Creating a Sustainable Lens…a Digital Globe: Remote Sensing CEO’s Offer Future Vision
Two remote sensing technology CEOs offered provocative insights into how they will conduct their companies in the near future at the Map World Forum in Hyderabad, India today. Jill Smith of DigitalGlobe wants her company to proactively collect imagery of regions of the world where climate change or other problems might be of interest to the global geospatial community. Dr. Robert Moses of PCI Geomatics believes that one day we will use a web service to query and analyze for change detection in a region using not only a time-series of remotely-sensed imagery but advanced classification algorithms to automatically map and highlight the affected areas. "The greatest opportunity is to enable a true model using all of the available sensors," said Moses.
Smith described her vision as a "sustainable lens" and, providing a twist on her own company’s name to infer a broader meaning, a "digital globe" of information that utilizes a constellation of satellites with "appropriate and re-usable data." Smith said, "We have more than doubled the rate at which we are consuming natural resources than we were 40 years ago. (Source: Living Planet Report, 2008, WWF)...How can imagery help? Imagery provides a visual reality – a translation from some of the complex theories to bring that down to layman’s terms, which are often emotional. Imagery communicates complicated scientific information to policymakers, civil and non-government organizations and citizens easily and visually; overcomes language, cultural, and literacy barriers…Imagery addresses the whole planet; no area goes undetected or forgotten."
Moses offered his own assessment of the volume of remotely-sensed data that will be available in the not-to-distant future. "The democratization of data will herald a plethora of information to support the status of Gaia. In the next decade there will be three profound changes in our industry: The plethora of earth-observing sensors; the rise of the web; and new, powerful processing algorithms that processes the many dimensions of this data," he said.
