**Specialised Informatics and Applications**

**1** 

**Applications of Geospatial Technologies** 

*Geomatics Technologies Department, Yanbu Industrial College, Yanbu* 

**of Geospatial Education** 

Yusuf Adedoyin Aina

*Saudi Arabia* 

**for Practitioners: An Emerging Perspective** 

Geospatial technology (also known as geomatics) is a multidisciplinary field that includes disciplines such as surveying, photogrammetry, remote sensing, mapping, geographic information systems (GIS), geodesy and global navigation satellite system (GNSS) (Pun-Cheng, 2001). According to the U.S. Department of Labour, geospatial industry can be regarded as "an information technology field of practise that acquires, manages, interprets, integrates, displays, analyzes, or otherwise uses data focusing on the geographic, temporal, and spatial context" (Klinkenberg, 2007). It is a new integrated academic field that has a diverse range of applications (Konecny, 2002). The applications of geomatics are in the fields of precision farming, urban planning, facilities management, business geographics, security and intelligence, automated mapping, real estate management, environmental management, land administration, telecommunication, automated machine control, civil engineering and so on. Even applications of some devices such as cellular phones, RFID (radio frequency identification) tags and video surveillance cameras can be regarded as part of geospatial technologies, since they use location information (Klinkenberg, 2007). So, graduates of geospatial technologies have the opportunity to pursue varying and challenging careers. Apart from offering graduates challenging career paths (both indoor and outdoor); geomatics exposes them to modern, cutting edge and innovative information system and technologies. The connection between geospatial technologies and information and communication system and technology runs deep. Geomatics fields, especially GIS, have used information and communication technologies such as database management, data sharing, networking, computer graphics and visualization. Thus, some authors (Klinkenberg, 2007; Goodchild, 2011) regard geospatial technologies as part of information technology. Even geospatial technology has had its own free and open source software movement in the open source geospatial foundation (OSGeo) which organizes the free and open source software for geospatial (FOSS4G) conferences. The foundation also support a number of geospatial projects for web mapping, desktop applications, geospatial libraries and metadata catalogue. This

relationship has led to further development of geospatial techniques and applications.

There has been a significant growth in geospatial technologies applications in recent years. There is a major increase in the availability of remote sensing imagery with increasing

**1. Introduction** 
