Between the Poles

Economic value of big geospatial data could reach $700 billion/yr by 2020

McKinsey Global Institute published a report Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity that analyzes the state of digital data, how it is used in different domains in both the private and public sectors, and offers suggestions for policy makers. In addition to looking at big data as a whole, the report examines five areas in detail including personal location data.

Real-time location data generated by mobile phones and other devices has created an entirely new set of location-based services from navigation to pricing property and casualty insurance. Personal location data is a new horizontal application domain that includes industry sectors from utilities to insurance to transportation. The growing smart phone market is creating an exponentially growing volume of location-aware data.  McKinsey sees this domain as a hotbed of innovation that has the potential to create significant value for consumers.  For example, use of real-time  traffic information for navigation will create a quantifiable consumer benefit by saving time spent traveling and fuel consumption. McKeinsey expects the economic value these innovations create to far exceed the revenue generated by service providers.

Economic value

Mobile phones with GNSS chips have created a revolution will continue over the next  decade. This personal location domain offers the potential for huge new value creation over the next ten years that McKinsey estimates at more than $100 billion/yr (about 0.14% of world GDP) in revenue to service providers and as much as $700 billion/yr (about 1% of world GDP) in value to consumer and business end users. Realizing this value will require investment in technology, infrastructure, and personnel as well as appropriate government action.

McKinsey's detailed analysis of the major applications of personal location data finds that, in ten years’ time, these applications could create value of $100 billion/yr or more for service providers  primarily from sales of navigation hardware and revenue from LBS, mobile LBS premiums, and geo-targeted advertising.

McKinsey estimates that by 2020 the benefits (difference between willingness to pay and the cost of applications) that customers, consumers and businesses, will enjoy from location-based applications will reach as as $700 billion/yr. Most of this, about 70 %, will be the consumer benefit from time and fuel saved by using GNSS navigation systems including those with real-time traffic information and mobile LBS applications. The remaining 30 % of the benefits will be through location-enabled applications such as geo-targeted mobile advertising.  Smart navigation applications are estimated to provide $500 billion in value to global consumers in time and fuel saved by 2020. Geo-targeted advertising could represent more than 5 percent of total global advertising spending by 2020.

For comparison, a recent study prepared for Google by Oxera Consulting Ltd in the UK estimated global revenues from geospatial products and services to be $150-$270 billion per year.  The geospatial industry is estimated to be growing by 13% per year through 2016.  These numbers were estimated using a different methodology to McKinsey's. The lower estimate of $150 billion/year was estimated using a bottom-up approach based on the Bloomberg BICS classification of companies worldwide and assumptions about allocating the revenue from companies that provide geospatial in addition to other services such as Trimble.  The $270 billion number was estimated by scaling up the US revenue estimated by Boston Consulting Group to come up with a world estimate.

Personal location data

McKinsey includes sources of personal location data that locate an individual to at least within a couple of city blocks in an urban settingin its analysis.

• Credit and debit card payments from cards processed at point-of-sale (POS) terminals and  automated teller machines. In 2008, there were 90 billion to 100 billion transactions of this type worldwide.
• Mobile phones - the location of such devices can be triangulated from cell-tower signals.  In 2011 there were about 6 billion of these.
• Smartphones with GPS - about 600 million devices in 2010 and the number is growing at about 20 % per year. Many smartphones also have Wi-Fi networking capability, which can be linked to a physical location of a Wi-Fi network.

In the future McKinsey expects indoor location to become more important.  They mention Shopkick, which allows merchants to track their customers from when they walk into a store, and Path Intelligence, which can track foot traffic within malls or amusement parks.

McKInsey's research estimates that the global pool of personal location data was at least 1 petabyte in 2009 and that this pool is growing by about 20 % a year. 

Location data generated by smartphones is growing at double the average rate of growth for all location data.  Asia is the leading region for the generation of personal location data because so many mobile phones are in use there. In 2010 the regions with the largest number of cell phone users were

• China 800 million
• India 650 million
• North America 300 million.

Applications of personal location data

McKInsey has identified three major categories of applications of personal location data.

• Location-based applications and services for individuals including smart routing, automotive telematics, and mobile-phone based location services
• Organizational use of individual personal location data that includes geo-targeted advertising, electronic toll collection, insurance pricing, and emergency response.
• Macro-level use of aggregate location data that includes urban planning and retail business intelligence.

