What will be hot in geo in 2015 — predictions from the GeoHipster crowd

GeoHipster asked several GeoFolk to predict what will be HOT in geo in 2015 (see 2014 predictions from December 2013). Here are their answers:

Nicholas Duggan, Dragons8mycat

Thanks for the opportunity, let me first get into smug mode and say that I wasn’t too far off the mark with Boundless’ OpenGeo being prime place for 2014. Even if it was trumped by the presence of CartoDB this year, people were still talking about it. So, CityEngine never really exploded the way I was expecting, it was beaten by ArcGIS Pro and the fantastic QGIS2Threejs which is still a win in my book.

My thought is that 2015 is going to see QGIS become the cartographers’ software of choice, already with many great effects and styling choices. The next year is only going to see those tools expanding and getting more relevant for the cartographer & casual mapper alike.

With the latest Snapdragon chipsets in the current Samsung & HTC devices, locational accuracy can be better than 3 metres anywhere in the world through an off -the-shelf mobile device. I can see this being a springboard for many GIS companies to bring out better mobile mapping/ tracking solutions and also the return of “job manager” systems to quality-control the input & output of this sourced data.

With the UK testing autonomous cars next year, I can see huge advances in LiDAR & data collection appearing… and maybe the reappearance of the indoor mapping…

Tim Waters

  • 2015 will be the year of specialized personalized OSM maps EVERYWHERE
    • maps on e-paper watches
    • OSM maps going to Mars. There will be a hashtag #mapstomars
    • maps on hats
    • maps on those jackets you put on little dogs to keep them from shivering
    • maps on free tissues given out in Japanese urban areas
  • 2015 will see the first major public lawsuit against the OpenStreetMap Foundation (OSMF) for some frivolous reason, such as “my client used OSM maps on his CartoCrate Corp GPS Routing App on his iPhone and crashed into a Yak. OSM Maps are at fault.” This will cause a crisis in the Foundation, causing a mapping personality to raise a crowdfunding drive to raise legal funds, and in the process, the personality devolves the OSMF board and takes executive control. As a response to the legal mess and the insinuation pointed at them from some mapping extremists that they were involved, CartoCrate Corp will create a Public Domain fork of the OSM database and set about getting the US Govt using it. It’s quite successful.
  • Oh, BTW Mapbox ended up as the company that did the paying mappers idea, although not as large scale.

Bill Dollins, Senior Vice President, Zekiah Technologies, Inc.

I think 2015 will be the year that other industries will catch on to geo and realize they don’t need GIS to do it. It won’t happen overnight, but I think it may be the start of a trend.

It could take any number of forms. Maybe it’s a company or organization not previously associated with geo that releases a narrowly-targeted tool or library that solves an industry-specific set of geo problems. Maybe it’s a large company acquiring a plucky geospatial startup to add some location awareness to its products.

The point is that the variety of open tools available will make it easier for organizations that understand their markets well to plug in “just enough geo” to enhance their domain-specific needs.

In short, 2015 will start to expose the fact that “Enterprise GIS” is really only relevant to GIS enterprises.

Stephen Mather

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” –Alan Curtis Kay

A year ago I predicted the beginnings of artisanal satellite mapping and ended with the phrase: “OpenDroneMap anyone?” After writing the prediction, I felt there was only one way forward. I registered the domain, proposed the project, and a year later (with the help and enthusiasm of many), we have OpenDroneMap. By January 2015, we will have a fully open source toolchain which fills 90% of the niche that Pix4D, Agisoft, and other closed-source projects fill in turning drone photos into geographic data, and it will have advantages that the closed source solutions know not.

Drones will continue to grow and be relevant to GeoHipsters in 2015 — more so in fact. As a result, retrograde coordinate systems, such as ones with promises of equal area, sub-inch accuracy, as well as vertical and horizontal datums galore will rise in prominence again amongst the GeoHipster clans. Geo will continue to converge to engineering scales. Great mock battles will be enacted between GeoHipsters and Survey-Hipsters.

