Emerging Approaches to Data Management for a New Geospatial Science Research: The Essences and Methodologies of Data Matter Perspective

Introduction

In the last decade; the world of information communication and technology (ICT) has been optimized greatly with innovations for speed, efficiency, accessibility, connectivity, and relative accuracy in the geospatial research work. These emerging technologies include visualization, data science, and data science methodology, big data, cloud, the Internet, web mapping, artificial intelligence, neural networks, global positioning systems (GPS), national spatial database infrastructure (NSDI) and cellular phones. What has also changed is how coordinates are captured, and world’s horizontal and vertical referencing systems are formulated. The world referencing system of 1984 (WRS84), Continuously Operating Reference Stations (CORS), the international reference frame (IRF), the African Geodetic Reference Frame (AFREF) form part of the major innovation which has tremendously increased the precision of the GPS three-dimensional coordinates measurement of any place on Earth. The measurement of the datum that defines the position of the spheroid relative to the centre of the Earth has been refined as well. Technical development on all aspects of ICT; people, organizations, computer hardware and software, communication, and data also play a vital role. This chapter puts all these developments into perspective, and their applications in the geospatial science research highlighted, and their importance ranked accordingly.