Yash Talreja says most people don’t know that cell phones were around for 30 years before they became affordable, useful, and prevalent devices for ordinary consumers. Now he says the same thing is happening with geographic information systems, or GIS. “For 30 years, it was a very specialized area,” Talreja says. “It was used by the very few.”
Nowadays, however, a confluence of forces is making GIS technology far more powerful, appealing, and pervasive—and San Diego’s resident expertise in software development and related technologies is putting the city near the center of the GIS development map. As a result, the San Diego Software Industry Council is organizing a GIS interest group to focus on various aspects of geospatial information processing, including geo-coding, location-based services, analysis, and visualization. Talreja, who is the group’s designated chair, says the combination of mapping technology, precise global positioning satellite technology, and the Internet with its search engine capabilities has made GIS one of the industry’s hottest sectors in the past two or three years.
Finding something on Google Maps is one thing, Talreja says. But the problem becomes more interesting when you get hungry while driving around, and the map interface on your phone or GPS device identifies and locates five restaurants within a six-block radius. Talreja says the spread of such location-based services means “The time will soon come when you’re gas tank indicator light comes up, and the map shows you where the nearest gas station is located.”
“There is a massive amount of data lying around that is related to a spot on the map, (environmental, traffic, health),” Bob Slapin, executive director of the software industry council, tells me by e-mail. “This data is often in different silos and in most cases making sense of it requires running around, finding it and mapping it somehow. The data is often structured and unstructured,” meaning software with a certain versatility is required to process it.
Slapin says he’s involved with EcoLayers, a San Diego GIS company developing interesting applications for watershed management. “This may sound boring but there is a realization that the control of water quality has a significant impact on the available water resources. Present management of this data is a nightmare.”
While San Diego’s software industry has about 10 active special interest groups (Slapin says, “we call them BIGS, Business Interest Groups”), there seems to be a special regional strength in geospatial systems. “We noticed
