2005 December 15 Contents Editor's Introduction Industry Survey: What was big news this year and what do you wish for next year?

This issue sponsored by ESRI

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Editor's Introduction

This week I bring you 25 responses to a set of four questions that I posed to about 200 GIS practicioners, developers, and managers. (Next week I will bring you a second batch of responses.) Plus, my usual round-up of news from press releases (by coincidence, 25 news items).

— Matteo

1. What is your niche in the geospatial industry?


2. What was the single biggest technological development in your niche this year?


3. What was the single biggest business development in your niche this year?


4. What technological or business development would make your company more profitable next year? [Alternative wording, for public agencies: "What technological or business development would make your agency's work more cost-effective next year?"]

1. The Army's Topographic Engineering Center (TEC) provides unique geospatial engineering and intelligence support to our nation's warfighters by providing the best geospatial tools and services the Army can offer. The focus of our activity is to produce the best shared situational awareness while transitioning to full net-centric battle command and intelligence operations.


2. The most significant development from the Army's TEC is the continued spiraling and evolution of the BuckEye System. Born out of the need for a field-expedient change detection system to aid in detecting improvised explosive devices (IEDs), BuckEye has rapidly evolved from only producing high resolution imagery over a commander's area of interest to now providing both high resolution electro-optical (EO) imagery and Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) imagery. The BuckEye provides commanders with the geospatial information they need to visualize the battlefield by providing high resolution imagery; geospatial intelligence; intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR); elevation data; and detail maps of the urban battlefield. The future of BuckEye will marry infrared scanning capability with EO and LIDAR imagery. Our goal is to see the Buckeye fielded with every Army terrain team to ensure service members have the edge they need to win the war.


3. The Army TEC Joint Geospatial Enterprise Services (JGES) Science and Technology initiative has been a significant business development during the past year. As the program approaches its third spiral, it is acting as an incubator for science and technology projects that support our nation's military. The JGES program provides the environment to foster geospatial compatibility of multiple systems that the warfighters need while offering a test bed for others to flourish and grow. The vast array of tools Army TEC provides to the warfighter are all compatible in the JGES environment. Additionally, Army TEC is working closely with academia, industry, and other federal agencies to provide this framework to ensure future enhancements in a net-centric environment that cries out for synergy among the geospatial tools. JGES is the basis for the synergy to occur.


4. More robust funding of the Geospatial Logical Data Modeling effort for the Army Battlespace Environment (ABE) project, which is key to connecting Geospatial data between NGA, FCS DCGS-A, and JC2.

1. This is really hard to say for us and I suppose our position has changed recently with the release of our new Geographic Imager product. I would say that our niche is to provide reasonably priced yet extremely functional software that bridges the gap between traditional GIS and the widespread publishing and design environments.


2. I would say the release of Geographic Imager for Adobe Photoshop.


3. Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia.


4. Further adoption of the concept of using the graphics environment (both vector and raster) for doing geospatial work. This and the wish that ESRI and other GIS market leaders would recognize the standard we have created and work with us to make their products more compatible with ours.

1. To provide time-saving software and effective training solutions to geospatial professionals using MicroStation


2. The unveiling of MicroStation V8 XM Edition


3. Perhaps our release of the first ever GEOPAK training CD-ROM library.


4. The official release of MicroStation V8 XM Edition.

1. We are an ESRI Business Partner and we focus on public safety (police/EMS/fire) as well as mobile GIS. We provide software solutions, services, and training for ESRI and Trimble products.


2. Strengthening in the server-side application development arena such as ESRI's ArcWeb Services, and ArcGIS Server, which allow for the dissemination of data, analysis, and solutions from a centralized location. This seems to be the direction in which applications and solutions are continuing to head. This year represents a big step in their growth, and over time they will continue to get more and more robust in the functionality that they provide. This will allow them to be an increasingly important component to many distributed spatially-enabled solutions.


3. With the release of ArcGIS 9.1, ESRI also made available Network Analyst. This kind of analysis can greatly assist public safety organizations with meeting or exceeding specific response guidelines as set forth by federal, state, and local agencies.


4. Technologically speaking, developments which would help make us more profitable next year would include expansion of wireless bandwidth. As wireless bandwidth continues to become available over larger and larger geographic areas (and at higher speeds), applications and solutions will also increasingly utilize mobile technology as an outlet and a means of transferring input/out directly to/from servers, further taking advantage of server-based GIS applications.

