2015 Today – My AGI Foresight Study
Way back in October 2009, I contributed to the AGI’s Foresight Study; predicting the shape of geo in 2015. Seeing as the future is rapidly encroaching, and I have yet to see the study be published, I thought I would share.
After presenting our predictions, some of the surrounding discussion was a sad reflection on the shape of the geospatial industry – the constant clinging to the security blanket of “but we are GIS *Professionals* and our skills are essential” was a particular low point. To me, GIS means clunky desktop software with terrible usability, ugly cartography and elitist terminology – wearing that as a badge of honour is an odd concept.
That aside, my five takeaway predictions for 2015 were:
1) OpenStreetMap to have over one million contributors.
2) Large scale investment in OSM from commercial organisations.
3) Widespread crowdsourcing of geodata to utilise excess cognitive capacity.
4) ‘Big data’ – huge, real-time, actively/passively crowdsourced datasets from the sensor
web.
5) Legislation requiring central and local government to release nearly all PSI to the public
domain.
Even Gary Gale gave me a strange look when talking about point 4, though in the brief time since then he has admitted I was correct. I stress that many of the big datasets coming from the sensor web will be closed, and that new commerical opportunities for geo lie there – whether it be for the data or services with the data.
Point 5 is practically enshrined in law now. I would add one little caveat to point 2 though, I expect government and commercial investment in OSM.
Agi Foresight Study – Christopher Osborne
Christopher Osborne
By 2015 “Professional GIS” and “neogeo” will have finished colliding, and a new tranquil island of geo will have formed. Governments and GIS professionals will still pay for some datasets, but will better understand the benefits of open data and OpenStreetMap, and will opt for that in preference. Skills like osmosis planet file manipulation and Mapnik configuration will be sought after “professional” skills, but also these open source tools will become easier to use and more interoperable with old style GIS software, and with the web.
Either that or google will take over everything.
I was formerly thinking that, in the UK, the data.gov initiative would have nullified the point of OSM. But it doesn’t. It works complementary to it. I think we will see the near completion of OSM in the countries that were first to embrace it, followed by others, notably those where there is poor to little mapping, as we have seen in Haiti. What will happen in countries like the UK and Germany is – following the Wikipedia model – it becomes ‘complete but tweaked’, where users continue to make fine adjustments to make it ‘humanly perfect’.
But that’s the beauty of it – as it grows toward the 1 million user mark, those 1 million users will take pride in moving their local road one metre to the south, to make it near-perfect. That’s the human, grafting quality of it that wasn’t available before now.
Great post, and probably very corrects predictions about the role af OSM (which could, in a broader sense also stand for Open Source Mapping). Maybe you could be interested in having a look at our presentation from the ENTER eTourism conference i Lugano, in particular if you’d like to discuss applications in tourism and innovations in tourist information/informatics: http://www.scribd.com/doc/31662326/ENTER-2010-Liburd-Nielsen-Sustainable-Experience
Any comments here or directly to the authors very welcome
We are approaching a cross roads, and some government agencies are putting serious thought into investing their time and effort into OSM…