Three development stages of mobile geographic information system technology
The development of Mobile Geographic Information System (MGIS), which is driven by the change of information technology, is clarified and divided into three eras in this work: embedded, mobile Internet, and intelligent Internet Of Things (IOT) era.At the end of 1990s, with the completion of Global Positioning System (GPS) deployment in the United States, the functions related to information acquisition of desktop GIS system were transplanted to Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) and other embedded devices to facilitate field data acquisition. MGIS entered the “embedded era” combined with GPS. In this period, the stand-alone version of MGIS has been successfully applied in the field data collection of land, forestry, surveying, mapping, and other industries. Although MGIS had some online functions at that time, the bandwidth of mobile network was not enough to support high-frequency network GIS services.MGIS has gradually entered the “mobile Internet era” with the rise of 3G/4G and other broadband mobile networks and the popularity of intelligent mobile terminals (especially Android mobile phones). In this period, the core module of MGIS was translated from Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) to wireless communication network. The most typical applications in this era are the map APP developed by Google, Baidu, and other electronic map service providers and its related location-based services APP. At this time, MGIS has extended to the entire geographic information industry chains, involving data collection, data processing, platform software, industry applications, etc. “Cloud+End” constitutes a new ecosystem of geographic information. However, due to the problems of cloud computing, such as less real-time, insufficient bandwidth, and large energy consumption, which are not conducive to data security and privacy, MGIS in this era is still in the traditional artificial ground operation stage, making real-time spatial analysis, target recognition, and other intelligent processing difficult.The MGIS technology gradually enters the “intelligent IOT era” around 2019 with the ubiquitous development of IOT, especially the development of Computer Vision (CV), Artificial Intelligence (AI), 5G mobile communication, edge computing, and other technologies. The main technical features of this stage are intelligent, real-time, and ubiquitous GIS, and the system architecture evolves into “cloud+edge+end”. In this era, everyone is a sensor and plotter. A large number of intelligent sensors, such as cameras and radars integrated on ground mobile platforms (wearable devices, vehicles, etc.) and air mobile platforms (unmanned aerial vehicles, etc.) have emerged, which can help us locate and provide holographic map information, such as acoustic-optic-magnetic information. These IOT terminals can be used as carriers of MGIS. The massive raw data of the collected images, videos, locations, and other data are no longer uploaded to the cloud, but are analyzed and processed in real time by AI and other technologies on the network edge devices. Only the results are transmitted to the cloud. This mode greatly reduces the pressure of network bandwidth, data center power consumption, and system delay and enhances the service response ability. Furthermore, the risk of network data leakage is greatly reduced, and user data security and privacy are protected because users no longer upload privacy or sensitive data (only stored on network edge devices).On this basis, a new generation of MGIS is proposed, which integrates GNSS, 5G, AI, CV, and other information technologies. The ubiquitous, real-time, and intelligent features of this technology are analyzed, and three core technologies, including cross-platform kernel, simultaneous localization and mapping, pan-information-based high-precision navigation map, semantic map, and intelligent decision-making, are discussed. The development trend and direction are also predicted.
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