English

Big Data: How Geo-information Helped Shape the Future of Data Engineering

Databases 2015-01-21 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Very large data sets are the common rule in automated mapping, GIS, remote sensing, and what we can name geo-information. Indeed, in 1983 Landsat was already delivering gigabytes of data, and other sensors were in orbit or ready for launch, and a tantamount of cartographic data was being digitized. The retrospective paper revisits several issues that geo-information sciences had to face from the early stages on, including: structure ( to bring some structure to the data registered from a sampled signal, metadata); processing (huge amounts of data for big computers and fast algorithms); uncertainty (the kinds of errors, their quantification); consistency (when merging different sources of data is logically allowed, and meaningful); ontologies (clear and agreed shared definitions, if any kind of decision should be based upon them). All these issues are the background of Internet queries, and the underlying technology has been shaped during those years when geo-information engineering emerged.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1501.04832,
  title  = {Big Data: How Geo-information Helped Shape the Future of Data Engineering},
  author = {Robert Jeansoulin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1501.04832},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

Conference "AutoCarto 6", revisited 30 years later in a "Retrospective book", edited by Barry Wellar, the same chair as the original conference. 12 pages, 6 figures. see: AutoCarto Six Retrospective, 2013. ISBN: 978-0-9921435-0-3, pages 190-201

R2 v1 2026-06-22T08:07:08.268Z