- Posted by Dale Lutz
A few folks such as Jason Birch and SlashGeo have been posting interesting remarks about the GeoTec conference last week in Calgary, and in particular, Ed Parson’s keynote (presented using Keynote!) on neogeography. I also really enjoyed Ed's presentation and thought that he dispensed a great deal of geo-wisdom to the crowd.
The panel discussion which followed was also enlightening and at times, entertaining (even if I was too chicken to stand up and publicly ask why Ed didn't explicitly put GML on his slide that listed format progression over time, with the traditional CAD formats on the left migrating through to KML and GeoRSS on the right).
But the thing that I thought was the most serendipitous was the store that I walked past just minutes before the keynote on my way back from my daily “when-in-Calgary” Jugo Juice run. Without trying to be too "on task", I had used Google maps/search on my Treo 650 to help me locate the nearest Jugo Juice – a perfect example of the location-based services that have been talked about for years at GIS shows and are now being used without even giving them a second thought. (Grizzled veterans may remember many OGC-type talks over the years that typically revolved around finding the closest pizza parlor; perhaps finding the closest juice stop is a bit more West Coast).
So there I was, casually using neogeography, on my way to hear a talk about neogeography. And that's when I walked by the Map World store. There it was - a whole store dedicated to globes and maps, both very very old and very very new.
Like Jason, back at the show I also talked with some folks who weren't necessarily too enthused about the whole world of neogeography. I remain convinced that neogeography and formats like KML and GeoRSS and maybe even geoJSON (pronounced geo-Jason, which I'm convinced is Jason Birch’s superhero alter ego) are extremely important and will receive widespread usage. In fact, this is happening already. In our labs at Safe, we’ve been playing around with using our soon to be re-released FME Server technology to integrate and publish spatial data “live” in KML and GeoRSS. Watch for more announcements about that soon…
But does this mean that what we traditionally think of as the domain of the GIS professional is going to wither up and disappear? Not at all. Some, even most, GIS professionals will really never have any use for any of these new formats in their daily working lives. But that's just the point. These formats aren't really for GIS professionals at all; they are for the 5.9 billion other people in the world that don't know or care about what GIS is. But in no way does this diminish the importance of what GIS people do. In fact, it makes it much more important, because the data, analysis and work of the GIS industry now has a conduit to a significantly wider audience than it ever had before.
This brings us back to the store that I had walked by before the keynote. Just because we have all these fancy new ways of distributing maps and looking at our world does not in any way diminish the value of the traditional physical "old school" maps and globes that we've had for several hundred years now. In fact, a store can still make a go of it in downtown Calgary by selling these things - just a few feet away from a conference where the latest developments in online mapping were being discussed. And right beside the sidewalk where people were scurrying about looking at maps on their handheld phones that guide them to their breakfast locations.
The old definitely has a place, an important place, and one that isn't going to go away. I think it’s very exciting to be living in an era when the new, with its much different mass market focus, is washing in all around us.
A few folks such as Jason Birch and SlashGeo have been posting interesting remarks about the GeoTec conference last week in Calgary, and in particular, Ed Parson’s keynote (presented using Keynote!) on neogeography. I also really enjoyed Ed's presentation and thought that he dispensed a great deal of geo-wisdom to the crowd.
The panel discussion which followed was also enlightening and at times, entertaining (even if I was too chicken to stand up and publicly ask why Ed didn't explicitly put GML on his slide that listed format progression over time, with the traditional CAD formats on the left migrating through to KML and GeoRSS on the right).
But the thing that I thought was the most serendipitous was the store that I walked past just minutes before the keynote on my way back from my daily “when-in-Calgary” Jugo Juice run. Without trying to be too "on task", I had used Google maps/search on my Treo 650 to help me locate the nearest Jugo Juice – a perfect example of the location-based services that have been talked about for years at GIS shows and are now being used without even giving them a second thought. (Grizzled veterans may remember many OGC-type talks over the years that typically revolved around finding the closest pizza parlor; perhaps finding the closest juice stop is a bit more West Coast).
So there I was, casually using neogeography, on my way to hear a talk about neogeography. And that's when I walked by the Map World store. There it was - a whole store dedicated to globes and maps, both very very old and very very new.
Like Jason, back at the show I also talked with some folks who weren't necessarily too enthused about the whole world of neogeography. I remain convinced that neogeography and formats like KML and GeoRSS and maybe even geoJSON (pronounced geo-Jason, which I'm convinced is Jason Birch’s superhero alter ego) are extremely important and will receive widespread usage. In fact, this is happening already. In our labs at Safe, we’ve been playing around with using our soon to be re-released FME Server technology to integrate and publish spatial data “live” in KML and GeoRSS. Watch for more announcements about that soon…
But does this mean that what we traditionally think of as the domain of the GIS professional is going to wither up and disappear? Not at all. Some, even most, GIS professionals will really never have any use for any of these new formats in their daily working lives. But that's just the point. These formats aren't really for GIS professionals at all; they are for the 5.9 billion other people in the world that don't know or care about what GIS is. But in no way does this diminish the importance of what GIS people do. In fact, it makes it much more important, because the data, analysis and work of the GIS industry now has a conduit to a significantly wider audience than it ever had before.
This brings us back to the store that I had walked by before the keynote. Just because we have all these fancy new ways of distributing maps and looking at our world does not in any way diminish the value of the traditional physical "old school" maps and globes that we've had for several hundred years now. In fact, a store can still make a go of it in downtown Calgary by selling these things - just a few feet away from a conference where the latest developments in online mapping were being discussed. And right beside the sidewalk where people were scurrying about looking at maps on their handheld phones that guide them to their breakfast locations.
The old definitely has a place, an important place, and one that isn't going to go away. I think it’s very exciting to be living in an era when the new, with its much different mass market focus, is washing in all around us.
Map World storefront in Calgary, Alberta
1 comments:
Lol. Good way to give GeoJSON a bad name... you don't want to see me in spandex.
And to bring things full circle, the mapworld.ca main page has huge embedded Google Map :)
Jason
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