But the great problems to solve in 2015 become ones not of how to process the new data, but how to store, retrieve, and share the data. In short, we will need artisanal pixel platforms like OpenAerialMap, with the need for similar projects specific to elevation models and digital surface models. These will be the great platform problems of GeoHipsters in 2015.

Tom MacWright

Companies exiting the tinkering phase will go all-in on making the killer apps, and building people-infrastructure like education and support. The GDAL/PostGIS/Mapnik stack that’s common to pretty much everything will see some major competition that fits better with the threads, clouds, and GPUs of new tech. Vector maps will finally be broadly available and the client side will eat more of the server side stack.

Randal Hale

So my 2014 predictions were more wrong than right. Maybe all wrong.

OSM did get more national attention and has a lot of companies leaning on it now. I would still argue that the “program” as a whole is unprepared for the World Spotlight. The OSM Foundation rules by not ruling and it can still be a bit of a wild wild west shootout on the listserves… since I was just in one. For me HOT (Humanitarian OSM) is the most desirable component of OpenStreetMap. They are doing it right — and maybe that is what saves OpenStreetMap.

I still think more organizations are moving to hybrid setups. It’s the future. You can’t rely on one software ecosystem to provide all your needs and wants.

I thought Esri would take out MapBox… and I’m so glad they didn’t pull a GeoCommons.

2015

The LAS format dust-up between Esri and rapidlasso finally gets some air time. I think this instance of Esri forking a LPGL format to only run on their software shows exactly how much they are embracing the open source world. They aren’t. If it happens once it will happen again.

Esri starts pushing the pay-for-play option for everyone. It may not be a bad thing at all. You pay for the portions of the ArcGIS ecosystem you want to use by buying “Esri Credits”. Hopefully that push finally kills off the out-of-date three-tiered approach to software sales. For some it will be good — for some it will be bad.

QGIS is my new love long-term affair for desktop software. I think in 2015 it takes off and becomes a tool everyone has on their desktop. Take a portion of your commercial maintenance (I’m guilty for not) and donate it to the program.

Esri makes a play for Spatial Networks. The guys behind Fulcrum are doing everything right. I have developed a severe bromance for that company. I hope I’m wrong on this one.

Finally — all the #geo people stop putting #geo in front of every term. Now I’m going out for a #geobeer to the #geopub and #georemember the one #geoprediction I didn’t #geomake.

Bill Morris

DRONES. Which of course sounds hackneyed and outdated, but UAV capabilities keep leaping forward. In 2014 the hardware matured and reached a broad audience; for 2015 UAV software and data management seems poised to shorten the channel from lens to actionable data. I see it already in disaster response, but I think agriculture is the likely sector to blow the doors off of UAV capabilities.

Paul Ramsey

When asked to look into the future, I generally start by looking into the past and reasoning by analogy. There have been some patterns of development in the last year that are worth at least commenting on.

JavaScript Uber Ales

It’s become pretty clear that MapBox intends to rewrite the whole of geospatial computing using JavaScript. Given the powerful JavaScript team in the company, it’s no big surprise. So starting from Leaflet, which is on the beaten path of JavaScript web mapping; then moving to Id, which is somewhat off the beaten path (and a tour de force of software development, Tom MacWright could retire right now and claim a full and complete career); with little detours through ideas like geojson.io; and more recently into places that look a lot like “GIS” via Turf and Geocoding via Carmen.

The architectural paradigm driving all this is very cloud- and horizontal-scaling-oriented: everything has to be chopped into tiny pieces, everything has to be embarrassingly parallel, everything is a URL, and everything Has-To-Be-In-JavaScript.

As it happens, I saw this movie the last time around, when the Java community arrived in the early 2000s and rewrote all of geospatial. The dominant architectural paradigm of the time was the three-tier, built on open standards, and the software all shows it. Everything was XML-configured, everyone followed the Gang of Four, everything was multi-threaded, and everything Had-To-Be-In-Java.

