Tucked into a company blog post about Smart Cities was this statement that caught my eye.
Ninety percent of the world’s data has been generated over the last two years.
Unlike the “80% of Data is Spatial” I have to admit this is totally believable and I can find the source. Most of this data is pure junk but the biggest problem with it is that it is literally unsearchable. Even in the age of Google, we can’t even begin to start aggregating this data and sorting through it.
On the BLM GPM projected that I was part of at AECOM/URS, we teamed with Voyager to attempt to find all their spatial data and share it. The good news is that I hear the BLM Navigator will be rolling out soon so at least we can know that the BLM is indexing their data and attempting to share it. But that is one organization out of billions.
This unaccounted for data is unable to be leveraged by users and becomes wasted. We all know GIS is great for making informed decisions about just about anything, yet we are most likely uninformed ourselves because the data just doesn’t happen to be at our fingertips. We’re a society that loves to create data, but not one that likes to organize data. If we’re truly going to change the world with GIS, we need to make sure we have all the information available to do so. Smart Cities, GeoDesign and all the rest are big data use cases. Let’s figure out how to start pumping them full of it.
