GeoWorld

Find and Use Dynamic Decision Points WHERE IT'S ABOUT TIME F BY ERIK SHEPARD undamentally, temporal data of any type are about dynamic measurement of some system. In the case of spatiotemporal data, they're about dynamic measurement of a spatial system. The spatial system to be measured could be environmental, such as weather and climate, or about land cover and usage. The spatial system could be about assets (which are distributed in space) or customer location and spending patterns. Geospatial has evolved beyond the information system that provides the largely static background, basemap data. Our society and economy have transitioned to real time. Customers expect to access information systems 24/7 (and the Web is itself an information system, though sometimes of debatable veracity). People expect real-time, up-to-date information. Flowing Data Economists are continually modeling and updating. The New York Stock Exchange might close at its bell, but the Nikkei doesn't, nor does the London Stock Exchange. We can go to bed after the Late, Late Show and wake to find that—even before the opening bell—the Dow Jones Industrial Average is poised to buoy or bust based on real-time information from overseas markets. Customers make buying decisions about where to shop, where to eat or what movie to see after 5 p.m. They want to see real-time updates on traffic—what's the best way to get to the concert? Those are spatio- temporal data, and they're dynamic data that need to be generated in real time. Utilities, too, have transitioned from static to Erik Shepard is principal of Waterbridge Consulting; e-mail: erik@ waterbridge.biz. 30 dynamic. Old electromechanical meters measured power as it was being consumed, but no business process or technology existed to collect the data. Once a month, a meter reader would read monthly net usage. Today, smart meters are rapidly replacing electromechanical meters—smart meters that provide dynamic data in one-hour (or even 15-minute) increments, allowing for customers to adjust power- consumption behavior. GEO W ORLD / M AY 2O12 Utilities also make decisions in real time based on dynamically changing conditions on the network. Power spikes in one part of the network can be detected and compensated for before fault events occur. Or distributed generator resources can be brought online before the utility has to switch to significantly more-expensive peak power. Power-quality issues can be detected and addressed before customers experience problems. Crews can be dispatched to outages before custom- ers begin to call. All of this is based on dynamic data collected from telemetered systems. A Sea Change Even two years ago, the concept of time in spatial systems was novel. But significant research has since gone into the development of spatiotemporal systems and applications. GIS and database vendors alike have extended products to include temporality as a core component, starting first with transaction time and then extended to include valid time, a true bi-temporal system. Research continues on the best way to visualize and analyze such bi-temporal data, but these capabilities no longer are novel—they're required. Geospatial professionals need to be versed not just in location in space, but also location in time. The profession is undergoing a sea change: geospa- tial isn't so much about points, lines and polygons anymore, nor is it about pixels. These things are as fundamental to our profession and society as bits and bytes, and in some ways as taken for granted. New opportunities in geospatial aren't simply about location. Virtually all of the geomatics-related professional organizations have seen radical shifts and declines in their ranks—from GIS to remote sensing to surveying and mapping. But this isn't doom and gloom for our profes- sion—not at all. Geospatial offers the tools, means and methods to gather dynamic data from a variety of sources, visualize them, analyze them and make sense of them. Geospatial is the window into the world, beyond the finance system, beyond the asset- management system. Geospatial brings the capability to continue to collect environmental (in the broadest context) data about an ever-changing world—whether that world is temperature, traffic or power consumption. This name of this column, "Where It's About Time," has been an obvious play on the location focus of our discipline with an extension twist into the time axis. But perhaps a better name would be "Dynamic Decision Points," because geospatial has become the dynamic discipline. I'm going to start on that name and premise in my next column.

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