Geospatial Data and Analysis

Chapter 5. Innovations: Platforms, IoT, and Mathematics

Now that we’ve toured a few toolsets, it seems appropriate to delve into the innovations that are pushing the industry forward. In this chapter, we’ll discuss the platforms and software packages that seek to solve processing, storage, and spacing issues as the scale of data pushes beyond the capabilities of current systems. We’ll include some anecdotes from industry contributors and product consumers and explore cartographic futures in sensor systems, satellite data, IoT (Internet of Things) innovations, and current industry contributions to mobile and massive data infrastructure.

These topics are important because they are continuously pushing the boundaries of the industry and forecasting what will become the foci of future years. We’ll discuss emerging techniques in mathematics, unsolved problems posed by networked devices, and aspects of geospatial development that further innovative practice.

Fantasy Futures

When we talk about size and scale for modern mapmaking, our data corpus extends well beyond the human capacity to visualize, filter, and collate information into appropriate geometries at all resolutions. With modern computing, we now have at our disposal a complex system of 2D and 3D layering schemas, allowing us to offload the processing requirements for large-scale projects to our surrogate devices. It was not always so. In the 13th and 14th centuries, contemporary “cartographers” created maps of the “known”—that ...