Urban planning, transportation planning, telecom and network services, what do these things have in common? To answer that, we must first understand the logic behind them.
In the world we are living in, location information plays a fundamental part in our daily life, which leads to better decision-making in all aspects. In ancient, people used the sun, moon, and stars to guide their way, this was known as celestial navigation. With technologies advancing, the coordinate system has become much more mature and we are using GPS (Global Positioning System) for daily use, while the impact it brought to us is far more than just simple navigation but also its derivatives such as tracking and monitoring objects.
Getting back to the question, what exactly do they have in common?
They are both technologies that heavily relies on the use of GIS.
What is GIS?
GIS (Geographic Information System is a framework to gather, manage, and analysing data. It analyses the spatial location and visualise it by using maps and 3D scenes. Due to the variety of data layers used in GIS, it allows users to evaluate suitability and capability, estimate, interpret, predict, and understand more.
To put it in simply, GIS is a framework to understand the science of our world, and it helps users to make smarter decisions.
Why is Our Location Information So Important?
Location information is the geographical position obtained from devices that are connected to the IoT, it is usually collected and tracked with GPS. When a device’s location services are turned on, it sends its location via GPS and the data collected can be applied to a wide range of practices, such as transportation and security. Moreover, GIS is a very powerful decision-making tool for any business or industry since it does not only collect data of your location but also data that can help businesses understand more about customer behaviours, which leads to more customised service provided and better user experience.
How GIS Benefits Smart Cities?
As the density of population in city areas is getting higher and will continue to grow every year, numerous issues are generated or worsen due to the highly intense activities such as traffic congestion, poor infrastructure planning, and pollution. With the urge of solving the problems, smart cities have become one of the most important topics in urban planning and city development. However, smart city projects are fairly complex due to the involvement of numerous sectors and technologies.
GIS can be an integrated tool to collect, analyse, and manage the spatial information for sustainable development and management for the city. An information system centralized base on GIS can provide an IT framework that includes all aspects of the smart city development cycle to every stakeholder.
It first helps to find the right sites for city development, identify legal boundaries, and helps users to arrive at the right valuation of new or existing sites.
Identifying insufficiencies and optimal solutions are crucial to designing and planning smart cities, by integrating GIS and design tools such as BIM (Building Information System) and CAD (Computer-Aided Design), a better result in analytics and cost estimation can be achieved to the infrastructure design process.
GIS also helps to integrate financial and project management software, which provides a comprehensive view of projects. The overall efficiency of projects can be improved by keeping all relevant project information organized.
Numerous marketing reports can be created to help city developers to achieve better sales, a more accurate picture of the city’s sustainability can be presented visually. Overall, the demographic and market conditions can be analysed more detailedly to make better results.
While maintenance being one of the most complex parts of urban planning, GIS accommodated asset inventory with inspection history and work order management to keep the investment effective.
Conclusion
The use of GIS has played a crucial part not only to businesses and institutions, but also the general public, it is a powerful tool to use in modelling, analysis, and various other applications throughout the life cycle of a smart city. GIS is not only necessary to develop urban areas, but also essential in today’s fast-moving, technology-savvy landscape.
As for now, most businesses only use geographic information at in city or state level, AXON Technology provides expert advice and tailormade smart solutions for all businesses with the goal of helping our clients to solve their problems and help pushing their business to the next level.
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