Great Public GIS Spawns Private GIS Firms?

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Tuesday, September 2. 2008

Great Public GIS Spawns Private GIS Firms?

I'm not making a direct correlation here, but note that Qatar has won many a GIS award (six at the ESRI conference this year alone). Today news of a newly funded startup: "Qatar Science & Technology Park has awarded a $400,000 to Qatar Navigator, a local start-up company, to develop an automated map of the country." It's to develop a navigation database with POIs to be licensed for use on GPSs, phones, etc. The local university students will be involved and the project is expected to take five months.

- Arabian Business

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Geospatial Business at 06:43 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

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Well, sure.

Census TIGER spawned GDT, which strengthened TeleAtlas...
NAIP and NHAPP and NOPP and the rest of them are the foundations for Google and VirtualEarth...
DoD NAVSTAR spawns Garmin & Magellan & Trimble...

and so on.

No company in their right minds would launch their own content creation system without at least some government investment...either in kind or in fact.

The tenuous state of the satellite remote sensing "industry" is proof positive of that.

#1 Archie Belaney on 2008-09-02 08:12 (Reply)

Just for the historic record, GDT was not spawned by the Census TIGER activity. It developed out of the much
earlier attempt by the Census to deal with the first mail-out/mail-back enumeration. That activity is, of course, also the ancestor of TIGER.

#1.1 Duane Marble on 2008-09-02 12:56 (Reply)

Thanks, Duane, that's true, but GDT did build its first nationwide street map by expanding the address ranges in the 1989 pre-census TIGER file.

In my stump-speeches I attempt to make a case that TIGER -- a "work-product" of the Census -- going into the public domain in 1989 was a major factor supporting the USA's initial lead in both private street mapping (GDT, ETAK and Navigation Technologies), and www mapping sites: MapQuest, Yahoo Maps, etc.

Similarly, the USGS releasing its "work products" for updating topo maps -- Digital Orthophoto Quads (DOQ) into the public domain in the 1990s kicked off a boom in aerial photography and its use: Terra Server, Aerial Express' "every city every year", and Pictometry.

Now we need Homeland Security and the NGI to dump their LIDAR point clouds into the public domain to kick-start yet another GIS advance.

#2 Don Cooke on 2008-09-02 15:19 (Reply)

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