NSGIC Mid-Year Reports: Emerging Technologies

Members of the NSGIC Corporate Leadership Council gave a presentation on emerging technologies in the geospatial industries.

Malcolm Adkins, of Michael Baker, spoke about the on-going effort to update the nation's Flood Maps. He noted that the tools now available make it easier to create widely usable flood maps. He also pointed to new ways to share data with the public using new tools from Google, Microsoft, and others.

Martin Hogeweg, of ESRI, spoke about working towards service-oriented architectures to take full advantage of data and applications. It is the advent of services that are widely available and inter-operative that has brought about the new practice of "mash-ups." He drew a parallel between established enterprise business models and an open, enterprise approach to the use and sharing of geospatial data.

Bill Bates, from TeleAtlas, gave an overview of navigation devices and a sense of how rapidly they are changing and being adopted. He noted that technology advances are helping to drive the market changes. This is true both of the tools used to collect and edit data and of the tools used by the public to make use of that data. He speculated that eventual two-way data communication between data users and data managers will allow continual, real-time data update by communities of data users.

John Auble, of DigitalGlobe, looked at changes in the aerial imagery tools and techniques, especially as satellite data improves. He hopes to work with the state GIS Coordinators to shape the business model that will take advantage of this growing volume of data. He suggested one day having a steady relationship for imagery; a line-item rather than a capital expense. He noted the idea of licensing data, rather than owning it (licensing rather than owning the copyright).

Update (3/18/08): Presentation materials from this session are now available on-line.

Bob? Bob?.... Is He on Mute? Is Bob Still on the Call?

There's an interesting article on CIO.com about ways to run effective teleconferences and virtual meetings.

Meetings are hard enough to run when the participants are all in the same room, fighting over the last chocolate doughnut. . . . You may be great at orchestrating an in-person meeting, but running an effective teleconference requires new skills.

NSGIC is increasingly taking advantage of teleconferencing and WebEx to bring together members, sponsors, partners and leaders to work on issues around creating the NSDI. We're slowly learning lessons about making the best use of this technology; we are often amused at our own fumbling.

We do a pretty good job, but it may be worth a few moments to share the tips and tricks in this article before our next NSGIC Call.