Geomatics

Lore & Background

The term 'geomatics' was coined in French ('géomatique') in the early 1980s, widely attributed to French-Canadian surveyor Michel Paradis. It was popularized in English by Paradis in a keynote address at the centennial congress of the Canadian Institute of Surveying in April 1982, where he argued that the needs for geographical information would reach unprecedented scope and required integrating traditional land surveying with new data capture, manipulation, storage, and diffusion tools.

Reader's Guide

Geomatics serves as an umbrella term for tools and techniques used to analyze the Earth's surface, including land surveying, remote sensing, nautical charts, cartography, geographic information systems (GIS), and other forms of earth mapping. Its subfields include hydrogeomatics (hydrography), health geomatics, and mining geomatics. Geomatics engineering is a rapidly developing discipline focusing on spatial information, with engineers designing systems for collecting and analyzing data about land, oceans, natural resources, and manmade features. The field has seen rapid progress since the 1990s due to advances in computer hardware, computer science, software engineering, and remote-sensing technologies. Geomaticians work in both public and private sectors, including land registry, urban planning, mapping companies, and remote sensing firms. The term has also led to university departments retitling themselves from 'surveying' to 'geomatics' or 'spatial information technology'.

Did You Know?

• The term 'geomatics' was coined in the early 1980s by Michel Paradis.
• Michel Paradis popularized the term in English at the 1982 centennial congress of the Canadian Institute of Surveying.
• In Germany, the discipline is commonly called 'geodesy and geoinformatics' or 'geodesy and geoinformation'.
• The four global GNSS constellations in operation are GPS (U.S.), GLONASS (Russia), Galileo (Europe), and BeiDou/Compass (China); QZSS (Japan) and IRNSS (India) are regional augmentation systems.