By Xu Hong
Geographic information industry, as an emerging information industry supported by such geographic information technologies as geographic information system, remote sensing and navigation satellite system, is the fundamental resource of economic society's development and the important component of national informatization construction.
Data showed that geographic information industry had kept an average annual growth rate of 20 percent over recent years. Experts indicated that China's geographic information industry had retained a trend of sharp uprising and stepped into a crucial period, although impacted by the international financial crisis.
Made-in-China software obtained significant achievements
"Geographic information system software is the top priority in the development of geographic information industry." said by experts. Since 1980s when the first set of geographic information system software was introduced, China's geographic information system technologies have developed greatly; especially made-in-China software with independent intellectual properties is of remarkable achievements.
With the support of different sectors, geographic information system software with independent intellectual properties has been developed and come into the market rapidly, which has in turn driven the development of the industry. Made-in-China geographic information system softwares represented by SuperMap and MapGIS have been emerging in succession and formed early scale.
Up to now, made-in-China 3D GIS softwares have taken up half of native market shares. A great deal of softwares in the industries like remote sensing and navigation have also realized independent innovation and occupied over 90 percent of native market shares.
By now, China's foundational software platform of geographic information system has fulfilled the industrialization, developed industrial demonstration, worked out a full portfolio of software products from large foundational platform softwares to various application softwares, and played an important role in several fields like state-owned land resource management and city management.
GPS navigation becomes a kind of momentum for the development
According to the forecast, China's navigation industry is coming into maturity and will be further booming at an average annual growth rate of more than 26 percent in future years. Among said industry, GPS navigation positioning system has shown powerful vitality and wide application prospect, and produced huge social and economic benefits.
Over more-than-ten-year development, there is a tremendous space for GPS navigation market in China. Along with the integration and development of China's auto industry, mobile communications (as 3G mobile communications technologies), plug-in mobile chip and mobile database technology, a market scale valued at hundreds of billion yuan will be generated for navigation industry.
According to the statistics, China's GPS navigation sales volume has increased from 150,000 sets in 2002 to 460,000 sets in 2007 with an annual growth rate of over 20 percent; and it is forecasted that the output value in the before market and after market of China's auto navigation will reach RMB10 billion yuan plus by 2013.
Modern technologies boost the industry to improve
China's modern mapping technology, which was mainly supported by digital measurement, is transforming toward an informatization mapping system gradually and has promoted the development of geographic information industry.
As provided by data, the gross output value of China's mapping industry come up to RMB22.06 billion yuan in 2008 driven by such projects as "Digital City" and "Western Mapping".
Advanced mapping technologies have expanded and enriched the space data volume of geographic information. At present, several national-level multiscale fundamental geographic maps and fundamental database construction have been completed in China. It can be found in the statistics that a fundamental geographic information data resource with multiple factors, scales and temporals has come into being, forming national databases of 1:4 million, 1:1 million, 1:0.25 million and 1: 50,000, provincial databases of 1:10,000 and 1: 5,000 and county-level databases of 1:2,000 and 1:1,000.
Fundamental geographic information provides strong backup for digital city construction. Since 2006, State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping has been exercising the demonstration for geographic space framework construction of digital city and by now there have been 53 cities in 24 provinces/regions/municipalities becoming the pilots of digital city geographic space framework construction launched by State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping, directly attracting local investments of RMB700 million yuan.
Fundamental aviation photography is the important data guarantee for fundamental mapping. Currently, the coverage of aviation photography over the land in China has reached 80 percent.
Experts expressed that China has huge potential in the development of geographic information industry and will play a more important role in improving people's life quality in the future.
