The future of geospatial intelligence

For centuries, humans’ capacity to capture and depict physical space has played a central role in industrial and societal development. However, the digital revolution and the emergence of networked devices and services accelerate geospatial capture, coordination, and intelligence in unprecedented ways. Underlying the digital transformation of industry and society is the fusion of the physical and digital worlds–‘perceptality’–where geospatial perception and reality merge. This paper analyzes the myriad forces that are driving perceptality and the future of geospatial intelligence and presents real-world implications and examples of its industrial application. Applications of sensors, robotics, cameras, machine learning, encryption, cloud computing and other software, and hardware intelligence are converging, enabling new ways for organizations and their equipment to perceive and capture reality. Meanwhile, demands for performance, reliability, and security are pushing compute ‘to the edge’ where real-time processing and coordination are vital. Big data place new restraints on economics, as pressures abound to actually use these data, both in real-time and for longer term strategic analysis and decision-making. These challenges require orchestration between information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) and synchronization of diverse systems, data-sets, devices, environments, workflows, and people. © 2017 Wuhan University. Published by Taylor & Francis Group.