![]() ![]() Quantum computing, solid-state, all-optical systems – whichever promising new computing technology becomes viable first, new online mapping applications will follow close on its heels. As well as developing more efficient and accurate algorithms, and more thoughtful and helpful applications, we need to keep improving our ability to process data with computers. As such, it’s become a vanguard area for data storage innovation – as we saw in the example of GTFS in Chapter 2: What is Google Maps? The future of online maps depends on our ability to store all of the information being picked up by billions of connected sensors around the world.Īcquiring and storing all of this data is, of course, pretty pointless unless we can do something useful with it. Online map data already makes up enormous databases. Our ability to acquire data will increase in sudden, dramatic steps in the near future if connected sensors flood the market as they are expected to. The Internet-of-Things ( IoT), more satellite and drone imagery, autonomous drones, and self-driving cars equipped with more and more powerful sensors have already started capturing record amounts of geographic data. Right now, everything we’ll talk about in this chapter is being held back by three simple limitations in our technological capacity: our ability to acquire data, store it, and process it with computers. In this final chapter, we’ll take a look at some of the exciting new features and applications that will transform online maps – and our everyday lives – in the years to come. The way that third party developers’ creativity and innovation has combined with Google Maps’s huge amounts of data and powerful algorithms to find countless diverse map applications – not to mention the awe-inspiring software marvel that is Google Earth – must be a sign of things to come in terms of online mapping’s potential for future disruption. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |