Lance McKee
Driven by new geographic data sources, improved software, and widespread need, geodata and geoprocessing are becoming big business. Between 60 percent and 80 percent of all database records have a geographic field (usually a street address), and new features in programs such as
Oracle
enable them to store more complex geographic data.
The need to support geodata is increasing. Within a decade, geographic positioning system (GPS) microchips will be in almost all new vehicles, cell phones, farm and construction equipment, and large shipping containers. Twelve new high-resolution commercial Earth imaging satellites will be on-line by the year
2000. Traditional geodata and geoprocessing markets are growing, and new applications are proliferating in ban
king, insurance, retailing, and other areas.
More than 60 organizations have joined the Open GIS Consortium (OGC, Wayland, MA), which is writing the Open Geodata Interoperability Specification (OGIS). The group's overall goal is to bring geoprocessing into the world of open systems and distributed heterogeneous computing. Part I of OGIS, The OpenGIS Guide, is available on the Web at
http://ogis.org
.
"Monolithic software systems and closed and incompatible data formats have limited GIS, Earth imaging, and other geoprocessing technologies to the status of cottage industries," says Carl Reed, president of geographic information system (GIS) software vendor Genasys (Fort Collins, CO). "OGIS will change that."
OGC's Technical Committee has created the basic elements of a platform-independen
t OGIS specification. Through a request-for-proposals process, the technical committee and vendors are now creating implementation specifications for distributed computing platforms, such as OLE/COM, the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), and Java. OGC's new Application Integration Working Group will give government and industry "geographic information communities" expert analysis and assistance on their geoprocessing issues.
Even the historical division between the raster and vector worlds is dissolving. OGIS will contain a comprehensive Earth imaging model to unify raster images of weather, land masses, and other geographic entities with vector representations typically found in CAD and graphics applications. Ultimately, OGIS will support sophisticated real-time raster-to-vector conversions (e.g., taking an aerial photograph and using image recognition to interpret roads that can be layered into CAD drawings) and other kinds of "in the pipe" processing.
As the OGC tears down pr
oprietary barriers, integrators will be able to quickly and economically spatially enable applications for both business and government agencies.
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1. Spatial data
will flow more freely through the corporate information system and the NII when the data is a standard component of open, platform-independent database technology. Here Oracle PowerBrowser shows the results of a database query, but any browser could display this information.
2. The user queried
the database for all companies in a certain industry within a 2.5-mile radius in New York City
.
3. Clicking on one
of the database hits, represented by a circle, yields specific business data.
Geoprocessing Goes Prime Time
