Smart Geospatial - Smart Processes, Smart Data and a Smarter Future

By David Crowther

What does Smart Geospatial mean? Well, we see it as one term that can be broken down into three others: Smart Processes, Smart Data, and a Smarter Future.

Smart Processes

All too often, businesses with whom we work have highly skilled staff and a committed management team, but their working practices are out of date, they use legacy software and have poor data sharing protocols. Ultimately this may lead to inefficient working practices, incorrect decision-making and expensive mistakes – perhaps even re-working a project. We strongly believe in implementing more defined and smarter working practices, better data connectivity and promoting shared project partnerships across all lines of business.

Indeed, a real shift change for our clients has been the implementation of our Software Licencing application, which lets Management Teams monitor the use of software applications and templates across all their projects teams. Implementing these types of Smart Processes has seen our clients dramatically reduce expensive licencing costs for software that is underutilised, as well as help promote the implementation of shared working practices and standardised project working, across all project teams.

Smart Data

Better processes lead, hopefully, to better data. Our DynamicMaps team are experts in implementing federated geospatial databases, and that’s how we help businesses to get the most from their own Smart Data. Unfortunately, it’s clear that many organisations still rely on ‘flat file’ formats with no single source of truth. This means duplicate datasets are being ring-fenced and then left in silos. The pitfalls of managing geospatial datasets this way is obvious, yet still the enthusiasm for – or even awareness of – Smart Data that’s implemented from a centralised location is not as wide spread as we’d hope.

Our team help organisations move towards Smart Data implementations by using interoperable (often Open Source) applications. One source of truth can more easily be established, accessed, updated with integrity and then managed by all stakeholders using software that’s easy to use and at their fingertips.

Smart Futures

While it would be a simplification to say that Smart Data is simply a move from the 2D to 3D environment, we see this is likely to be the biggest step change in how our clients implement their Smart Future. More advanced software applications, data capture processes and Smarter Datasets mean that we now have a plethora of highly intelligent 3D data sources that will start to add real value to our geospatial analysis. We know the world is not flat, so why are many of us still collecting, analysing and reporting using 2 dimensional datasets? In this new Open Source age, we no longer need to purchase expensive plugins for commercially available GIS software to undertake 3D analysis, QGIS does this out of the box! By utilising applications such as Cadline’s OS Model Builder and InfraWorks, we can integrate GI and CAD information, utilise intelligent 3D asset information, implement shared project working, while at the same time manage our Smart Data as one single source of truth.