Barriers to use of personal location data

Concerns about privacy and security was identified by McKinsey as a major barrier to future expansion of the use of personal location data. Laws are unclear about who owns that data and how it can be used.  McKinsey believes that a policy and legal framework that clearly describes the permissible and prohibited use of these data would be beneficial for all stakeholders.

For policy makers, McKinsey sees that a priority is incentives for innovation are in place including developing an up-to-date framework for intellectual property rules and rights, funding R&D in potential breakthrough areas, and ensuring that the infrastructure, including spectrum policies, is optimal.

Methodology

By looking at the value chain of location-based applications, McKinsey examined both the amount of data generation and the potential to create value.  McKInsey estimated the amount of personal location data generated in each category of application orsource device and in different geographic regions using the installed base of devices, usage behavior, and the frequency with which data are generated. To assess the potential value that data can generate, McKinsey estimated the economic value of each application to end users—individual consumers, enterprises, and government organizations.

Privacy and personal geographic data

At the Creating the Policy and Legal Framework for a Location-enabled Society conference in Boston, Kirk Goldsberry, who is a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard, gave a fascinatng presentation with the help of two of his students on the topic of personal geographic data and privacy.

According the the Federal Trace Commission, which is responsible for protecting privacy at the Federal level, the 4 holy data types are

• Financial data
• Medical data
• Data about children
• Geographic data

Goldsberry's main point was that the first three are treated as very sensitive and there is a legal framework to ensure these data types are protected.  When it comes to geographic data, on the other hand, there is very little by way of policy or legal infrastructure ro protect personal geographic data.

As an example he cited the iPhone.  About two years ago it was disclosed that iOS devices maintain a database that potentially could be used to track the movements of users. In response Steve Jobs in an email said that "We don't track anyone. The info circulating around is false."

Without the user's explicit consent iOS doesn't record GPS location, but does record the location of cell towers and Wi-Fi access points, which can be used to create a clear general track of a user's movements. 

To show what was possible with this iOS database, two of Goldsberry's students voluteered to carry an iPhone (with location disabled) for a couple of weeks.  Goldsberry used the iOS database recording cell towers and Wi-Fi access points to put together maps that showed pretty clearly where the students had been including long distance trips and their daily routines.  For example, one student had travelled to Seattle for a conference and had stayed in a hotel.  The student's location at and around the hotel and conference were not hard to discern.  The student went to a Mariner's game and from the location determined through the iOS database it was very clear that the student was at Safeco Field.

Limited legal and policy protection for personal geographic data

I interpreted what Goldsberry showed as not targetting Apple specifically, but that there is very little policy and legal protection for personal geographical data.

A number of speakers made the point that technology, including GPS and GIS, has moved so rapidly and regulation and legislation move so slowly that for personal geographic data, the horse has already left the barn.  It is too late to close to the door. 

Experiment

There is the risk that hasty legislation or regulation on privacy and personal geographic data could prevent or inhibit the very real social benefits the technology is capable of delivering.  The approach that several speakers recommended is to enable governments to experiment, so that regulation or legislation on privacy of personal geographic data is able to optimally walk the fine line between protecting privacy on one hand, and enabling the social beneifts the technology is capable of on the other.

I commend Kevin Pomfret, Excecutive Director of the Center for Spatial Law and Policy, for organizing such an important conference at such a critical time for geospatial technology.

Creating the Policy and Legal Framework for a Location-enabled Society

On Thursday and Friday of this week the Centre for Spatial Law and Policy is co-hosting a conference with Harvard University's Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA), Berkman Center of Internet and Society and Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. The conference, titled "Creating the Policy and Legal Framework for a Location-enabled Society" will be live-streamed and combines leaders from many of the diverse aspects of the geospatial community (many of whom are members of the Centre) with internationally-recognized academics and researchers from Harvard and other top universities.

If you have some time on Thursday and Friday  you can watch/listen to the conference over the web.  Details will be posted here.

