to … get things a lot cheaper than if they tried to do them on their own. They are not able to specify exactly what they get—this is a commercial marketplace, you get what's there. Maybe 98 percent of their needs are satisfied with what's there; they can go somewhere else to get the missing two percent."
• The government is also a very big data supplier. For example, the U.S. federal government is the source of TIGER files and NAIP imagery, while county governments are the principal source of cadastral data. Therefore, the collection of geospatial data is a partnership between consumers, private companies, and government agencies.

Remote Sensing

• The acquisition of satellite and aerial imagery is rapidly becoming commoditized; yet…
• …it is important to support the federal Earth-observing satellite programs.

Privacy

• Gail: Complying with different privacy requirements in different states and countries is very challenging.
• The increasing accuracy and timeliness of the available geospatial data is beginning to raise serious questions about privacy. Maybe some people don't want their backyards to be photographed.

» Back to our GIS Monitor MAR 2007 Issue