1. CyberCity 3D builds interactive, geo-referenced, high-resolution, computer-based 3D city and terrain models for visualization. Our models are used to develop and explore concepts and alternatives through communication, business development, and planning. Our target markets include engineers, planners, architects, real-estate development, GIS, the entertainment industry, and public outreach.


2. CyberCity's single biggest technological development in our niche this year has been to cost-effectively and productively visualize massive amounts of geographic data in 3D within a standard PC environment.


3. CyberCity's single biggest business development in our niche this year has been a contract award to produce a 3D terrain exploration model of a large infrastructure project in Southern California, valued at more than $75,000.


4. The technological development that will make our company more profitable next year is the Los Angeles Region — Imagery Acquisition Consortium, a comprehensive plan organized by the county to obtain highly accurate digital imagery. The digital imagery is of great value to CyberCity 3D since it is the initial requirement in building our models. Having off-the-shelf data cuts costs for our firm as well as for our clients.

1. GIS software development, custom development services, ESRI software customization, and functionality extending


2. Google entering the geospatial market with its Google Maps and Earth. We think this was the most prominent and industry-influencing technological development this year.


3. ArcGIS 9.1 release


4. ArcGIS 9.2 release, as some of our efforts in the joint projects with ESRI are planned to be included in 9.2. Besides, continuing expansion of ESRI software and technology worldwide is always important for us since most of our products and services are around ESRI products.

1. Dewberry provides a wide range of specialized professional services. We focus on the following performance areas: disaster and emergency response management, data development, quality assurance and quality control, and professional consulting services.


2. The emergence of open source solutions such as the Google Maps API has had a major impact on the industry. We think that we'll see geospatial applications and Web services proliferate as a result of this kind of technology, pushing data and analytical functions to end users, while at the same time allowing public and private agencies to centralize and create enterprise solutions.


3. The single biggest business development is fully deploying our ESRI Enterprise License Agreement and rolling out GIS tools to the entire Dewberry Enterprise. With this initiative, we intend to fully enable all disciplines within the company with GIS technology. We will be using GIS in every aspect of our business — including land development, transportation design, facilities management, and environmental planning.


4. The single biggest development that would make a difference to us is a national strategy for geospatial data. Currently there is no organized, national program for reliably (and efficiently) collecting and distributing geospatial information, in spite of the great strides that have been made in some areas. A recent report by NSGIC identified the impact of this situation. Their study showed that there are hundreds of uncoordinated programs across the country plagued by duplicated effort, higher costs, and varying quality. If everyone could collaborate on a single strategy for data collection then there would be better collaborative funding and in turn bigger projects. Also, less money per client would be spent on data collection, leaving more money for application development and actual utilization of the data.

1. Dynamix Corporation views our strengths in spatial data management and geospatial professional staffing services. Our team of experts has headed the industry in terms of the mining, acquisition, quality assurance, and preparation of locally-provided spatial data for both the public and private sector. Dynamix has also provided staff for a variety of geospatial efforts, including cadastral mapping, disaster response, disease proliferation modeling, GPS collection, GIS/GPS training, and GIS programming.


2. Dynamix Corporation has introduced a wastewater profiling plug-in for ESRI's ArcGIS that aids production technicians in quality control efforts. This tool produces profile views of 3-dimensional data that mimic plan-and-profile engineering hardcopy information used for digitization, in order to simplify quality control visualization techniques. This tool is also capable of identifying both 2D and 3D topological inconsistencies in wastewater data.


3. Dynamix has recently expanded its staffing services to support disaster response efforts and the heath care industry.


4. Dynamix Corporation is currently active in developing geospatial tools and analysis to aid in vulnerability studies of critical network infrastructure. We believe this effort can greatly aid in revealing infrastructure that would be vulnerable to failure in catastrophic events and assist in disaster planning, protection, and response.

1. I am in GPS-GIS sales, training, and troubleshooting.


2. The sub-foot GPS mapping system for under $5,000.


3. Partnering with other companies allowing us to offer more comprehensive systems.


4. The continued development of partnerships, offering more sophisticated technical support services, and continued integration of technology from other manufacturers allowing us to offer more capable systems.

1. Building new content/information layers for GIS from remote sensing and DEM (digital elevation model) data. Focus on environmental baselines and geologic applications.


2. Google Earth


3. Google Earth


4. Asset managers considering 4D GIS (x,y, elevation, time) a cost-effective investment for basic environmental applications, given the immense inventory of digital data that is available from agencies; the ease of conversion; and the fact that assets, people, and the environment operate in (at least) a 4D world.

