Features

Mapping Out the GIS Market

Right now, a satellite is moving overhead and taking pictures of a cold front moving in from Canada. A New York City phone operator is directing an ambulance to the origin of a 911-phone call placed from the home of an elderly shut-in. And a couple is using the Web to see if a particular Bed and Breakfast will be in the peak-foliage zone this weekend. All of these applications use Global Information Systems (GIS), a set of technologies that involve manipulating massive amounts of geographic data and making it available to consumers, businesses, and governments.

"GI has traditionally supported applications like land and asset management, planning, facilities management, defence and navigation," explains Peter Woodsford, Director of Laser-Scan, a leading GIS vendor based in the U.K. "Increasingly GI is moving into the IT mainstream and business areas such as insurance, retail, health and recreation."

Global Information Systems are electronic maps. The U.S. Geologic Survey defines GIS like this, "In the strictest sense, a GIS is a computer system capable of assembling, storing, manipulating, and displaying geographically referenced information, i.e. data identified according to their locations. Practitioners also regard the total GIS as including operating personnel and the data that go into the system."

Although GIS technology has been around for years, it has progressed in piecemeal fashion. NASA might collect store its data in a way that make it unreadable by the Department of Agriculture or the phone company map out its service territory in a way that the cable company couldn't access.

"The problem is not as serious as it was 10 years ago but it still a very real and costly issue," explains Carl Reed, PhD and The OpenGIS Consortium Executive Director. One of the key elements of application domains such as Emergency Services and Homeland Security and Defense is data sharing, according to Reed. "This is not the file transfer type of data sharing, but the ability to access many spatial data repositories, sensors, and other sources of geospatial information in near real time."

The work of processing, organizing, and visualizing the millions of data points involved in spatial technology usually falls to a workstation. Running GIS applications requires significant processing power and memory capabilities. Although a simple PC might access a database of GIS information, users of MapQuest.com do this all the time, it takes a lot more processing power to create and manipulate detailed geographic maps.

Although some vendors, such as IBM and Intergraph offer custom hardware and software solutions, there is a growing market for off the shelf workstations. HP for example, recommends its HP Workstation xw6000 for map creation and analysis. The HP Workstation xw6000 offers up to two Intel Xeon processors with speeds up to 3.20 GHz, up to 8 GB DDR SDRAM memory, and a host of Nvidia Quadro graphics options. Storage can be upgraded to a 500 GB Ultra ATA drive. The system comes with Microsoft Windows XP Professional, Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional, and/or Red Hat Linux 7.3 preinstalled. Prices start at $1,576.