Providing web access to usable open geospatial data

The principle of free and open access to government geospatial data has been adopted by many governments including US Federal, Canada, Japan, South Africa, Brazil, California, and by the City of Vancouver and other cities.  But being able to access prepared maps and other derived material is just a first step, governments need to provide access to raw geospatial data in commonly used Web-friendly formats. Tim Berners-Lee, in Government Data Design Issues, is a strong advocate of making raw data accessible over the web including supporting standard Web methods, most critically, searching.

GeoREST

I blogged previously about an initiative called GeoREST developed by Haris Kurtagic and implemented by Jason Birch at Nanaimo for property records that attempted to enable visual browsing of open datasets, support standard search engines, plus enable simple access to raw geospatial data in web-friendly formats such as GeoJSON.

What do users want ?

Brian Timoney has reported metrics and a analysis of  how the public actually uses local goverment web maps. He has also created a minimally viable property lookup service.

In light of this Bill Morris has developed an alternative way of accessing public datasets that he feels is compelling to technicians as well as to the lay public, as an example, a template geoportal for accessing multipurpose public data, specifically, building records.

He targeted his geoportal on two audiences:

1. Citizens who want to access their own zoning information and permit history fast.  These folks can search for address, see buildings in context, and get the basic information in one minute or less.
2. GIS analysts who want to download raw building footprint geodata for urban planning, disaster response or cartography.   Thes folks acn download all the features within the current view extent, in a choice of interoperable formats.

Value of geospatial services to the global economy

Google released a report What is the economic impact of Geo services ? earlier this year prepared by Oxera Consulting Ltd in the UK.

What are geospatial services ?

Oxera incuded all interactive digital mapping and location-based data,  products, and services in its definition of geospatial services.  This includes providers of satellite imagery, digital maps, satellite positioning signals (GPS/GNSS), navigation devices, geographic information systems (GIS), and geospatial expert service providers.  Digital maps include online maps and locally stored maps, but not hardcopy maps.  Geospatial products and services generate direct revenue for companies such as ESRI, Garmen, or Digital Globe.

What is value ?

The study aims to quantify the impact of geospatial services on the world economy and consumer welfare.  It breaks these impacts down into

• direct effects - revenue generated by firms developong and providing geospatial data, products and services
• consumer effects - the benefits that consumers, business and government experience from using geospatial services from geospatial services
• wider economic benefts - productivity and efficiency improvements resulting in cost savings from geospatial services

Economic impact of global geoservices

Direct revenues

Global revenues from geospatial products and services as defined by Oxera is estimated to be $150-$270 billion per year.  The geospatial industry is estimated to be growing by 13% per year through 2016. [ There are important assumptions that led to these numbers.  The lower estimate of $150 billion/year was estimated using a bottom-up approach based on the Bloomberg BICS classification of companies worldwide and assumptions about allocating the revenue from companies that provide geospatial in addition to other services such as Trimble.  The $270 billion number was estimated by scaling up the US revenue estimated by Boston Consulting Group to come up with a world estimate.]

Gross value added (GVA) is the grand total of all revenues ( from final sales and subsidies minus direct taxes ) which are incomes into businesses.  Geospatial services are estimated to have a global GVA of $113 billion/year, which is about 0.2% of the world's GVA of $70 trillion.

Consumer benefits

Geospatial services provide benefits (not including direct purchases of geospatial products and services) to consumers.   For example, enabling consumers to find the nearest Thai restaurant in seconds rather than leafing through the yellow pages and looking up the location on a map saves time.   Finding the fastest route to the nearest hospital saves time and may actually save lives.

Some of the consumer benefts of geospatial services include time savings, fuel savings, emergency response, education, and competition.

Examples of categories of consumer benefits include more efficient navigation, estimated to provide benefits of  $22 billion/year, and educational benefits estimated to amount to $12 billion/year.  Faster emergency response to cardiac arrests is estimated to potentially save 152 lives/year in the UK.

Wider economic impact

Geospatial services also make users more efficient.  For example, a trucking company that has installed GPS trackers on its vehicles and uses location-aware routng software will be more efficient, delivering items faster and more efficiently.  There are also indirect benefits to the general public in improved safety.  By getting things to end users and businesses faster and more safely, geospatial services facilitate economic activity.

For example, GPS/GNSS is estimated to provide $10 billion in cost savings to the global economy.  Geospatial  services are estimated to save 1.1 billion hours of travel time/year and to reduce fuel demand by 3.5 billion liters of gasoline/year.