Applying the Java experience to the current JavaScript rewrite of All Software Everywhere:

  • The pre-Cambrian explosion of JavaScript software options currently underway will naturally be followed by a great die-off as a few dominant solutions take over the marketplace. Unlike the Java iteration, this time around there are almost no serious proprietary alternatives in the space, which is an interesting reflection on the state of software development.
  • By the time the dominant JavaScript solutions have achieved victory, they will be considered hopelessly passé and dependent on antiquated notions (these days everybody has to use Tomcat, but nobody looks at Tomcat’s XML configuration files and says “what an excellent idea”).
  • The architectural foundations of the new JavaScript solutions will also be considered out of fashion, though most of IT will still be humming along happily on those very foundations.
Imagery — Cheap, Cheaper, Cheapest

For a long time, discussion of imagery has been pretty boring stuff: Can you convert formats? Can you ortho-rectify? Can you color-balance and feather a mosaic? But this year at FOSS4G there was quite an interesting collection of talks all pointing towards a blossoming new world of cheap, cheap imagery.

At FOSS4G 2014 in Portland I saw talks by Frank Warmerdam on processing imagery for Planetlabs, and by Aaron Racicot and Stephen Mather on mapping with cheap drone hardware. With cheaper and cheaper sensors — ranging from the shoebox-sized “doves” from PlanetLabs to the sub-thousand-dollar quadcopters — we can and will pile up larger and larger collections of raw imagery. This pile of imagery will in turn drive innovation in image processing software to convert it all into a rationalized view of the world.

The new world of cheap, cheap imagery is enabled by two parallel innovations: really really cheap sensors that produce generally inferior imagery but incredible volumes of it; and really really clever software that can leverage multiple images of the same object to infer extra information, like 3D models, best pixels and so on.

It was only a handful of years ago that Microsoft’s Photosynth technique of building a 3D model out of an unorganized collection of photographs was a computing marvel. That capability is now available on smartphones. At one time the best computer vision software was only available as proprietary licensed SDKs: now it’s all open source.

With cheap sensors and algorithms capable of dealing with the imagery they generate, we’re not far away from a new world of earth observation — both from orbit and from only a few hundred feet above.

I expect that the tools for processing raw drone imagery will only get better, and that once (if?) the FAA sets reasonable rules for use of drones in the civilian sector, the USA will be awash in drones mapping every corner of the country — for the local county, electric company, and real estate board.

More Spatial, Fewer Maps

Over the last couple years I’ve been using the words “spatial IT” a lot, as a description for a trend in the geospatial world: our previously specialized tools are no longer specialized, they are just add-on features to general purpose IT tools.

So databases have a spatial column type. Document indexing systems (like ElasticSearch) have a spatial search capability. “Geocoding” functionality is now built into almost every application that might happen to have an address field.

So IT professionals are now capable of delivering “GIS” results, without “GIS” software. The classic “notification report” of all houses within 100 yards of a re-zoning application is now just a tabular query-and-mailmerge operation. No map, no GIS.

Data visualizations, having run through a brief map-mania after the advent of Google Maps, are now coming back full-circle to a realization that sometimes the best map is no map at all.

Non-spatial actions — like running a web search — are setting up subtle spatial queries in the background: your Google search returns results that are “relevant” to you not just categorically, but also geographically. Just a list of results, no map, but more spatial than before.

And spatial actions, like asking for directions, are returning way-finding results. A list of directions, rather than a schematic. The bar for a useful result from a routing application has moved “up” — away from a schematic cartographic result, to a natural language description of a step-wise route.

I guess it’s no real surprise that, as the wider world moves away from maps and towards embedded spatial everywhere, in our own field there is a growing nostalgia for classic cartography. Who is winning the maps competitions at the spatial gatherings these days? The whooshing pulsing arrows of the data visualizers, or the clear classic cartographers, telling story with the spare language of maps?

Hopefully this is just a moment, and maps will be back, but for now, spatial is the thing.

