Congratulations to Steve Liang, awarded the 2022 Gardels Award for his work in sensor technologies for geospatial and pioneering web standards for publishing spatial data.

! e>

By Brendan Wesdock, Geodecisions, president

Brendan Wesdock

A Look at Technology and Geospatial Trends Impacting the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) Industry

Reviewing where we’ve been and looking ahead to where we’re going, there are five primary technology and geospatial trends impacting the AEC industry: Kubernetes, geospatial artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), digital twins, GeoBIM, and high-definition (HD) maps and LiDAR.

Kubernetes

Kubernetes – an open-source platform that orchestrates data and process workload balancing, automated program updates, and data management – is becoming more popular for cloud processing. It allows computing to happen at a completely different scale, becoming a transformation agent.

Benefits

Kubernetes implementations have multiple benefits: scalability/system response, cloud environment/decreased investment in on-site technology, increased return on investment with more capital, and system upgrade functionality.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is seeking public comment on STAplus 1.0. STAplus is an extension to the OGC SensorThings API Part 1: Sensing Version 1.1 (STA) Standard data model that is based on requirements from the Citizen Science community. Comments are due by March 23, 2023.

STAplus (SensorThings API extension PLUS) defines a SensorThings data model extension that improves FAIR data principles when exchanging sensor data by including licensing and ownership information.

The dominant use for the OGC SensorThings API (STA) data model (and API) can be thought of as “a single authority provides sensor readings to consumers.” However, in Citizen Science there are many contributors (citizens) whose observations together form the “big picture.”

The STAplus extension is designed to support a model in which observations are owned by (different) users that may express a license for re-use.