By David Krapf, SPAR staff | April 17, 2012
HOUSTON - “In the world of 3D, it is truly the most exciting times I can think of in the last 40 years,” said Lawrie Jordan, director of imagery at Esri, and special assistant to Jack Dangermond, the company’s president, as part of his keynote address at the SPAR International conference here.
Jordon touched on more than a few GIS trends he is seeing, including the “convergence” of GIS and 3D imaging technology, an uptick in cloud computing, and a “stunning” increase in the use of mobile technology. “An exciting area we see is measuring and capturing volunteer geographic information from social networks and social information, and, of course, the technology and science behind GIS is evolving very quickly,” he said.
Another positive trend, Jordan told SPAR attendees, is that the governance issues are “coming together with regard to open data policies.” Taken together, the aforementioned developments are forming “a very strong and very positive trend that we believe are setting the stage for a much better understanding of the world in which we live.”
Jordan added that in GIS, there is now a trend toward what he terms as “global persistent surveillance.”
“We’re trying to capture, measure, monitor, and map literally everything that moves or changes on the planet,” he said. “We then want to connect all of these different layers and look for patterns and trends and form some meaningful analysis that helps us see and answer some complicated questions.”