Thanks to Dr Bob Austin for pointing me to this.

Value of geospatial services to the United States economy

According to a report by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) the geospatial services industry in the United States generates annual revenues of $75 billion annually.  That is about 0.5 % of the US GDP. The report breaks the geospatial services industry into geospatial data including maps and imagery, geospatial software, applications and devices and geo-expert services.  End users of geospatial services are government, business, and consumers.

For comparison studies of the contribution of the geospatial industry in Australia and New Zealand estimated a contribution of between 0.6 and 1.2% of the GDP in the case of Australia and 0.6 % in the case of New Zealand. 

The BCG report estimates the economic impact of the geospatial services industry on government, business, and consumers is estimated to be $1.6 trillion in revenues (greater efficacy) and $1.4 trillion in cost savings (greater efficiency).

The BCG study reports that the value that consumers ascribe to geospatial services is about $37 billion per year or about $350 per year for the average U.S. household.

BCG also estimates that more than 5 million employees in the U.S. in a variety of industries use geospatial services as part of their job.

BCG forecasts that the economic impact of geospatial services in three business functions, marketing, logistics, and strategic decision-making will increase by at least 10 percent a year over the next five years. 

BCG forecasts that the geospatial services industry will reach $100 billion in annual revenues over the next five years.  It projects that the efficiency gain in the U.S. economy will reach $2.6 trillion.  But the report cautions that to continue this growth will require sustained public- and private-sector cooperation and partnership, open policies governing collection and dissemination of location-based data and increased technical education and training at all levels.

Thanks to Talbot Brooks for pointing me to the BCG report.

Contribution of geospatial to the Canadian economy

Two countries, Australia and New Zealand, have commissioned studies to estimate the contribution of geospatial data and technology to the national economy.  Canada has just announced the award of a similar project to a team that includes ACIL Tasman, who conducted the Australian and New Zealand studies.

Australia

In 2008 a report The Value of Spatial Information, The impact of modern spatial information technologies on the Australian economy was prepared for the CRC for Spatial Information & ANZLIC – the Spatial Information Council by ACIL Tasman. 

The report found that in 2006/2007 the spatial information sector contributed between $6.4 billion and $12.6 billion to the gross domestic product (GDP), which represents between 0.6% and 1.2% of the GDP.

Secondly, it found that restrictions on access to spatial data reduced productivity in some economic  sectors by between 5% and 15% which could have reduced the GDP by about 7% in 2006-2007.

Thirdly, it projected that with the right policies the contribution of the spatial information sector to the national economy in the medium term had the potential to be up to 50% higher than in 2006-2007.  In other words, instead of a contribution of about 1%, the spatial information sector could have contributed 1.5% of GDP.

New Zealand

In August 2011 a study was released by Land Information New Zealand (LINZ), the Department of Conservation (DOC) and the Ministry for Economic Development (MED) that estimated the contribution spatial information makes to the New Zealand economy.  

According to the report the use of spatial information added at least $1.2 billion, about 0.6% of GDP, to the economy last year through productivity gains, but the report indicates that wider and better use of spatial information could lead to even greater productivity and add another $481 million to the economy.

Canada

Natural Resources Canada’s Mapping Information Branch in collaboration with the Canada Centre for Remote Sensing and the Surveyor General Branch, has announced the award of a contract  to Hickling Arthurs Low Corporation and partners ACIL Tasman, Fujitsu Canada and ConsultingWhere,  to conduct the Canadian study.
 
The primary focus for the study is to understand the current situation and emerging trends in Canadian geospatial activities and their overall direct and indirect economic value and contribution to the Canadian economy.  There are two components to the project.  The first is a geomatics environmental scan to examine the current geospatial information market in Canada and profile the Canadian geomatics sector.  The second is a economic value study that will determine the value of open geospatial information within the Canadian economy and its contribution to competitiveness and innovation in Canada, evaluate geospatial information as a ‘public good’ in the Canadian context, and make recommendations on the future strategic direction for geospatial information in Canada with an emphasis on the roles that can be played by the government, industry and academia.

The study will be managed by the GeoConnections Program of NRCan’s Mapping Information Branch and is scheduled to be completed by March 31, 2014.

