L'innovation dans l'industrie géospatiale : une interview avec un juré des Geovation Awards – Jaroslaw Marciniak  

À mesure que l'industrie géospatiale se développe, les compétitions qui y sont associées se multiplient également. Celles-ci incluent les Geovation Awards, dont notre Directeur deServices géospatiaux – Jaroslaw Marciniak, a récemment été membre du jury. Le concours est organisé par le Geovation initiative visant à promouvoir des solutions innovantes dans le secteur. Cet événement en constante croissance revêt une importance significative pour l'ensemble du secteur. Il aide les acteurs de géospatial le secteur afin de rester à jour avec les dernières idées et de faire progresser l'ensemble du domaine.

Pour explorer l'idée qui sous-tend la compétition et mettre en lumière les projets innovants qui y participent, nous avons échangé avec Jaroslaw Marciniak.

Quelles ont été vos expériences en tant que membre du jury du concours ? 

My job as a judge was to assess the admissions for one of the categories. I was actually asked by the organisers which one of them I prefer. In the end, I judged the entries in the Land, sea and air category. The submissions in this category were not only about new services or products created by start-ups, but also about innovative research or new ways of capturing data by large organisations or very large companies.  

L'une des raisons pour lesquelles j'ai choisi de juger cette catégorie était de m'appuyer sur mon expérience de travail avec des clients qui livrent très souvent des produits de valeur ou de données précisément basés sur la mer, la terre ou l'air.

I guess we could say that I’m closer to business in my daily work. And I know that in this category, there are also start-ups and solutions that are not only purely public but also commercial. Geovation itself has a lot of members in public organisations and institutions. That’s why, as director of the Geospatial department at Spyrosoft, I was chosen to represent the business side of the industry. 

Notably, the Geovation Awards have recently become more global. The entries come from all over the world, which on the one hand, proves the growing importance of this competition, and on the other hand, gives us a chance to look at interesting projects from different parts of the world. For example, there have been large organisations, from Europe, Africa, US and Australia, which have submitted projects covering extensive areas and with new types of data across entire countries. 

Quelles étaient vos attentes concernant la compétition, et plus spécifiquement concernant les projets des Geovation Awards ? 

I was most interested in projects that commercialised an innovative idea, instead of being just developmental research without a significant business element. As for the expectations of the competition, I thought that there would be more small companies and organisations that are just starting. I expected them to be the ones coming up with innovative ways of using different data sources and presenting them in a new way or offering them with some added value. What surprised me was that large companies such as, let’s say, Hexagon, or entire organisations operating, for example, on a national level, also entered the competition. 

Among such large and exciting projects, there was an entry carried out in collaboration between a large organisation linked to the government of a Caribbean country and a large corporation. They delivered a project to map marine life in the Caribbean basin. In it, they used innovative solutions such as attaching cameras to animals – e.g., sharks. This approach allowed them to scan what is happening in the water, what lives there and what the seabed looks like. 

À quoi avez-vous accordé le plus d'attention dans les projets ? Qu'est-ce qui était le plus important et le plus intéressant pour vous ? 

Cela peut sembler anodin, mais j'ai accordé la plus grande attention à l'innovation. Non pas l'innovation pour l'innovation, mais avec le souci d'apporter des bénéfices aux utilisateurs et aux communautés, ainsi qu'aux personnes et aux entreprises qui portent cette innovation.

I once heard that innovation is about more than just new, interesting ideas. They still need to be able to secure funding and, ideally, make money for themselves. That is what innovation is to me. It is something that brings new value on which new solutions can be built. So, it’s not just an innovative way of getting something, but also defining a specific purpose for it. 

Alors, quelles innovations et technologies ont joué le rôle le plus important dans les candidatures aux Geovation Awards ? 

