I started out of school as an environmental scientist analyst working for a government agency, and what I did was analysis on our monolithic GIS, now more popularly known as geospatial, platform. The hard thing about using spatially defined data is, the babel of data formats and the harsh difficulty of sharing data and of accessing the data outside of a thick client desktop application or proprietary databases. This was very true 10 years ago, and it is true now. There has been spatial data standards created over the past decade (the Open Geospatial Consortium or OGC) but support for this as might be imagined is overall not complete.
Tags: geospatial
