Chinese geographic information system developer SuperMap held its 2020 Global Technology Conference recently, a multi-lingual virtual event with minisites and presentations in Chinese, English, French, Japanese, Russian and Spanish. The conference theme was ‘Geo-intelligence, connecting the future’ with presentations on GIS integration, blockchain, big data, AI and more.
SuperMap head of R&D Li Meng described new features in SuperMap GIS 10i with notably, a new Hyperledger fabric-based ‘geo-blockchain’ solution which is claimed to secure distributed geospatial analysis and processing. Other novelties include augmented reality GIS based on spatialized video, cross-industry 3D GIS, and ‘smarter and more powerful’ AI GIS.
SuperMap’s distributed GIS operates from the edge to the cloud. The cloud versions leverage Docker containers and a microservices architecture. A poster child deployment is the geological ‘big data’ system developed for China’s Yuhan Province, a 400 terabyte data set spanning a variety of storage from H-Base, HDFS, Yarn, Hive Spark, MapReduce and more. The distributed architecture supports ‘GeoAI’ machine learning and 3D point cloud data.
The geo-blockchain is said to provide ‘GIS data credibility’, albeit with a processing overload and larger data footprint. The appropriate strategy is to only upload ‘key data’ to the blockchain. A ‘geospatial smart contract’ mechanism controls the process.
SuperMap appears to be behind China’s surveillance society and offers geo-fenced analysis of video camera feeds to perform, for instance, vehicle number plate recognition and spot traffic violations. The 3D aspect appears to offer a fully immersive gaming-like functionality integrated with the GIS. The toolset makes considerable use of open source technologies and standards (CityGML, Postgres, HBase, Elasticsearch) and the whole gamut of Keras, PyTorch and TensorFlow deep learning packages for image processing.
Natalie Kang from Korean GIS specialist SPH presented PLAS, its pipeline analysis solution. PLAS embeds DNV GL’s ‘killer app’, Synergi Solver, within SuperMap’s iObjects GIS. Pipe flow and pressure data can be visualized and modeled in the GIS environment. PLAS also interfaces with customer billing systems. The system has been deployed by Korea’s JB Corp natural gas utility.
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