Ed Freyfogle

Two major trends:

  • More and more consumer services/apps will emerge that assume/require continual knowledge of the consumer’s location. This whole new range of services will require more and more consumers, but also developers, to contemplate location in ways they never have before. Privacy will be a bigger issue than ever. Most of the developers building these services will have no background in GIS or cartography or such things, nor any desire to learn. They will embrace whatever tools help them get the job done.
  • OpenStreetMap’s data volume will continue to grow rapidly, not least due to the introduction of more and more domain-specific editors like Rob Hawkes’ building height estimator or Tom MacWright’s CoffeeDex. More and more data, all around the world, will flow in, in some cases without the consumer even needing to be aware OSM is the underlying datastore. Meanwhile on the usage side, OSM’s “good enough” quality will continue to improve every day. The inevitable march forward will continue, helped on by more and more governments (local, national) embracing open data albeit in a very chaotic, piecemeal manner. More and more best practices and robust toolchains will emerge.

Gary Gale

More Geospatial Visualisations, Maybe Less Maps

One of the great things about having a wife who understands and accepts that you’re a map nerd is getting great Christmas gifts such as “London: The Information Capital” by James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti. The book is subtitled “100 maps and graphics that will change how you view the city”. Reading this book made me realise that there were as many maps as there were visualisations with spatial data, and I also realised that this book wasn’t an isolated instance. More and more geospatial information is being visualised, both online and elsewhere. This means lots of maps but not just maps. This is a trend that will continue into 2015 and beyond as people who aren’t used to maps still want to visualise mapping data.

More Tangible Maps

At home I’ve got gift wrap with maps on it, a notebook covered in maps and even a map on the case of my phone. Walking through our local bookstore at the weekend, I was struck by just how many maps there were in so many shapes, sizes and forms, and with not a single digital map to be seen. Take a brief search through Etsy and you can get a map on all you ever wanted and a lot more besides. Maybe the public has fallen back in love with tangible maps as digital maps become more and more part of our daily lives? Whatever the reason, maps are here to stay.

More Bad Maps

Both of the previous two predictions means we’re going to continue seeing a lot more maps. But that also widens the scope for a lot more bad maps. There’s even a Twitter hashtag for this. Take a search for #badmaps if you want your eyes to bleed and whatever cartographic skill you possess to shriek out in anguish. This is not going to get any better. Now, because anyone can make a map, this means anyone might make a map, regardless of whether they should or not. That’s not to say that cartography should remain the preserve of professional cartographers, but if you don’t have a modicum of appreciation of design, an eye for colours that complement each other, and at least a rudimentary understanding of geography, then making a map might be something you want to pause and think about.

Even More People Doing GIS, Without Knowing They’re Doing GIS

Coupled with the news of the forthcoming demise of Google Maps Engine and existing customers looking to take their web-based geographic visualisations onto another platform or toolset, more people will end up doing GIS, or at least the lower end of the GIS spectrum, blissfully unaware of the fact that what they’re doing is in any way connected with something called GIS. Expect ESRI to make ArcGIS online much less GIS-like and Mapbox’s Turf and CartoDB to pick up lots of Google Maps emigres. Meanwhile people who are used to Javascript and web maps will look at toolkits like Polymaps or Leaflet and end up accidentally doing GIS, and free GIS tools such as QGIS will also reap the benefits of GME power users.

OSM Will Explode

It’s a sweeping generalisation and probably a controversial one too, but OpenStreetMap seems to be divided into 4 tribes. Firstly there’s the utopian tribe, truly believing that OSM is the only way forward for mapping data, that it will dominate across all forms of mapping data, and that if only everyone else would embrace the ODbL and its share-alike clause everything would be so much easier. Then there’s the community tribe, who use and contribute to OSM because they like the community aspect first and the mapping aspect second. Thirdly there’s the map tribe who just want to get on with mapping the world. Finally there’s the pragmatic tribe who want to see OSM flourish in the current business world and realise that something probably has to change in order for that to happen.

Each tribe wants something different from OSM and although there’s overlaps and blurring the lines, the OSM community is a divided one. I have to ask if this is sustainable in its current form.

All of which means that 2015 might be the year OSM explodes. Sadly this doesn’t mean uptake and contributions will explode, but my fearful prediction is that OSM itself will explode and fragment, with the possibility of OSM forking looming on the horizon.


