What is Geospatial

In its broadest sense Geospatial can be applied to:

• data or information that describe terrestrial features, eg any data you might find in Google maps, or
• software that works with geospatial data, eg Google maps, any software found at OSGeo or OGC, or
• analysis using geospatial software or terrestrial data,
• standards, and specifications for any of the above.

In my case the data is typically New Zealand, Pacific or Antarctic data describing the terrain, soils, climate, vegetation or other living species. Some of this data is served up though Landcare Research's GISPortal, and we have lots more that we are thinking of providing.

For software I have been using ArcInfo / ArcGIS for over 20yrs  and also MapInfo, Genamap and various other commercial products, and am now making much more use of Open Source software such as PostGres, PostGIS, GeoServer etc

But for me the really interesting stuff is in analysis, doing things collaboratively over the net, geospatial mashups, workflows using web-services, the implications for standards and protocols and changing the geospatial paradigm from one person and their desktop to teams working together using dispersed Internet 2 style geospatial resources.