The life geospatial - navigating one future of geospatial

Working from home, WFH has been, for many, an escape from the hassle, pressure and cost of the dreaded commute.  Hybrid working could sustain some of those freedoms through distributed, in time and space, commute.  Walking to the local well connected coffee shop, cycling to the library, scheduling meetings for off-peak fares and shunning the office for the co-space or the coffee catch-up open up a whole world of new journeys while keeping actual office time fresh and collaborative.

Photo by Ethan Sykes on Unsplash

And that means choice – where to go, when to go, how to get there, what mode of transport, carbon counting, step counting, what else can I do, who else can I see etc.  And you can be sure, there’s an app for that.  And yes, even the least location data aware person knows that the map in the app and the instructions to follow are built from an accretion of both slow changing and highly dynamic data – maps of infrastructure at one end of the spectrum and rapidly changing levels of usage on the other.

The least stressful option of course is to blindly follow those instructions, that purple or blue route overlay.  There are well publicised instances of this leading to near-disaster, blocked minor roads, jammed bridges etc with road warning and limit signs un-seen or ignored.  The incremental gains from all this free journey time optimisation are a product of the deals we do with the panoply of hardware and software providers in exchange for our data.

The Geospatial Commission is currently running a consultation that will inform their next iteration of the Geospatial Strategy.  Central to this is consideration of the coming evolution in the tools and technologies that will drive the creation, processing, analysis, visualisation and application of location data, and the wider societal and economic context in which that will happen.

For this post I would urge any readers to respond to the consultation and in doing so to think less about the array of tools and technologies that many of us can identify that are with us now or on the horizon and think more about that wider context.  Hence the reference to that exchange of our data for services that are free at the point of consumption.

There is an argument that that ship has sailed and you need “to get over it”.  The reality is that this is very much the tip of the iceberg and that the coming revolution in compute will enable the bulk of the iceberg.  Remember all the Vs of big data?  “There’s so much data” but we were poorly equipped to realise value from it all; reporting as opposed to monitoring limited the risk of us sacrificing our data in exchange for free services (and adverts). That iceberg of value derives from the shift to real time processing of all those data streams.

The vague sense of personalisation or of curated content that we currently have has the possibility of being transformed into a hyper-automated orchestration of our lives.  Too cynical or dystopian a view?  Perhaps!  In the capture technologies of body-worn cams, 4k CCTV, wearables and widespread IoT, in the 5G/6G high-capacity ubiquitous connectivity and distributed cloud and edge compute that allows the assimilation of the data or in the algorithms that drive the visualisations, alerts, insights and (automated) actions lie the infrastructure for a step-change in the bargain we’ve been making with those with who we share our data.

There are initiatives, from GDPR and SOLID to the Locus Charter and more, that offer us choices as to how we personally interact with those aggregators and how those aggregators behave with our location data (all this data has a location element – “they know where you are”).

There is still a tendency to think of location data as being somehow benign, map-type data and the epithet geospatial risks diverting our attention from the wider environment in which location is central to all that data and its value.  It is therefore timely that the Geospatial Commission is leaving the door open to a wider view of our present and future location data-driven world than ‘geospatial’ and that the wider community can help inform the scaffolding to allow us that freedom of navigation.

It has been said that will never know what it is like to be lost again.  Without the “home” button, getting there might be a challenge for most and should the lights/power go out that challenge is writ ever larger.  You can make a choice about who has your data and you can urge more oversight as to how what is collected is used. We could even pay for these services! Just in case though, do keep a suitable atlas with you and know how to read it (and the stars!).

And do contribute to the call for evidence, it closes on 12th December 2022.