INDUSTRY

From the editor
Prof Arup Dasgupta
Managing Editor, arup@geospatialmedia.net
2016 could be a year
of ‘democratization’
Every time when the
month of January
comes around, I
begin to wonder what
earth-shattering geospatial
events am I going to predict
for the New Year in the January
edition. This year, I was intrigued
and then convinced by the arbitrariness
of this concept of New Year
after someone on Facebook had
recently concluded that the concept
is fallacious as it just represents
the completion of one more orbit
of the earth around the sun from an
arbitrary starting point. It is not even
a heliocentric reference point like
the winter solstice; summer as those
‘down under’ will aver, which itself
is an arbitrary construct.
Going through various articles
slated for the January 2016 edition, it
dawned on me that the world in general
and geospatial world in particular
does not race from event to event
timed by this arbitrary epoch. Rather
it is a process of continuous change,
of waves of evolution as it were. At
intervals some technology arrives to
disrupt the status quo but soon gets
absorbed in the scheme of things
through a process of adoption and adaptation.
For example, can we mark
a point in time when say, remote
sensing became active? Rather, do
we not see a blip that was aerial
surveys, then handheld photography
by astronauts, then TIROS and then
several blips like ERTS, RESURS,
SPOT and IRS that seem to blend
into a continuum of satellites with
more and more advanced features.
Therefore, instead of trying to be a
Geospatial Nostradamus, I shall limit
myself to a few observations based
on the current situation of the geospatial
world around us.
My first impression is that the leitmotif
for 2016 seems to be ‘democratization’.
This is reflected in the
shift towards consumption-oriented
business models. Consumers are
looking for localized solutions, but
are not interested in putting together
solutions themselves from scratch,
buying data, systems and software,
coding their own applications and
managing workflows.
In this consumer-centric holistic
approach, the data acquisition is purposed
and the workflow is integrated
into the hardware and software such
that the consumer is able to get solutions
on demand and at their location
which could be at their desk or on
site. This indicates that geospatial
services will continue to grow in the
form of integrated applications, or
apps. Apps bring the real world to the
digital world and thus helps the user
to understand the problem and apply
the right solutions to it.
Chairman
M P Narayanan
Publisher
Sanjay Kumar
Managing Editor
Prof. Arup Dasgupta
Editor — Defence &
Internal Security
Lt Gen (Dr) AKS Chandele (Retd)
Editor — Mining (Hon)
Dr. Hrishikesh Samant
Editorial Team
Bhanu Rekha
Anusuya Datta
Ishveena Singh
Amit Raj Singh
Design
Debjyoti Mukherjee
Product & Marketing Team
Harsha Vardhan Madiraju
Sanskriti Shukla
Vijay Kumar Singh
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expressed in the publication. All views expressed in this
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responsible for any loss to anyone due to the information
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7 • Geospatial World • January 2016