Open Source Geo in 5 years time
Posted September 3, 2009 
Comments(10)
Comments(10) I’m writing a short paper on what the open source geospatial space is going to be like in 5 years time. I’ve got some ideas of my own, but it seems apt (and would be mighty helpful) to seek advice/views/opinion from the community on this point. I’m particularly interested in the emerging trends that people see, and the impact that they will have on the acceptance and use of open source geospatial software in the more general geospatial “industry”.
Comment below, or use the contact form. Anything that I use I’ll credit.
An open access paper?
Well… it’s a contribution to something the AGI are putting together. Not sure if the whole thing will be open access, but my bit certainly will be!
Past performance is not an indication of future returns, but how far has Open Source Geo moved in the *past* five years?
Also, where will it be in comparison to what? Commercial software? Technology trends as a whole? Technology trends in GIS? More specificity is needed in the question, I think.
@Howard Butler- good point- in comparison to how it looks today, I guess. I’m keen on people’s views on your other question too- have things moved on in the last five years? I think so, but others (with a longer exposure) may not…
Semantics
This isn’t only happening in the ‘Open’ community of course (Yahoo Geocoder, OpenCalais, etc) but in my book they are leading the way (GeoNames, Pleiades), mostly because linking is much easier to do when you can freely access the data!
I see an increasing accessibility, stability and interoperability of open-source GIS software (and the reverse of commercial GIS), increasing availability of high resolution geospatial data (eg. the recent ASTER DEM release), and increasing public/scientific demand for free access to high quality government collected/produced data.
I also see increasing digitizing of the corpus of archaeological reports which allows GIS analysis to be broader in scope, scale and usefulness.
But that’s just me.
I strongly recommend Peter Batty (‘geothought’ on my blogroll) re: neogeo – he’s a keynote speaker @ AGI2009 in a fortnight if you go.
Succintly here are themes (see my blog):
a) there will be a convergence of the web and the geospatial, and Google Wave is a harbinger of that – that’s what I bang on about geomatics gaining real traction only after it goes under the hood – and that likely will all be opensource
b) crowdsourcing (Openstreetmap) will blow data provison wide open, and that will likely be driven by opensourcers (current vendors aren’t likely to IMHO)
c) as single-sourced cradle-to-grave workflows simply don’t happen, emphasis will be more and more on standards, which will enhance interoperability, and that in turn will be driven by opensource (@ the moment current vendors appear to be driving it, but that’ll change)
I agree with Colin that we will see greater interoperability and access to data. The web tools seem to be the most innovative of late; GeoWeb, openlayers, ajax, cloud computing, etc. ESRI is pushing web services too. OpenStreetMap has taken off. We can safely predict evolutionary advancements for much of the core tools – MapServer, Gdal/Ogr, PostGIS, OSM, Desktop GIS – Grass, Qgis,svGIS, Udig, OpenJump, MapWindow. I personally like the RDBMS spatial tools – SQL Server 2008 native spatial support, Spatialite (open source answer to ESRI FileGeodatabase), PostGIS, MySQL, Oracle.
Hi Jo Cook, I am currently working with trends in Gis. Have a look at my website and I will be more than happy to help.
http://gisws.media.osaka-cu.ac.jp/gistrends/
Thanks for all the responses- I’ll be putting the paper together over the next couple of days!