Trend of GIS—Integration of Cyber and Physical Systems with Geo IoT

Abstract

Recent achievement of the Internet of Things (IoT) have brought a great opportunity for GIS to be integrated with physical space as Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). This article reviews the concepts of IoT and CPS from the perspective of geospatial spaces and clarifies the complementary relationshp of the two technologies. Two forms of CPS were discussed: Pseudo-CPS (PCPS) which projects spatial data on a display without interaction among data sources and True-CPS (TCPS) with handles data sources deeply and semantically. While PCPS is widely industrialized TCPS is in its infant, lack of common schemes and platforms for data sharing, security and privacy etc. Dissolving the barriers requires collaborations cross sectors and disciplines. A transformation of our mindset on GIS from ‘location + attributes’ to ‘location×attributes’ is recommended for creating value-added GI services.