Academic Round Table meeting report “Clash of challenges – ICT & Geo” – September 28, 2011 During the GIS Conference 2011 in Rotterdam, hosted by Esri Nederland, an Academic Round Table meeting took place. The meeting was co-organized by the ICT-innovation platform Geo (IIPGeo) and the National Geodetical Commission (NCG), part of Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. The discussion between 25 experts from public organizations, ICT and Geo academia (see participants list in the attachment) was moderated by Ir. Tamme van der Wal, Aerovision. The purpose of this meeting was to discuss and explore the relation between Information Technology (IT) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in the past, now and in the next 10 years. Geo and ICT = Business? The Academic Round Table started with two presentations. The first presentation was prepared by the scientist from the ICT, the second by a scientist from a GIS world. After the presentations the experts from two disciplines could exchange their opinions about the relationship between IT and Geo world. Prof. Dr. Ir. Peter Apers from the Department of Computer Science of University of Twente started with a presentation entitled: Geo and ICT = Business?. In his presentation Professor Apers discussed the main trends in ICT and relations between ICT and Geo. One of the mainstream trends is that ICT technology becomes faster and smaller. A good example is the advancement of mobile technology commonly used by contemporary societies. It is also crucial that modern ICT applications and devices have a user friendly interface, no matter the functionality is. Cloud computing was also mentioned as a main trend observed in ICT world. Cloud computing generates many questions about security and privacy and the location of data storage. Another visible trend is that consumers become also a producer of data. The voluntary production of data by consumers can have both active (Twitter) or passive (signal of a mobile phone) character. This trend results in great amount of freely available data. The ownership and quality of these data can be however questioned. Nevertheless these kind of data can still be highly relevant. Therefore the dilemma for business developers arises: making geo data more accurate and more expensive? Or look for new business models that lead to new ways of using (cheap) data. Prof. Dr. Ir. Arnold K. Bregt from the Centre for Geo-information of Wageningen University discussed a timeline of the relations between IT and Geo. He stated that the GIS has its roots in geodesy, cartography and geography and until year 2000 the role of IT has been limited to storing and managing spatial data in Data Base Management Systems (DBMS). Since the year 2000 when an advent of Spatial Data Infrastructures can be coined, the role of IT gained importance. Since then its role has been to improve data sharing between organization and for applications in society. It is remarkable that most of the standards to exchange and manage spatial data have its roots in ICT standards. According to the presenter, we now are at a point of real time collection of geographical data. This trend will result in huge volume of highly diverse data from various sources. The question now is how IT technology can help GIS world to process and use these data. Professor Bregt concluded with a proposal that analogically to the expansion of Information Technology into Information and Communication Technology (ITICT), the ICT will expand into Information, Communication Technology and Location (ICTICTL).
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Conclusions The discussion that followed contained many interesting observations and ideas from both ICT and Geo experts. The conclusions from that discussion can be summarized in the following points: •
One of the important questions raised during the meeting was if the close cooperation of Geo with ICT world leads to innovative business opportunities. According to ICT experts, the answer is at the user side. The ICT world is much more mature than the Geo world in meeting the client needs. ICT have long experience in supporting business processes at the end-user side. Geo world is too much concentrated on data storage, analysis and presentation, all done in a software reserved for geo specialists. According to ICT experts, by focusing on data use, the GIS world would reach the broader scope of users. The role of ICT within Geo in the next ten years will mostly be to provide technologies and applications for complicated geo analytical questions. As the focus of geo will move towards the technologies able to analyze and extract meaningful information from great amount of data (formal, informal, real time), the ICT world will have a task of providing necessary algorithms to support this new Geo trend. For example, ICT technologies for extracting meaningful information from geo-related data from informal and user generated sources such as tweets with location or geocoded photos. It seems that ICT has not ready-to-use generic tools (Spatial Aware Tools) to answer geo analytical questions. This will be the focus of Geo-ICT cooperation in the following years.
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The interesting trend which is observed both in Geo and ICT world is a shortening of the processes of data collection (e.g. sensors, crowdsourcing, open data), searching (e.g. search engines, indexing), analyzing (e.g. SaaS) and sharing (e.g. cloud computing). This is also due to a wide-spread, easy to use technology available for everyone.
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There is an overlap of trends (and related challenges) in both worlds: Cloud computing, sensor networks, privacy and security issues, consumer becomes a producer.
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Open data trend is seen as an opportunity for Geo and ICT world. The easier access to data, the more use of these data and more applications for the end users. Because of the availability of open data, the monopoly of big data producers will disappear. Nevertheless, the big data producers will still have a role of producers of certified data of known quality. Open data will be an alternative for users for whom this certificate is not needed.
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The role of the geo-information sector is changing from “guard of the archives” to “guide for the users”. It also means change of business models and change of power.
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Will GIS disappear into IT domain? If so, a few other disciplines are also in front of the line to integrate with IT. “Spatial is special” – GIS will always have its particular dimension in IT world.
The next step The meeting agreed to collaborate on the the following themes: • Formal versus informal data – Tom van Engers UvA, Menno Jan Kraak ITC, Peter Laarakker Kadaster • Geo-ICT Analyse – Arnold Smeulders UvA, Arnold Bregt WUR, Rolf de By ITC, Marc van Kreveld UU • Satellite image database – Arnold Smeulders UvA , Martin Kersten CWI, Radboud Koop NSO.
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