Realizing the geospatial potential of mobile, IoT and big data

What happens when you have connected sensors in everyone's pockets, homes, vehicles, workspaces, street corners, shopping areas, and more? With the convergence of Mobile Computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), and the ability to gather and analyze this Big Data, the availability of massive amounts of information will continue to be gathered and you can expect the unexpected to happen. The themes of this panel are driving development in information technology, but what is the intersection with geospatial? Location determination and use of location for context are core capabilities of Mobile and IoT. Knowing your location along with nearby Points of Interest (PoIs) and Indoor maps provide a new level of spatial awareness and decision making. This information will be used and viewed in new ways including Augmented Reality (AR). Social computing with geospatial checkins provides a rich picture of the social environment. With embedded computing becoming even more ubiquitous, Sensor Webs will provide opportunistic sensing of the physical environment. Geospatial filtering is one of the most effective methods to extracting information from these big data streams. These streams will continue to grow, e.g., mobile 3D video at incredibly high resolution. Data Fusion to combine multiple data sources will create new capabilities many based on geospatial processing. How can we realize the full potential of these technological capabilities in regards to geospatial? We can envision a lot of upside with the technology, but at what cost to privacy and rights? How should policy, privacy and rights be included in the conversations and deployments of these technologies and the resultant data? What role will ambient and participatory crowdsourcing play? A goal of our technology development must be to reduce the apparent tradeoff between surveillance for public safety vs. interests and rights of people. Technology development will continue to be a social activity based on geospatial APIs and standards for mobile platforms from organizations like W3C, OGC, IETF, and OMA. Development of these technologies are a basis for the critical outcomes, e.g, in creating Smart Cities including Smart Energy. Crowdsourcing from mobile platforms and M2M-based sensors webs will provide a basis for humanity to better understand our world and make critical decisions about the livability of our future..