By Xu Hong

No matter home appliance, furniture, books, medicine box, or even the small sewing kit, all can be "put into" a web television. In this visible, three-dimensional "home", everything could be easily got, and the locations of the articles are the same with the reality. Therefore, you will not feel anxious when you cannot find the uncommonly used articles. In this virtual home, you can set more information, such as purchasing time, category of the medicine, and the expiration date of food, etc. It is like an information administrator, who sorts all the articles and you can read all the information from it. Of course, you can also realize such functions by using mobile terminals like MP and laptop.

Promote public use

Geographic information system (GIS) software is gradually getting popular in the public; it is very common in foreign countries. China's GIS public application is on a fast development stage, and industrial application is increasingly extensive too. Professor Liu Yong, Vice President of China Association of Geographic Information System and President of Zondy Cyber, said the other day that with the vigorous support and guidance of the State, domestic GIS software is accelerating popular pace, everybody will be able to enjoy GIS service and the convenience brought by GIS in the near future.

China's GIS software has had over 20 years' history, with starting from scratch, from import-dependent to independent innovation, it maintained a high-speed development momentum, some technologies and products have reached or been closed to the advanced international level. In 1995, the emergence of MapGIS with independent intellectual property rights broke the monopolization of foreign GIS software. In 2005, the birth of very large distributed GIS in China gave an end to the long history of depending on foreign software in large GIS projects.

Liu Yong introduced, "China must develop its own technology in high end area, foster domestic enterprises with world influence. Particularly, GIS relates to national security, it is very crucial for protecting national benefits, so we have to reinforce independent innovation capability". In 2009, MapGIS K9, the new generation service-oriented distributed visible GIS underlying platform supported by National 863 Program, was successfully developed. It had several breakthroughs in core technologies, broke the bottleneck restricting China's information-based development, realized zero-programming, reduced software development volume considerably, improved the quality of software development, and lowered the difficulty of development. In other words, like traditional industrial production, we can use standard parts, "plug in and out" freely in the system to produce GIS software, and therefore realize high quality, high efficiency and popular application of GIS software.

Realize multi-aspect independent innovation

In the fierce market competition, it is a major task in the face of domestic GIS enterprises that how to grasp opportunities to promote development. Liu Yong reckons that the core of industrial development is strengthening independent innovation ability. GIS industry chain is "big at both ends and small in the middle", upstream data and downstream information service are both bigger than software development in the middle. In domestic market, the total market share of ArcGIS, MapGIS and SupGIS is less than 5 percent. Hence, the innovation of technology, operating mode, mechanism and system should be made so as to obtain better development. 

The annual GIS software test has promoted the development of software industry. Liu Yong explained that domestic software enterprise can easily find the disparities with counterparts through the test and therefore make relevant improvement. Through software test, more people get to know geographic information industry, and then pull the development of the industry. Nowadays, China's geographic information industry has covered the whole industry chain, and independent innovation is promoting the maturity of the industry day by day.

As a new strategic industry, the development of geographic information industry will be definitely guided by concreting scientific resources. It is introduced that the scale of the industry has reached RMB100 billion Yuan in 2010, and will grow at a rate over 25 percent. It is estimated that to the end of "The Twelfth Five Year Plan", the industrial output will reach RMB 500 billion Yuan, and will promote employment opportunities around 4 million to 5 million, at the same time, the market scale of relevant supporting industries will be bigger. Liu Yong said, the national key projects in "The Twelfth Five Year Plan" will support part of GIS Cloud, the State will provide GIS remote sensing technology supermarket to the society free of charge, the investment value of the project is estimated to be between RMB 30 million Yuan and RMB 50 million Yuan.

Xie Zhong, Executive President of Zondy Cyber, said boldly that although China's GIS software technology and operating ability is in the forefront of the world, but the platform interface is not beautiful enough and is not able to compete with world advanced level, it needs further improvement. Moreover, cloud computing of IT field is also adopted in GIS system; cloud platform under mesh mode has already taken shape. At present, the key factor affecting China's GIS Cloud development is the further improvement of systematic framework.

Looking into the future, China's GIS software will be applied more widely by means of innovative development. No matter in city management or other industries, or in common people's lives, geographic information service will give people more convenience.