ASM
Cheap Data Helps Build the Industry
Jon Fairall spoke to Bob Ryerson in Kuala Lumpur on 13 November 2007.
There is no doubt about the big news stories for the industry during 2007. All the focus has been on business. The endless round of acquisitions has dominated the headlines. Big companies eat small companies, which eat even smaller companies, and so on down the scale.
What’s going on? It’s easy to be blinded by the big bucks being paid for little mapping companies, by the endless round of amalgamations, and by the doings of Google and Microsoft.
But an obsession with such matters obscures the real story – which has to do with the fundamental restructuring of our economy.
At any rate, that is how Bob Ryerson sees our world at the moment. He is a former head of the Canadian Centre for Remote Sensing, and now the president of Kim Geomatics, an Ottawa-based consultancy company. He is also one of the foremost thinkers in the industry.
When I spoke to him, he had just finished consulting to the Thai government. The government’s Geo-Informatics and Space Technology Development Agency has recently completed its policy on data distribution for the forthcoming Thai Earth Observing System.
The first satellite in the system, Theos-1, has just been launched. Ryerson’s thesis is that for most of recorded history, the economic prosperity of mankind has been a function of geography. Some tribes of early humans lived where the best game was to be found, and later on the best soil for growing rice, or where the climate was kindest. They prospered.
Others lived where game was scarce and the soil poor. They did not.
The fortunes of mankind were a lottery where the dice were loaded by Geography. Geo-luck, Ryerson calls it.
He says we are leaving this era behind. ‘The next generation now has the technology to overcome the tyranny of geography’, he says. People being born today will be the first truly global citizens, in that their personal location will be much less a factor in calculating their fortunes.’
Ryerson describes a world where people know, not only where they are, but the location (and changes in location) of everything that is significant to them – family, possessions, the car, the shops and services, friends, potential lovers.
Once people did not know the time. Now watches regulate not just our lives but also the economy. In the same way, cheap location devices and the integration of their information with other spatial data will change the way we think, talk and relate to each other.
The same thing is happening in business and the economy. Globalisation and finely tuned transportation mean that the factors of production can be put together more or less independent of distance.
Moreover, the fact that it is now so easy to make people, things or information systems aware of location gives us an unprecedented measure of control over geography.
‘You can tailor goods for sale in a retail store to the people that live in the neighbourhood. In fact, if you don’t you go broke.’ The same fate awaits insurance companies that ignore the location of their risk.
The insurance industry will be important in all this. As they come to fully understand the spatial dimension of risk, they will increasingly play a large role in determining where things get built, and where they don’t.
In this vision, it makes perfect sense for mainstream IT industry to be buying a position in spatial technology.
‘Mainstream companies understand that manipulating spatial information will be significant in the future’, says Ryerson. ‘That’s why they are throwing money at it.’
The issue for the industry, of course, is the role that it can play in this future. Will GIS disappear – or, more particularly – will GIS or remote sensing experts become redundant?
‘There is no doubt that in the future, spatial data will be smarter, but the users will be dumber. So where does that place the spatial professional?’
The fate of the current crop of spatial professionals may be a moot point. What is certain is the centrality of spatial data to the health of the economy, in much the same way that IT is now a central component of the modern service economy.
Ryerson’s message is simple: spatial data can only have this central role if it is used. ‘The value of data lies in using it. Policies that promote the use of spatial data are good ones. Those that do not are bad.’
He also has a special message for governments that attempt to set prices on the basis of covering the costs of acquiring the data: it is putting the economy in a straitjacket.
‘Of course it costs money to acquire data. It is not free. The question is where and how you charge for it. And who pays.’