1. Like most other utilities, we employ geospatial technology to model our water, electric, telecommunications, and steam systems as virtual networks. These models begin as a merely graphic inventory of equipment rendered with only relative accuracy on a non-standard projection, and then, over time, mature to fully attributed and connected features with a high degree of geopositional accuracy.


2. Utilities in general, and public utilities in particular, have been very conservative in the deployment of new technologies. The ones that we are currently investigating were the "biggest technological developments" five or even ten years ago. These developments don't even show up on our radar screen until they have shown staying power for several years and begin to show maturity and acceptance by larger utilities. This conservative bent, along with ongoing resource constraints related to aging infrastructure, and a deep commitment to public benefit keeps us at a safe distance from the 'bleeding edge.'


3. We have been largely immune to any developments this year (even though our prime migration vendor, Miner & Miner, was acquired by Telvent). Some of us have loaded up Google Earth, and watch with interest their foray into the spatial arena (they have the money to really shake up Location Based Services), but it is not clear yet whether or how this product will integrate with our core utility business processes.

1. The IcoMap product line utilizes mathematically based optical character recognition that allows users in both the government and title insurance space to dramatically increase their mapping productivity. In addition, our professional services group is now contracted with several major underwriters to build GIS-based workflow processes and tools, automating much of the mapping and locating function of the title plant.


2. The widespread adoption of ArcGIS 9.x has allowed us to focus on developing for the ESRI platform. The IcoMap 4.0 release allows for even great time savings when mapping and, as an ArcGIS extension, is even more tightly integrated with ArcView, ArcEditor, and ArcInfo.


3. Our billable work and software sales of GIS-based mapping products increased more than 80 percent to title insurance companies over 2004. On the software side, IcoMap is becoming the standard for easement and parcel mapping for commercial and builder services title operations on the West Coast. In terms of operations, we are assisting several major underwriters who are moving from a paper-based mapping and locating process to a true GIS-based title production model.


4. A continued strong housing market will keep the pressure on title insurance operations to become more productive and competitive. Our products and services directly address this need, making them more profitable.

1. We provide GIS database development and processing services, with particular emphasis on landcover / fire-fuel mapping based on satellite image processing and classification.


2. Google Earth


3. Same answer — Google Earth


4. Google Earth — we are already using it to supplement our efforts on two ongoing projects involving GIS data development and satellite image processing. We will likely use it more this upcoming year.

1. GeoNorth is focused on GIS enabling enterprises of all sizes. We provide traditional consulting services such as needs analysis, implementation planning, and application development. GeoNorth also develops commercial software products for the desktop and the Internet. However, our specialty is integrating GIS with other business systems — such as permitting, land records management, maintenance management, etc. GeoNorth has successfully integrated GIS with several business systems, both commercial and developed in-house.


2. The recent efforts of Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo along with commercial data providers, GPS, and navigation system providers have massively elevated GIS awareness in all industries worldwide. We see the technology used in these solutions, how information is presented to the user, ease of use, and open API's as some of the biggest technology advances this year.


3. Consumer adoption of GIS and the realization by non-GIS business system providers that GIS adds significant functionality and value to their solution. Adoption and awareness have been achieved through marketing, the press, commercial navigation systems, and the release of Google Earth. More importantly, software vendors have recognized that it is perhaps more cost effective to develop open APIs rather than attempting to directly offer and support their own GIS functionality. This provides GIS solution providers and end-customers with options and flexibility. It also allows software companies to remain focused on their core solution, be it document management, permitting, or maintenance management.


4. GeoNorth will continue to innovate new solutions, help clients leverage their existing investments, be responsive, and provide the best possible solutions and services. These all contribute to the health of our company.

1. Intergraph provides geospatial solutions for the government, public safety, utilities and communication, transportation, military and intelligence, and photogrammetry industries. We are focused on providing open, scalable, and seamless geospatial solutions to improve business operations in these industries.


2. Improving the ability to fuse data to form Common Operating Pictures for military and emergency operational decision making. High volumes of vector and imagery data along with text and surface data can be easily integrated, analyzed, and viewed for decision making. This includes integrating different formats, coordinate systems, databases, schemas, and map scales.


3. The introduction of the consumer-level Google Maps, Google Earth, and MSN Virtual Earth websites has increased the value and usage of geospatial data across our industries. This is helping to motivate more creative usage of geospatial information in business processes.


4. We will continue to introduce the combination of Public Safety dispatch solutions, Emergency Operation Center (EOC) command and control solutions, and incident planning / preparation solutions to provide complete security solutions for the government, public safety, and transportation industries.

