## 5 The Future of Geospatial Analysis and IoT
### Challenges  
Challenges of geospatial analysis in IoT projects include the cost of IoT equipment, data storage needs, the requirement of (sometimes real-time) event processing and computational analysis of geospatial big data, and the use of databases that natively support spatial data types. The latter is becoming a less important issue nowadays, since almost all traditional relational databases (e.g., MySQL and PostgreSQL) offer spatial capabilities, while non-traditional NoSQL databases are also becoming spatially-enabled (e.g., Neo4J, MongoDB, and CouchDB). In addition, real-time analysis of geospatial big data can be performed by tools such as Microsoft StreamInsight ([[https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee362541](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee362541)]([https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee362541](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee362541))(v=sql.111).aspx) and ArcGIS GeoEvent Server ([[https://enterprise.arcgis.com/en/geoevent/](https://enterprise.arcgis.com/en/geoevent/)]([https://enterprise.arcgis.com/en/geoevent/](https://enterprise.arcgis.com/en/geoevent/))). Other open research challenges involve the absence of accuracy on generalizations, especially interpolations [72], the need for standardization of spatial data and infrastructures [78] and the inclusion of semantic web concepts to sensor discovery [79], to turn the Web into a location-aware Web [6], where the Web could become an information system where location-related information can be more easily shared across different applications. In terms of geo-data interoperability, interestingly, the impact of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards ([[http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards](http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards)]([http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards](http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards))), such as the Sensor Observation Service (SOS) as part of the OGC Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) suite [80], seems to have been low thus far (i.e. based on the authors' research on mentions over time in Google Search trends and citations in literature databases such as Scopus). While there are several transmission standards to support IoT network interoperability (e.g., MQTT, LWM2M, CoAP, and ZigBee), there are no popular andwidely-used standards that support data interoperability, except the OGC SWE. However, SWE was designed when sensors were still comparatively large devices with wired power supply, It has not been designed for resource-constrained, battery-dependent IoT devices [81]. Some of the surveyed works adopted XML as a data transmission standard [48], but it has large bandwidth requirements and it generally fails to describe adequately the semantics of information. [PERSON] et al. [82] proposed the new SensorThings standard, which is part of SWE, thus inheriting the SWE conceptual model enabling sensors to be self-contained and self-describable, by using a more lightweight code-base and JSON as data exchange format (as used also in [46]). The SensorThings API ( [[http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/sensorthings](http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/sensorthings)]([http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/sensorthings](http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/sensorthings))) is designed to be RESTful and support (with extension) MQTT and CoAP. A first part (on sensing) has already been adopted as OGC standard, and a second part (on tasking) is in the public commenting phase. Although [PERSON] et al. showed that SensorThings uses bandwidth efficiently and also runs well on memory-constrained devices, time will tell whether the uptake by the IoT manufacturers and community will be bigger than the SOS. In parallel, it would be very interesting to see the evolution of semantic web technologies and LOD in the geo-data world [12; 20; 57]. Finally, an open challenge for future IoT researchers and geospatial analysts is to be able to easily combine multiple heterogeneous datasets to develop 4D models that would enable users to view conditions over time.