The Future

by Ilse Genovese

On this Presidents' Day, as we look forward to the 2011 Surveyors Week, I am reminded of three past presidents among our forty four—George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Ronald Reagan. I think of Washington's valiant defense of a young Nation and of Lincoln's pursuit of a More Perfect Union. I read of the "significant contributions made by surveyors to the United States" Reagan cited in Proclamation 5151 establishing the Surveyors Week in 1984, and I see history meeting the future. At a national level, we are attempting to find a balance between curbing profligate spending and investing in our future. The future of our country and its people weighed heavily on Washington, Lincoln, and all the other presidents after them. In his State of the Union speech early February, President Obama called for investing in America's future; he talked about another "Sputnik moment" we're faced with. That moment has arrived in the geospatial world too. Before our eyes, expanding technological capacity is changing the way geographic data are collected, analyzed, shared, and ultimately used by government and the public. The new kid on the block, GIS, is no longer so new or young. Geographic information systems have matured and moved, with ever more powerful computing and geodatabases, to the "cloud." Eventually, all the layers in the NSDI (National Spatial Data Infrastructure), including the proposed land parcel data layer will be fed with data from geodatabases in the cloud. Surveyors have a great opportunity to ensure that these data conform to real-time ground truth—if they grasp it before it too migrates "to the cloud." Undeniably, surveyors have made historic contributions to land development and land use in the U.S. But since "new technology is constantly modernizing this honored and learned profession" (Proclamation 5151), it behooves surveyors and mappers to join other geospatial professionals and give "the idea of creating a national cadastre a fresh look" (see "The Future," pp. 27-29). Designing and implementing a national cadastre layer will be met with the same demands for interoperability and standardization as is happening on widely distributed geographic reporting platforms being created by citizen cartographers, geocachers, and other members of the public. Increased demand for broader and/or different technical competencies will almost certainly cause shifts in program emphasis toward educating geospatial professionals capable of working in multidisciplinary environments—and, by extension, in the demographics of professional associations. The young surveyors and mappers graduating from these "future-oriented" programs will increasingly put high premium on how much the professional organization they join can help them make the emerging new geospatial modality their own.