1. We provide state of the art wavelet-based technology (MrSID and JPEG2000) to more efficiently manage, process, and distribute large amounts of high-resolution geospatial imagery.


2. The biggest technological development has been the endorsement of GML in JPEG2000 as an OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) standard for geographical imagery, a standard that was developed and submitted by LizardTech in collaboration with Galdos and other organizations. GML has traditionally been associated with vectors but the new specification endorsed by OGC is going to take GML into the realm of imagery and will be a great improvement over the geospatial image metadata management capabilities available in other commonly used metadata formats, such as GeoTIFF.


3. For our company, the biggest business development was the announcement of our relationship with Oracle to provide native wavelet support in MrSID and JPEG2000 for Oracle 10gR2. How to efficiently store and retrieve geospatial imagery in a database has been a poorly addressed problem, and a partnership with the leading database vendor coupled with our long expertise in wavelet technology will certainly be a very important development towards solving geospatial image management and distribution problems for our customers.


4. The problem of distributing geospatial imagery while interoperating with different applications is still largely unsolved and the company that steps up and really fixes this problem will certainly become more profitable. We think that after ten years of work in wavelet technology, and more recent work with standard bodies like OGC or database vendors like Oracle, our company has the requisite expertise and technology to improve upon the ways geospatial imagery is handled. Now is the time to assemble all the pieces we have been working on into a more complete solution that helps our customers improve their image workflows and hopefully brings us greater profitability on the way.

1. Provide county government employees and county citizens with decision-support services via geospatial-related mapping products and provide tailored, Web-based GIS business mapping applications which improve the cost-effectiveness and efficiency of county resources.


2. Improvement in 3D information display techniques coupled with advancement in hardware processing capabilities.


3. Hurricane Katrina events mandated increased and improved GIS applications / techniques for government emergency management preparedness. Federal funding for emergency preparedness was a significant business development. Local focus on very realistic emergency drills, scenarios, and preparedness has increased by several orders of magnitude and thus elevated GIS to a very significant/visible member of the emergency response team.


4. Quicker and more robust hardware processing capabilities for rendering and visualizing raster and TIN products in an emergency. Visualization of analyzed/integrated data is the fastest and most efficient decision-support tool/methodology for emergency management decision-makers.

1. MetaCarta, and the technology we provide, occupy a unique place in the GIS market. MetaCarta's technology plays a key role in delivering actionable intelligence, by automatically fusing traditional GIS, based on structured data, with unstructured text content. MetaCarta GTS is the only solution that can take massive amounts of text content and provide geospatial search with a map-based results display. Both of MetaCarta's flagship products, GTS and GeoTagger, provide massive productivity gains to organizations that have a geographic focus and large amounts of unstructured data in their decision-making processes. Only GTS and GeoTagger are able to automatically detect geographic references in natural language text and resolve them to places on the earth (Lat/Lon).


2. We believe that the biggest development this year is the development and interest in the new class of geographic visualization tools for the Web (intranet and Internet), which have exposed a wider audience to geospatial presentations of complex content.


3. Geospatial analysis and visualization has begun to emerge as an enterprise-level service that is applicable to a wide range of business processes. These solutions are no longer just niche products that make maps.


4. We believe that the nexus of both the technological innovations and business developments mentioned in the previous questions will lead to increased profitability, as more organizations and individuals understand the value of geospatial integration with their knowledge management efforts.

1. We provide technology for the rapid construction of highly accurate, highly realistic 3D urban datasets modeled and texture-mapped from aerial or satellite photography, packaged to be very affordable and usable. You don't need to be a photogrammetry expert or a traditional 3D modeler to get good results from our software, yet it's built to handle the large amounts of data with which geospatial professionals are accustomed to dealing.


2. 3D viewing technologies capable of interactively handling real geospatial data beyond just maps and terrain are finally becoming a reality. Faster graphics hardware, smarter software that caches and pages data to improve interactivity, more bandwidth, and more data accessible through standard Web services all drive that.


3. There are many favorable trends, but I think that the introduction of Google Earth may have done the most to raise the awareness, change the thinking, and increase the number of geospatial data consumers. It will be exciting to see what new ideas and new opportunities evolve from that.


4. I think the current trends will continue, and I am hoping an expansion in thought will proliferate in the geospatial community that will relax the pervasive 2D, orthorectified, North-up assumptions. Our users would benefit from easy online availability of unprocessed high-resolution aerial photography, now normally just used to create orthomosaics. They would also benefit from support for 3D data types in OGC standards like WFS. In the short-term, however, if Google Earth or one of its competitors added a no-nonsense capability to display texture-mapped 3D cities our user base would grow considerably.