I tried to pay the most attention, and also gave the highest marks to, those projects and submissions that combined multiple aspects of technology. Of course, an important element that the whole geospatial industry is focused on is how the data are acquired. For such competitions, this usually refers to large-scale data – e.g., from drones, satellites, or large-scale imagery. 

I was keen to see new technologies used for this as well. Of course, artificial intelligence was very popular, facilitating the extraction of more information from the collected data. In addition to this, it was also important to present such data in a user-oriented way, e.g., through appropriate visualisation de données géospatiales. Il est essentiel que la solution soit livrée, par exemple, sous la forme d'un service où l'utilisateur peut facilement accéder aux données et les exploiter.

In the context of the technologies used, the accessibility of a given solution is also very relevant. On the one hand, this refers to accessibility in terms of use through various media, e.g., desktop or mobile. On the other hand, it also applies to the possibility of integrating data or the solution itself with the entire ecosystem of other systems emerging on the market. Solutions should not be closed only to one entity that invented them. It is important to share knowledge and ideas, make APIs available or adhere to open data standards. 

A significant proportion of the projects used open-source tools. In particular, the toolkit provided by the Open Geospatial Consortium – OGC. Of course, big players such as Esri also made their mark on entries, especially in the context of data processing. However, a significant proportion of projects were bespoke solutions using tools from the OGC group, plus additional cloud or AI technologies. 

Surprisingly, I think there was very little use of Mixed Reality or Augmented Reality. I have the impression that this is quite a natural direction to take, especially in Land, sea and air projects. There were no such solutions in the competition, so I see potential here for the future. 

Y a-t-il des tendances technologiques qui émergent des candidatures au concours ? Quel impact peuvent-elles avoir sur l'avenir de l'industrie géospatiale ? 

L'intelligence artificielle est indéniablement un sujet brûlant. Cependant, je ne sais pas si l'on peut parler d'une nouvelle tendance. À mon avis, depuis un certain temps déjà, nous pouvons observer certaines des applications intéressantes de l'IA dans divers domaines géospatiaux. Cette technologie est utilisée pour extraire des informations à partir de données spatiales ou tirer des conclusions basées sur différentes sources de données. Sa popularité est indéniablement visible, et c'est également ce qui m'a plu dans les projets du concours.

A noteworthy trend is how much importance companies are placing on interoperability. There was a strong focus in the projects on making sure that the provided data or solutions could function in a wider ecosystem. Combining what the application unit provides with other tools and systems available on the market was very meaningful. Companies did not lock themselves into one self-contained solution; instead, they offered point-to-point operations. This approach was certainly visible, and I think also quite new to the geospatial industry. 

Pouvez-vous partager davantage d'informations sur les projets du concours ? Quel projet avez-vous préféré, et de quoi s'agissait-il ? 

I gave the highest marks to the project of a platform that uses satellite data and combines it with AI-based solutions. The use of AI made it possible to improve the quality of the data and to automatically create correlation between different data sets. This is a very innovative and also very clever use of the technology. 

An important aspect of the project was that the data and analysis could be shared openly. In this case, findings are available to the whole world at a very high resolution for a specific target. This platform makes it possible to see, for example, how crops will act in a given area or how they have behaved over the last 10 years. The solution firstly makes such data, and the analysis based on it, available, and secondly allows it to be extracted into any other system and developed in its own way.  

For me, it was very interesting that the project works on a global scale – you can download data for Poland, but also for the Philippines and for countries in Africa. Apart from that, I really liked that the solution follows “API first” approach. That is, the creators primarily rely on the fact that they are the source or intermediary of the data, while someone else builds solutions on top of it. This fits very well with a kind of data-sharing mission, which is why I rated it highly. 

You could say that globalisation and accessibility, as well as the use of innovative technologies and solutions that allow data to be shared with other parties, were the most important aspects for me, and I paid the most attention to them in the projects. 

Pour en savoir plus sur les solutions innovantes que notre équipe géospatiale peut développer pour votre organisation, consultez notre page d'offre.