Making geospatial data and services meaningful in the real world

The Semantic Web is an effort of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).  The idea of the Semantic Web is to provide a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries, or put another way a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines.  Converting the existing web to a semantic web has turned out to be a major challenge and it remains largely unrealized.

However, as a first step ways are being found to add some level of semantic content to existing data and services.  As an important example,  the OGC has announced the adoption of "Semantic annotations in OGC standards" as an OGC Best Practice.  Annotation of Web Services (or data) compliant to OGC standards such as WMS, WFS and GML refers to attaching meaningful (semantic) descriptions to the service.

The authors give an example from a GML document of an XML schema that defines a class or feature type exploitationsponctualsproduction.  They point out that from the information in this schema you can't tell what the data described by this schema represents.  The name is confusing and the attributes don't provide any additional information. Whose name is the value of name, what does the attribute year refer to, and how is the allowedproduction measured?

An OGC Best Practice means a recommended way to add semantic content to OGC web services based on existing standards.  The authors discuss how to do this using not only OGC standards but also standards from the W3C and ISO/TC211.

OGC standards cover the functional dimension of a web service, but they don’t tell us much about what the data represents in the real world. For example, in the case of WMS or WFS the application knows how to load and visualize the data on a map, but provides very little information to a user in a specific domain such as engineering or construction about how to read the displayed map. 

Put another way, semantic annotations can convert geospatial data into infrastructure data.  Semantic annotations are a way for data providers to connect geospatial data to real world domain models, to provide information about data and web services that is meaningful to an engineer or construction contractor.  Semantic annotations not only make data meaningful to a much broader audience of consumers, but make it discoverable by a much broader audience through standard web search engines.

Free and open authoritative European geospatial data site launched

Starting 8 March 2013, a 1:1 million scale topographic dataset, EuroGlobalMap has been available free of charge for any use under a new open data licence, the EuroGeographics OpenData Licence, which allows you to:

• Reproduce the Product, distribute it and communicate it to the public;
• Adapt the Product and reproduce, distribute and communicate the adaptation to the public;
• Extract and re-utilise the data of the database (as a part of the Product);
• Exploit the Product (and its derivative creations) commercially.

All you have to do is to acknowledge the copyright and the source of the data by including an attribution statement:

“© EuroGeographics. Original product is freely available at www.eurogeographics.org. Terms of the licence available at http://www.eurogeographics.org/form/topographic-data-eurogeographics”

And you have to avoid anything that suggests that EuroGeographics endorses you or your use of the data.

The data is comprised of six themes - administrative boundaries; names locations; transport networks; settlements; elevation; and the water network.  The data is sourced from authoritative national mapping supplied by 45 European countries and territories, members of EuroGeographics, the Association for European Mapping, Cadastre and Land Registry Authorities.

Cesium open source WebGL virtual globe and mapping Javascript library

Earlier this week on an Eclipse Foundation Locationtech teleconference, Matt Ford of Cesium provided an overview and demonstration of the features of Cesium.  You can watch the video here.

Cesium is an open source virtual globe and map library written in JavaScript using WebGL. It provides hardware-accelerated graphics in a browser without a plugin.  Cesium supports a 3D globe, 2D map, and 2.5D with the same API.   Cesium allows you to layer imagery from multiple sources, including imagery (WMS, OpenStreetMap, Bing Maps, ArcGIS MapServer, and standard image files) and vector data (KML, ESRI Shapefiles, WebGL, JSON).

It supprts vector editing including pionts (labels and markers), polylines, polygons with holes, circles, ellipses, and other shapes.  It also supports cameras and animation.  One of the cool things Matt showed was a camera following a satellite.  And perhaps the coolest capability is materials which alows you to define the appearance of the surface of objects using textures such as water, checkerboard, stripes, dots, brick, cement, asphalt, wood, grass, diffuse map, specular map, reflection, and refraction.

Functionality that Cesium already supports in beta and that looked impressive in Matt's demonstration is digital terrain models.  Functionality currently under development are

• Models - the example shown was a rubber duck
• Integration with other open source packages - the example shown was a plugin for GeoServer

But perhaps the most exciting capability to look forward to is an OpenLayers API on top of Cesium.  This would provide OpenLayers with an extremely rich set of 3D capabilities in the very near future.