1. High quality and timely delivery in aerial photography acquisition and photogrammetry.


2. Digital camera


3. Not a single event, hard work, focused efforts.


4. Same as #3

1. Our niche is to supply the best digital maps and dynamic location content to end users and partners. I love seeing how quickly we've moved from GDT being the Business Geographics street data provider to a much richer global role as part of Tele Atlas, and without compromising our obsession with getting things right and bonding with customers and partners.


2. The biggest technical development is clearly the open interfaces to services like Google Earth & Local, Microsoft Live Local, and Amazon A9. It's really nice to be a key supplier to such innovative and visible companies as they introduce increasingly intriguing products.


3. For Tele Atlas, it's the coming-of-age of personal navigation devices. I've stopped renting a Neverlost from Hertz when I'm on the road; I bring my own TomTom now. I've taken it out to California twice now, and both times when I've re-installed it in my car back home, it hasn't balked at computing a 52-hour, 3,000-mile commute from the Hertz depot at SFO where I last turned it off to my office in New Hampshire. Then a few seconds later, when it gets a GPS fix — still inside my garage — it quickly recalculates a more appropriate route. I need to download the John Cleese voice for it, and perhaps even sexy Sylvia. I love the TomTom — especially because if I find an occasional map glitch, I can make corrections for the next data release myself!


4. Tough question, as I think all we need to do is execute our business plan; I have a lot of confidence in all areas of our operations. We're ahead of the game in technology, just having bought GeoInvent. I'd like to see several large companies — currently wedded to the "industry leader" — take another look at the new Tele Atlas. I think they'd like what they see!

1. Trimble provides complete GPS systems for the collection, maintenance, and use of geospatial data.


2. Trimble introduced subfoot accuracy for GIS data collection and maintenance in April of 2005. Subfoot accuracy is especially important for utilities and telecommunications customers and others where the need for higher accuracy is critical.


3. The expansion and evolution of our business partner channel, which focuses on creating and delivering customized solutions. Our business partners use Trimble technology along with their own solutions to address our customers' specific needs.


4. [Declined to answer.]

1. Automated feature extraction (AFE) software solutions for the geospatial industry.


2. Release of LiDAR Analyst for automated extraction of 3D features from airborne LiDAR. Release of Feature Analyst 4.0 which is now available on all of the leading GIS and remote sensing software applications including ArcGIS, ERDAS IMAGINE, GeoMedia and SOCET SET.


3. Insertion of Feature Analyst into the NGA's IEC baseline geospatial production environment.


4. VLS continues to automate the collection of 2D and 3D geospatial features from imagery — LiDAR radar, scanned maps, etc. &$151 and provides a complete integrated workflow with the industry leaders in commercial GIS and remote sensing software for feature collection, editing, and attribution.

1. Affordable, full-color 3D printing


2. The release of our new high-definition color 3D printers, which can print models at 600 DPI.


3. Z Corp and Contex Scanning have merged. Contex has a significant presence in the GIS and AEC vertical markets and the ability to make 3D printers available to a wider audience.


4. We will benefit from the upward trend in adoption of 3D software for visualization and analysis by GIS & AEC professionals.

1. We view our niche as the integration of geospatial technologies with traditional IT systems to extend the benefits of spatial analysis to non-spatial data. We have primarily focused on the delivery of custom GIS solutions for the Web and the desktop to the homeland security / homeland defense, critical infrastructure protection, and defense markets.


2. I'm not certain whether you want us to answer this question with respect to just us or the industry as a whole. Therefore, I'll answer it both ways. For us, our big technological development was the delivery of four variations of the HD-MAP system to other customers, in coordination with our primary HD-MAP customer. One of those versions was deployed on the Internet to support the Navy's search and recovery efforts in response to Hurricane Katrina and became the primary geospatial visualization and analysis tool for their remote teams. For the industry as a whole, the single biggest technological development seems to be Google Earth. We are hearing about it everywhere now. It seems to be driving the development of more robust free data viewers across the industry.


3. For us, the single biggest business development has been the introduction of the ESRI Developer Network (EDN). It has made it extremely affordable to get up and running with their product line and has greatly reduced our production and R&D; development costs. It could use some improvement but ESRI is on the right track with this one.


4. For us, it would be helpful if key players in the homeland security community, such as DHS and the US Northern Command, would finalize and publish their geospatial requirements in order to give the industry a rallying point.

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