TwinGeo - The geospatial perspective

GOLGI ALVAREZ published in the MAPPING 200 special edition.

It is easy to predict what will happen in a week; the agenda is usually drawn, by far one event will be canceled and another unforeseen will arise. Predicting what could happen in a month and even in a year is usually framed in an investment plan and quarterly expenses which vary relatively a little bit, although it is necessary to abandon the level of detail and to generalize.

Predicting what could happen in 30 years, is simply reckless, although it will be interesting in the overview of all the articles in the 200 edition Mapping Magazine. From the geomatics side, we could propose aspects in relation to technology, the information storage media or the academic offer; however, in the long term there are unpredictable variables such as cultural change and the influence of the user in the market.

An interesting exercise is to look back on how things were 30 years ago, what they are like now and where industry trends are heading, the role of government and the academia; to have an approximation of the role of geomatics in the management of information and operations in human activity in social, economic and environmental areas.

RETROSPECTIVE 30 YEARS BEFORE

Thirty years ago it was 1990. So a tech-savvy user had an 80286, with a black screen and orange letters behind a filter, Lotus 123, WordPerfect, Dbase, Print Master and DOS as the operating system. At that time, users with more access to CAD / GIS design software felt like kings of the universe; if they had an Intergraph because normal PCs drained the patience and ridicule of paper draftsmen.

• We are talking about Microstation 3.5 for Unix, Generic CADD, AutoSketch and AutoCAD, which that year won the Byte Magazine award for the first time, when the buttons were simulated icons and the innovative paperspace that nobody understood. If you expected to enter 3D additionally it was necessary to pay ACIS.

• It would still be a year before the first intuitive interface of ArcView 1.0 was born, so in 1990 the one that knew about GIS did it with ARC / INFO in command line.

• As for free software, it would take 2 years for GRASS 4.1 to appear, although all these technologies had the maturity of a journey since 1982.

Regarding global communication, in 1990 ARPANET would formally disappear with 100,000 computers connected; the term world wide web would appear until 1991. The remotest thing in education was the correspondence courses because Moodle gave its first steps until 1999 and the only way to buy something was to go to the store or call the printed catalog phone number.

THE CURRENT SCENARIO OF GEOMATICS AND EARTH SCIENCES.

Seeing how things were 30 years ago, we are aware that we live in glorious moments. But not only for the free and private software that we use, but for the entire industry. Geolocation and connectivity has become so intrinsic, that a user navigates on a mobile, requests a delivery service, reserves a room on another continent without having to understand how an UTM coordinate works.

An interesting aspect is the merging of the entire Geo-engineering environment. Disciplines that managed data grew with separate routes and where forced to converge in the operation management, simplifying themselves and reluctantly accepting standardization.

This convergence of disciplines around work flows requires that professionals expand their spectrum of knowledge in function of a company that seeks to be efficient. The geographer, geologist, surveyor, engineer, architect, builder and operator need to model their professional knowledge in the same digital environment, which makes important both the subsoil and the surface context, the design of generic volumes as well as the detail of infrastructures, and the code behind an ETL as the clean interface for a managerial user. As a consequence, the academia is going through a critical stage to maintain an offer that matches the needs of industry innovation and market evolution.

There are cycles of explosion in innovation. Right now we are about to see one start.

PERSPECTIVE IN 30 YEARS IN THE FUTURE

In 30 years our best glories could look primitive. Even reading this article will cause the feeling of a hybrid between an episode of the Jetsons and a movie of The Hunger Games. Although we know that trends such as 5G connectivity and the fourth industrial revolution are just around the corner, it is not so simple to determine the changes that culture will undergo in relationships studentteacher, citizen-government, employeecompany, and consumer- producer.

If we refer to trends that are currently driving the industry, government and the academia, these are my particular perspectives.

The adoption of standards will be a norm of responsibility. Not only for purposes of

technology or information formats, but on the operation of the market. It will be very normal to standardize fulfillment times for the provision of services, environmental guarantees, and construction guarantees. The geomatics industry will have to include more the human factor, since it will have an important role to connect the real world with digital twins, beyond modeling representation, contracts for the interaction of people, companies and government.

By 2050 blockchain will have been the primitive http protocol, not as a solution but as the alert to a bigger problem, where standardization should be a norm of responsibility.

Usability will be decided by the end customer.

The user of a technology, product or service will have a role not only of consultation but of decision; thus, aspects such as urban design and environmental management will be opportunities for the disciplines associated with the land. This will involve instrumentalizing overly specialized knowledge from disciplines such as geography, geology, surveying, or engineering into solutions where the end user makes decisions.

The profession must turn its knowledge to tools, so that a citizen decides where he wants his house, chooses an architectural model, adjusts parameters to his wish and immediately receives plans, licenses, offers and guarantees. From the decision-making side, these types of solutions will work both on an asset scale, as a network of connected infrastructures, a regional or national system; with geolocated objects, mathematical models and artificial intelligence.

Connectivity and interaction with real time will be intrinsic.

In 30 years, geographic information such as images, digital models, environmental variables, and predictive models will be very accurate and accessible. With this, sensors for receiving information from satellites and devices at lower altitudes will move to more everyday uses once they overcome the complications of privacy and security.

All education will be virtual and the complex will be depreciated.

Many areas of human interaction will be virtual, inevitably education too. This will lead to the simplification of knowledge that is unnecessary for practical life and the standardization of aspects that today are barriers such as borders, scale, language, distance, and access. Although borders will continue to be of great importance, in the virtual environment they will die as a consequence of the market and the fall of the cult of the absurd. Geomatics surely could not die, but it will evolve from being a professional elite discipline to a knowledge close to the new challenges of humanity.

For now, feel satisfied of having been part of the “30 years before”, witnessed the current moment and the emotion of entering a new cycle where only the ideas that facilitate decision-making and present a better end-user experience will survive.