China's domestic GIS software has blown the bugle call for domestic software to break through. At present, the market share of most domestically produced software accounts only about 5 percent in such fields as operating system, database, and office software while domestic GIS software outshines all the others in the market of GIS software with a high proportion of over 35 percent, thus having broken the monopoly of foreign software in that field.
GIS does not only serve us in our daily life but plays an important role in e-government. For the time being, over 80 percent of various governmental departments' management of comprehensive businesses and their adjuvant policy-making tasks are related to geographic information. GIS is not only extensively used in such aspects as resource investigation and environmental evaluation; it is further utilized in regional planning, public facility management and important sectors of national economy like transportation, telecommunications, urban construction, energy resources, electricity power, and agriculture while playing an important role in such fields as macro policy-making of the country and national security.
Not long ago, the sharing of government information resource has been realized successfully in the six pilot counties including Huairou and Pinggu in Beijing. The national industrialization space information system taking Huairou and Pinggu as the pilot counties is the first e-government GIS with fully independent intellectual property rights in China.
Importance has been attached to GIS universally in various countries in the world, and GIS has become an important fundamental field that is increasingly related to the national economy and the people's livelihood. The scale of domestic GIS market has amounted to over RMB30 billion yuan. During over 20 years, China has made certain achievements in the research and development of GIS and thus become one of the world's great powers in terms of the GIS technology. Nevertheless, with a view on the applications of GIS, there exist substantial gaps between China and developed countries in terms of the GIS development scale and the GIS prevalence. Especially in civil and economic fields like in such industries as commerce, traffics, and logistics, GIS applications in China lag even more behind.
What makes people feel gratified is that in recent years, a series of independent innovative achievements targeted on application have begun to rise as a new force; such achievements being increasingly absorbed into the mainstream of information industry are becoming new growth points for the information industry.
For the moment, China has been provided with a whole series of GIS software products from large-scale basic platform software to all kinds of applications; there have shaped up a batch of lively GIS corporate groups made up mainly of mid- and small-sized enterprises. There are more than 1,000 enterprises engaged in the development of GIS software and applications, and the annual production value realized through the sales of commodities like software has amounted to a few hundred million yuan.
Preliminary statistics show that domestically produced GIS software has been extensively used in economic construction and national key technological projects including such large systems as the information distributing system for civil aviation flights and the SARS epidemic situation distribution geological information system of the Ministry of Health. The competition of domestically produced software against foreign software has almost extended to all fields, and domestically produced software has seized more than a half of the market shares in applied engineering, service market, electricity and telecommunications while having seized the space data-processing production industry and the land management sector in mid- and small-sized cities.
The system of technological innovation for China's GIS software, which gives priority to enterprises and gets production, learning, and research integrated, is getting increasingly consummate; and there has shaped up a fairly complete service system of basic platform software and applications targeted on specific applications and specific fields. It is possible to offer technological supports for the development of various GIS application systems of a large, middle, or small scale. A group of hi-tech enterprises devoted to independent innovation and being fairly competitive internationally have made remarkable progresses in the research of software technology and the development of products while making new progresses incessantly in marketing and applications.
For instance, SuperMap GIS Technologies, Inc. that belongs to the Chinese Academy of Sciences sets its foot on technological innovation and has developed SuperMap GIS, a kind of GIS software with completely independent intellectual property rights. SuperMap GIS is a complete large-scale basic platform software, which is made up of multiple software based on universal kernel and can meet various application demands; multiple technological breakthroughs have been successfully realized, and SuperMap GIS takes the lead across the world in terms of its date-processing volume. For the moment, SuperMap GIS has successfully entered into places like Japan, thus having become a pioneer in the internationalization of China's GIS software.
Autor(en)/Author(s): Han Ji & Zhang Lili
Quelle/Source: China Economic Net, 29.11.2006
