Professor Wolfgang Kainz, Professor Emeritus of Cartography and Geo-Information Science, University of Vienna, Austria, and Visiting Professor at Wuhan University.
During the 26 years of development, SuperMap has always attached great importance to establishing partnership with experts and companies both inside and outside of the GIS industry. It's their support that make SuperMap's success today and in the future. And great events always represent us good opportunities to meet our partners and communicate with them.
At the GISTC 2023 conference held in June, I had the opportunity to have a talk with Professor Wolfgang. Having attended online the formerly GTC (GIS Software Conference) in 2022, he is our old friend, who has also known Dr. Song Guanfu, President of SuperMap for a long time as they meet very often at GIS related events. He was also invited to attend the 6th International Workshop on GIS Technology and Application and gave a presentation titled "The Importance of Fuzzy Logic for GIS". At the international forum of GISTC 2023, Professor Wolfgang delivered another report, giving insights into the future development of GIS.
In his report, he concluded three rounds of GIS evolution, which happened since 1980s. After decades of development, GIS has become more ubiquitous and more advanced, from 2D to 3D, to 2D and 3D integration. He also gave a clear definition of GIS science and its branches, including geography, GIS, remote sensing, geodesy, photo-grammetry, and cartography. All those branches are important. The core of GIS, as Professor Wolfgang says, is spatial modeling. And GIS is about spatio-temporal analysis.
When talking about what impressed him the most at the GISTC 2023, Professor Wolfgang said that he was mainly looking forward to Mr. Song's report as he wanted to know what's new in Mr. Song's thoughts on the industry. Mr. Song Guanfu introduced the new concept of "Geospatial Intelligene" that SuperMap proposed years ago.
"We posed the concept of 'geospatial intelligence', which is the value that we, as a GIS company could bring to the IT industry, how do you like the idea?"
"We have to differentiate the different meaning of "intelligence" in different context. If in the meaning of artificial intelligence, that's Mr. Song also said, that is actually, it's not a new thing. It's just now in the last years, in the last maybe ten years, it has become so popular because of more software that's becoming available for machine learning and it definitely will continue to be popular and be used more and more, so very high frequency, especially in the universities. But the thing is that everybody wanted it or they were talking about it, but for many years it didn't really work. And it started already in 1970s and then there was up and down. And then there was a time when they were talking about expert systems or rule-based systems who are losing neural nets, neural networks, but it was all so so, until the last, the last about ten years when all these machine learning algorithms and software products that popped up and were being used. It used more and more. It will still take some years for the 'intelligence' to be talked and developed. It will not go away unless something matters coming."
Except for the concept of geospatial intelligence, Professor Wolfgang also talked about the new product that SuperMap launched on the plenary conference. One of the most eye-catching products in the SuperMap GIS 2023 is the integration product of remote sensing and GIS.
"It's an important step forward. First of all, I should say it's a logic step in the industry. Basically, all industry companies that are working in GIS, we are going into this direction because it's just, it's a necessity and it is definitely an advantage for SuperMap to have that integration because I understand SuperMap has a lot of customers in China, and they need this integration not only of remote sensing and GIS but also 3D and time, so dynamic 3D GIS."
Looking to the future of GIS, Professor Wolfgang listed at the international forum of GISTC 2023 some novel display technologies for GIS like hyper globes, immersive displays, foldable screens, human-machine interfaces and holography. Today's GIS have more options thanks to new technologies.
But talking about the emerging IT technologies like AI, big model or Chat GPT, people's opinions divide. When asked whether he thinks the emergence of new technologies will bring threats or benefits to the GIS industry, Professor gave his answer.
"Both. Definitely opportunities, but also a lot of threats and challenges. Not only for the industry but also in general for society. Because as long as you don't have quality control, then the software might produce results that are absolutely wrong or unreliable. But the users don't know about it. What I want to say is that, take ChatGPT as an example, the providers of that software, they will have to follow some quality criteria. They have to make sure that their software is producing reliable results because now with ChatGPT you can produce a lot of nonsense but not only for the industry, for example also for education at the universities. There are now big discussions about how much AI you can allow, in the class or allow the student to use, like the extent of participation of ChatGPT. So, we need to be careful and make sure that these new techniques can used in the right way."
I'm really impressed by Professor Wolfgang's rigor as he pays attention to the subtle difference between things no matter when he was talking to me or delivering his report. There’s still a lot of things I want to discuss with him, and there's still lots of space for GIS industry to develop. Hope that next time, we could meet at another GIS event and talk about new progress in this industry.