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15 responses to “What will be hot in geo in 2015 — predictions from the GeoHipster crowd”

  1. Andrew Zolnai Avatar

    – fit4purpose web apps / freemium model
    – HTML5 will make apps redundant
    – authoritative public data tipping point

  2. Jarlath O'Neil-Dunne Avatar

    I agree on the drones front, but the biggest issue will not be processing, storage, or applications, it will be the legal aspects. Current predictions are that the FAA won’t have the rules finalized for another two years!

  3. Matthew Weber Avatar
    Matthew Weber

    2015:

    Continuing to follow the geohipsters and glean info on all the cool new toys and techniques my clients’ middle managers would never have the vision to use.

    I’ll keep hacking, piecing together, and learning how to map with foss4g and .js…so I can go to my day job and clean slivers out of big polygon layers :/

    As for 2014:

    Much thanks to all the geohipsters for sharing so much with us n00bs, making the transition to “neo-geo” a bit easier for those of us from the public college–>public agency–>ESRI triangle.

  4. […] Geohipster predictions for hotness in 2015 – Always fun, this annual survey from the GeoGeek community shares what the geeks feel will be hot in 2015. I sadly missed getting my list into the Hipsters but had I remembered to do so I would have noted how I feel the wearable hype is just that, Hype!  I think the UAV market is like the wild west and hopefully 2015 will see some privacy issues worked out and things will settle down a bit. I see the drone/UAV market as huge for opportunity for geo professionals as the real world will wake up and realize that they should seek out highly skilled professionals for drone mapping projects rather than securing the help of a novice drone enthusiast. As mentioned above, i also see 2015 being huge for the connected car. […]

  5. […] Geohipster.com some people make predictions for 2015 with respect to geographic information. We’ll see whether Tim Waters’ prediction is […]

  6. Carl Reed Avatar

    I need to read the entire posting. However, a quick read and the following caught my eye:

    “I think 2015 will be the year that other industries will catch on to geo and realize they don’t need GIS to do it. It won’t happen overnight, but I think it may be the start of a trend.”

    Really? Since 2002 the internet community has been integrating geo elements into a number of internet standards. Check out location enabled DHCP, SIP, ECRIT as well as new internet RFCs such as LoST and HELD. The driving use cases for this standards work was and still is emergency dispatch, 911 calls over VoIP enabled mobile devices, and so forth. These geo or geo enhanced standards are being implemented as part of the Next Generation 911 system (see NENA i3 architecture).

    And in aviation, geo is an integral part of such applications as NOTAMs (Notice to Airmen) .

    The integration and use of location enabled content and/or services with little or no GIS knowledge has been happening for decades. My point is that geo has been abd is being quietly and effectively integrated into many, many application domains with little or no fanfare – the result of logical forward thinking and market forces. In all of these cases, GIS need not apply 🙂

    Regards

  7. Milo van der Linden Avatar

    First of all, thanks for the predictions! I always appreciate a good read.

    Following a short discussion on twitter:

    The 2015 predictions are in my opinion very USA oriented, I challenge the hipsters: I predict the next spatial innovation comes from outside the USA. If I am wrong, I will ship a crate of the finest dutch beer to geohipsters doorstep!

    Why I predict the next big thing comes from outside the USA?
    1. Alternatives to Sillicon valley are arising all across the globe
    2. US legal system, FAA regulations, War on Terrorism cause people in other countries to seriously look for alternatives
    3. A lot of governments outside the USA still think ESRI === GIS, they are not open to alternatives. Other governments want nothing to do with USA based products at all and adapt linux as the OS and open source products or proprietary software from their own homebase. This will, in my opinion, hardly create any openings for USA based GIS products from parties other then ESRI in large parts of the world.
    4. Only ~5% of the world population live in the USA. The rest of the world is picking up pace regarding internet access, education. It is just a hunch that “good things yet to come” might come from the other 95%

    Regarding the answer that 55% of the predictions come from the US:

    Nicholas Duggan – UK
    Tim Waters – UK, but worked in the USA
    Bill Dollins – USA
    Stephen Mather – USA
    Tom Mac Wright – USA, mapbox
    Randal Hale – USA
    Bill Morris – USA
    Paul Ramsey – USA, boundless
    Ed Freyfogle – USA/German

    To me that is >70% from the USA 😉

    Anyway, I like a good challenge, so are you guys up for it?

