sustainable development of GIS in Hong Kong

What is sustainable development of GIS? It is about a framework or strategy or a pattern that can enable any potential GIS users to enjoy and make use of the power of GIS with indefinite future. Development of GIS is to solve daily geographical problem in the community, for example, production of digital map database, dissemination of map database, enable potential map database users to build up GIS, and enables them to perform analysis and discover geographic pattern with minimize efforts and resources. To understand how to make GIS development becomes a sustainable task, we shall have well-understand about what components are required to build a GIS system. Here, I am not talking about building a GIS software, but an application that can make use of GIS concept and technologies to solve geographic problem. In general, a GIS system is composed of software, hardware and human resources. Software means a GIS software that is available in the market that meets at least minimum requirements of your organization. Hardware is typically server based system or even a desktop hardware system. Human resources is about project management professional, GIS specialists and GIS programmer who understand very well about the software and hardware so that they can define methodology, schedule, technique as well as specifications to implement the GIS system.

To make thing becomes sustainable. One method is to enable those resources that we pour into the system becomes re-usable. Another method is to minimize the cost of spending for acquiring resources. To do this, we shall have technology. If we have technology in hand, and we can have sufficient skills to manipulate technology, technology itself can help us to minimize resources and ensure scalability with inexpensive components. In fact, this is not a new concept and it has been realized in Google search engine. Google is a technology company that they have capability to develop a invincible search engine and the entire system is scalable to a very large matrix with cheap machine and even free software, i.e. Linux.

The key to the road of sustainable is technology. Using technology is not a trival task to many people as it has risk embedded somewhere. Applying technology is not a straight forward thing that you can enjoy success within one month or even a year. Applying technology requires people immense into it and to keep thinking to tackle any obstacles in front.

In this case, it is obvious that to build a sustainable GIS system, one shall have technology, more than that is courage. In addition, one shall have knowledge to handle technology with open source software platform. Once people gains knowledge to open source software platform, it is about opening your potential to the sea of massive computing power as there is no longer restriction to run your server or program on Wintel machine. Operating system license could be lowered to nothing. As the level of gaining knowledge of an open source software platform that means to enable specialists and programmers not only to build new components/modules on it but also they can perform system tuning without asking your GIS vendors for changes and bug fixing without timetable and commitment.

However, in current technology in GIS, there are different architectures of it and it can server different purposes. In general, there are desktop GIS and web mapping. In recent years, GIS development on web mapping especially in open source arena is very popular and it has reached a mature point that can be depolyed for production use. There are many open source web map software in the market now and the most popular are including mapserver, geoserver, openlayer and ka-map. On the other hand, for desktop GIS, brandname software is still having their advantages.

In case in Hong Kong, the Government can start consider open-sources web mapping software so that it can lower resources and make GIS becomes an afforable and if it comes true, more and more people can use it.