Mobile Geomatics

Mobile geomatics involves using mobile computing devices and sensors to acquire, process, analyse, manage and visualise the geospatial data with which users can interact via a large variety of smart mobile geospatial applications. From the point of view of geomatics engineering, the most significant feature of mobile geomatics is its mobility, which is enabled via mobile computing devices, sensors and wireless Internet. Geomatics engineering is a computationally demanding task in terms of computation power, data storage capacity and memory space. The recent developments in mobile computing and sensor technologies allow mobile devices to meet many of the demanding requirements for geospatial computing. The current computation power, data storage and memory capacities of smartphones are better than that of a PC ten years ago. Furthermore, smartphones are now found among the general public in ever increasing numbers. This has been the significant driving force in the transformation of mapping science from a very narrow professional area to a widespread field that is well-known to the general public. The involvement of information technology giants such as Nokia, Google, Apple and Microsoft in this area of operation also provide us with new opportunities and challenges for developing new solutions for geospatial data acquisition, processing, analysis, management, visualisation and novel application technologies. Mobile geomatics will play a significant role in future geospatial computing in the areas of ubiquitous positioning, mobile mapping, mobile geographical information systems (GIS) and innovative geospatial applications.

Areas of interest to the FGI include ubiquitous positioning, mobile mapping, context awareness, GNSS technologies, smart mobile geospatial solutions, cloud computing for mobile geomatics and mobile GIS.