I believe that the geospatial industry has lagged behind the general IT landscape, with concepts like “Big Data” and “Cloud Computing” taking longer to gain a solid foothold. Buzzwords aside, technology has changed a lot but much of the traditional GIS industry has not been aware of these changes. This will be a pivotal year, fueled in part by open source communities that think outside the box, solve real problems, and don’t need to work at the speed of a large proprietary monopoly.

It’s always fun to write about the near future and come back a year later and see how wrong you were in making your predictions! With this in mind, here are my ten predictions for technology trends in the geospatial industry in 2014:

• Mobile is king. The desktop is in decline as people increasingly access the internet through mobile devices. While some users may still need a powerful workstation, they will soon be outnumbered by casual users that nonetheless require access to complex geographic content and functionality. The geospatial industry has focused on porting desktop concepts instead of creating new paradigms for mobile platforms but it’s time to unchain ourselves from traditional desktop GIS altogether. This is the year that we may see some groundbreaking changes in this space.
• You will like your data options. In addition to crowd-sourced efforts such as OpenStreetMap, companies like Planet Labs and SkyBox Imaging have the potential to really disrupt the industry by challenging the incumbent data providers with compelling options and innovative products. The key to success for these data providers will be having the shortest time to market possible and providing products that are easy to consume with the minimum amount of effort. Whatever the outcome, the competition is very welcome.
• Data in real time. Capturing, preparing, and analyzing GIS data has traditionally taken anywhere from minutes to hours or even days but the trend has been towards real-time data feeds— with sensors, the “internet of things” and social media increasingly adopting location as a key facet. As evidenced by our adoption of new database technologies and monitoring tools, we expect this trend to continue.
• Geo is multiplatform. If your geospatial software is not multiplatform, it will become irrelevant. If we compound the effects of cloud computing (mostly Linux) with mobile devices (Android and iOS), we realize that the Windows operating system is increasingly at a disadvantage in many deployment scenarios and may soon cease to be the dominant platform for the fastest growing segments of the IT industry.
• Geospatial programming is increasingly polyglot. If you are getting started as a geospatial developer, it’s a safe bet that choosing a scripting language like Python or Javascript will get you very far. The former is probably the most used language in our industry and has even been adopted by proprietary companies as their main scripting language. The latter is especially relevant for web-related technologies and is exploding in the general IT industry. However, it’s important to understand the limitations of these technologies, since solutions based on C, C++, and Java are not going away soon and may even grow thanks to their power and flexibility. Many new languages like Clojure, F#, and Scala that are also pushing the functional paradigm into the mainstream and will offer unique advantages to developers building geospatial applications. There hasn’t been a better time to be a geospatial software developer!
• Big Data is getting Really Big. As Paul said about LIDAR, sensors and satellites now regularly produce terabytes of information daily and systems regularly collect billions of locations in just a few hours. Systems able to handle this amount of information are distributed by nature and have requirements for both batch processing and online analytical capabilities. This will be a hot R&D topic in our industry for years to come and I believe we will see an acceleration in these types of investments over the next year.
• Distributed by design. This will probably be the new default architectural design for most server-side infrastructure, especially those that require high volumes of activity. There are many factors, some mentioned above, that will make this among the most important paradigm shifts in how we build solutions: skyrocketing numbers of users, real-time data, “Big Data”, cloud computing, and many more. If you want to dive deeper into these concepts, I suggest reading — and signing — the Reactive Manifesto.  While this shift may take some time, we will see more activity around this area in 2014.
• Indoor mapping will be hot. Not entirely a new thing, but I believe the next year will see a large increase in solutions around indoor mapping. Mainly in the consumer space — prepare for targeted advertisements! — but perhaps some more useful applications will arise. For instance, I foresee really cool and useful applications for persons with disabilities, in the form of visual and hearing aids that take into account precise data for the surroundings, in real time.
• Open source solutions will keep growing. In early 2013 there were over 3 million developers and over 5 million repositories on GitHub and there are probably many more now. There are thousands of small open source projects that each solve a specific need and there are also well-established projects with dozens of developers working daily on improving their code bases. This trend has already exploded in the general IT industry, where open source has become the default deployment option for software that we use everyday. The internet is built on top of open source software, and so are most of the cutting edge technologies that have flooded the industry with buzzwords like NoSQL, Big Data, etc. Why should the geospatial industry be different? The obvious answer is that it isn’t.
• A true geospatial collaboration platform. The geospatial industry has been struggling with effectively collaborating around geographic content for much too long. Some previous efforts have not translated well to the web or use subpar approaches.  While some seem great at first, they end up being too restrictive, limited, or expensive. At Boundless we believe the status quo is unsatisfactory and think that 2014 will bring exciting offerings in this space.

Whatever you might think of these technology predictions, I believe one thing is clear: the need for geospatial information keeps growing and our industry is in a very interesting moment; there has never been a better time to be disruptive, and the opportunities are boundless.

Check back tomorrow for Paul Ramsey’s predictions for the open source geospatial community and don’t forget Eddie’s post on the future of Boundless.

Juan Marin, our CTO, has been developing geospatial applications for over a decade in the energy, environmental, defense, telecommunications and retail industries, among others.