A promising future of computing for geospatial technologies

The explosion of the power and sophistication of computing applications in the past few years has revolutionized the way we live and work. This marked trend is of especial significance for geospatial computing, which directly relates to the very foundations of our society and essentially embraces all the diversification of its activities. Geospatial information, already important in many scientific and engineering disciplines, is increasingly becoming an integral component in consumer-driven technologies. How to further improve or enhance geospatial information processing, organizing, analysis, and visualization? Especially, handling rising flood of digital data from many difference sources puts serious technical and scientific challenges. With rapid progress of information processing and multiple disciplines, there are more and more promising computing technologies, which could be employed to solve these problems. At present, cloud computing, mobile computing, visual computing/GPU computing, business intelligence, and social computing have been playing key roles in geospatial applications. Some latest computing advancements, such as big data computing, heterogeneous computing, Internet of Things (IoT)/sensor computing, and bio-computing, have great potentials for the effective realization of information processing in the geospatial environment. This talk highlights the impacts of these current and prospective computing technologies on the future of the geo-world. Our consideration is intended to bring fresh thoughts to explore new directions for geospatial research and development. The talk also provides a vision of the ".geo" term and a combined outlook for both computer and geospatial communities, i.e., how computing technology is changing the landscape of geospatial applications and how diverse geospatial information processing requires the change of various computing technologies.