This year the New York State GIS Association held their Geospatial Annual Meeting and 2016 Summit on 21 October at New York University in the Bern Dibner Library of Science and Technology in downtown Brooklyn. The summit featured several excellent speakers who spoke about GIS in different disciplines.

Here are five things we learned at the NYS Geospatial Summit:

1. From Laura Bliss, we learned that there is a long, often-hidden, history of women involved in cartography and social/political map making.
2. As Joseph Hlady noted, the advent of automated vehicles, equipped with a variety of sensors, provides a significant source of data for measuring and appraising public infrastructure.
3. Creating algorithms which are fair, accountable, and transparent is a big topic of discussion these days, as Arnaud Sahuguet argued, including within GIS communities.
4. Tomorrow’s GIS maps, particularly those related to travel and transportation, will be updated at a rate many times greater than today’s maps, with real-time collected data from sources such as vehicle-mounted lidar making for extremely detailed portraits of geospatial conditions.
5. Big data has transformed GIS just as surely as it has transformed other fields.