    Cheers!

    1. Atanas Entchev Avatar

      Thank you for the insightful analysis, for the predictions, and for the challenge. Accepted! The challenge may prove hard to arbitrate, though, as traditional country boundaries get blurred in the global economy.

      Paul Ramsey is a Canadian who works for an American company. Ed Freyfogle is a German/American who owns a UK-based business. Waze was created in Israel, acquired and currently developed by Google. Which country does the credit go to? Does it matter all that much?

      Regardless, we aim to further broaden the GeoHipster representation in 2015 to all continents. If we fail to do so, we’ll ship you a case of Coors Light! 🙂

      1. Kim H Avatar
        Kim H

        My prediction: continued under-representation of female voices in geo-spatial media. Diversity, Milo and Atanas? Never mind US dominated, nine experts and not a one of them is a woman? Shame on you!

        I remember reading the year-end wrap-ups/predictions in the (paper) GIS magazines in the mid ’90s. It might be ten industry experts and perhaps two of them would be women. Have we made no progress at all? How do we encourage young women to enter the field, worse, who will hire them when male thought leaders don’t even see the issue?

        Not so hip, guys.

        1. Atanas Entchev Avatar

          Kim:

          Your point is very well taken. Having said that, I must also say that I have nothing to be ashamed of.

          Diversity is very high among our priorities. For the “2015 predictions” feature I invited a number of geo professionals to share their thoughts, several women among them. I published the responses I received.

        2. Christina Boggs Avatar
          Christina Boggs

          Hey Kim,

          Thanks so much for stopping by! As a woman in geo, I understand some of the issues going on. I know it may seem exclusionary by who responded to Atanas but as one of the authors on this site, he and the rest of the authors have been incredibly welcoming to women. If you take a look at who has been interviewed for #geohipster posts in general, I think you’ll find we’re hitting better diversity numbers than the geo community population actually has. I’m happy to be a part of this group.

          Thanks,
          Christina Boggs

  8. Damian Spangrud Avatar

    In 2015 – the looking glass

    Battles continue to be fought between ‘old guard geospatial experts’ and the new comers. Each side will misrepresent the other but I’m hopeful that bridges can be built. We all need to be open to new ways of thinking but be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater while at the same time be open to breaking established norms. And everyone realizes that just because you can make a map doesn’t mean the map is any good, judgment needs to be applied to context and content.

    Infographics and maps become increasingly similar expressions of the same idea, but will result in new battle lines between cartographers and data scientists.

    The promise of real-time sensor aware networks (measurement and observation) will become closer to reality, exciting the community about the possibilities and scaring the hell out of those who see ‘persistent surveillance’ the beginning of the end.

    Virtualization of systems and infrastructure continue to radically change how systems come to life.

    Thematic mapping should move beyond aggregation to ‘odd’ govt boundaries – and move to regular (OMG not hexagons!) and local (neighborhoods) – mapping boundaries need to be units people understand not ‘census blocks’ or ‘postal zones’.

    Analysis continues as ‘pure science’ and ‘applications’ – but where the rubber meets the road is where good science provides new and better insights for applications. Then people care about it.

    also- Bad maps will still be created by good people, and Great maps will go everywhere …

    Finally we will see non-map aware areas continue to learn about the power of geography, sometimes called Geo-Literacy and this will drive changes in the education and expectations of what the next new hire should know…(I believe we are at a tipping point here)

  9. N.N. Avatar
    N.N.

    Once in a lifetime I did a bet on the right horses:

    * PostgreSQL (1997)
    * QGIS
    * PostGIS

  10. […] disagreed. This year GeoHipster has done it again and I’ve made some more predictions. The whole list of predictions is online and it’s well worth […]