Geospatial "Race to Zero"

In Imaging Notes Winter 2010, Craig Bachmann and Natasha Leger postulated that the radical growth of real time information coupled with global communications and inexpensive storage is "creating a frictionless world, whereby not only the time but also the money once needed to accomplish seemingly complex tasks is grinding down to zero."

While attending ILMF in Denver a few weeks ago it struck me that we are seeing this "race to zero" manifest itself almost daily in our geospatial world. Take for example the incredibly rapid deployment of mobile LiDAR systems over the past year. These systems, traveling at highway speeds, will collect more highly detailed and exceedingly accurate geospatial information in a few minutes than arguably a dozen survey corps could collect in a year without ever putting surveyors in peril or closing the highway.

Now imagine coupling this terrestrial LiDAR seamlessly with airborne LiDAR of a community or county and then integrating this with high resolution digital orthophotos. The result is an engineering grade geospatial database that has been developed by a handful of individuals in an exceeding short period of elapsed time for a fraction of the cost, i.e. the "Race to Zero".

So these are the pros, what are the cons. Bachmann & Leger point out that “the cons are the destruction of jobs that keep the economy going and the lack of critical thinking that require more than a bullet point on a PowerPoint slide so that one can move on to the next task to hit that all important Key Performance Indicator (KPI)".

Stop and ponder a bit about other geospatial technologies that have surfaced over the past few years and ask yourself, "Where’s this all going?” My answer, "I don't know for sure but it's damn exciting!"

David K. Nale
President/CEO
Certified Photogrammetrist
Certified Mapping Scientist
Professional Land Surveyor