Putting the IoT in its place

by John Williamson| Open Digital Ecosystem & IoT   I January 23, 2015

Some colossal projections about the Internet of Things are being bandied about.

Many analysts are predicting that tens of billions of connected devices, machines and users will be generating trillions and trillions of dollars’ worth of value-add in the not too distant future. Others, however, opine that the IoT pudding has been greatly over-egged and caution that construction and operation of it is unlikely to be as quick, painless or readily monetized as some of the more optimistic pundits imply.

What seems incontrovertible, though, is the key part that geographic information systems (GIS) and geospatial analytics will play in shaping the eventual scope and timeline IoT deployment. In general, GIS will help to organize and maximize the utility of the IoT, while proliferation of the IoT itself will help to increase the profile of and the level of engagement with GIS and analytics.

There are a number of synergies and interdependencies between the IoT and GIS, some obvious, others less so. Although experts argue about actual percentages, it’s clear that there is a location context for countless human and societal activities and behaviors, and for agricultural, commercial, business and industrial processes and practices. It’s equally clear that for much of the data collected, analyzed and utilized in the IoT, a spatial element will be an important part of the value-add, whether this has to do with the location and/or movement over time of sensors, meters, devices, machines, vehicles, assets, resources or people.

As noted by Eddie Oldfield, Chief Executive Officer, Spatial Quest Solutions and Member, Open Geospatial Consortium, in our recent Quick Insights report Geoanalytics: Why location technology is critical to IoT success, geospatial technology has progressively moved from the desktop to the web. As with the IoT, GIS is now calling on many types of data from human input to sensors, databases and mobiles, and is bringing these together for analysis, map-making and a variety of other applications.

Once again we see how in the ‘value fabric’ of the emerging digital services world, multiple parties must collaborate and interact to deliver value in the form of products, services and applications to customers, sometimes also with the participation of those customers. By definition these partnerships will have, so to speak, a lot of ‘moving parts’, and it will be necessary to know the location of these parts and their relationships to each other.

An array of fairly heavy-duty challenges face builders, operators and users of the IoT in areas such as data prioritization, network capacity, standards, metrics, best practices, regulation, privacy and security, and corporate and organizational cultures. To what extent these challenges can be met, and to what extent the IoT can reach the prominence and significance envisaged by its evangelists, remains to be seen. But at least one thing is certain: GIS and geooanalytics will play an important role.