The first two installments in our "Mapping the Geospatial Community" series (Thrall and Campins 2004a, 2004b) dealt with the user side of the geospatial community, applying business geographic methods and reasoning to evaluate the readership of Geospatial Solutions. We now turn our attention to the production side, asking "where are the product and service providers of geospatial technology?" In this column, we calculate and describe the location and characteristics of geospa-tial technology producers both at the national and international geographic scale.

Because the Department of Labor expects geospatial technologies to become a $60-100 billion market within the next decade, knowing the geographic characteristics of the user and producer side of the geospatial community is a first step toward redressing a critical need for more personnel trained in the use of spatial tools. Geospatial market growth has also caught the attention of economic development officers who are now actively seeking spatial technology firms as a means of promoting local economic and community development.

Figure 1 (Click to Enlarge). This point map shows the distribution of geospatial companies within the United States. Not shown are zero companies in Hawaii, three companies in Alaska, and zero firms in Puerto Rico.

The Spatial States For this stage of our analysis, we obtained a database from Geospatial Solutions for companies providing geospatial technology products or services. The magazine maintains this database of company contacts for editorial and business-development purposes. The database includes advertisers, potential advertisers, software and hardware manufacturers, service and data providers, and firms important in the business-to-business marketplace.

Using Coder/plus, a previous version of ESRI's Community Coder, we geocoded the database of geospatial technology firms by address-matching the companies' headquarters. We successfully geocoded 645 of the 647 addresses and imported the resulting data file into ArcGIS 8 as a point data layer.

Figure 2 (Click to Enlarge). Based on Geospatial Solutions database, this map depicts the percent distribution of spatial firms within the lower 48 states.

Figure 1 shows the locations of the geocoded companies within the Geospatial Solutions database. Not shown in Figure 1 are zero companies in Hawaii, three companies in Alaska, and zero in Puerto Rico. Figure 2 provides a bit more insight, showing the percentage, by state, of all companies within Geospatial Solutions' dataset.

Table 1. (Click to Enlarge.)

Table 1 additionally presents this information numerically. Note that California has nearly twice the number of geospatial firms as second-ranked Colorado, which in turn has nearly double the number of firms as third-ranked Texas. Virginia, Georgia, and Florida round out the set of leading states in geospatial technologies, each having more than 5 percent of the total number of geospatial firms.