Oh, and I nearly forgot - I’ve just posted my paper “Better the Devil we Know: Obstacles and Opportunities in Humanitarian GIS” for all you krazy kids who dig Geographic Information Systems. It’s an attempt to uncover why GIS has consistently underperformed in the humanitarian sector, and to present a more strategic approach to GIS development in the broadest sense. Comments are, as ever welcome.
Anybody who’s interested in this topic should visit the site for another project I’m involved with - the creation of a humanitarian GIS data model. This is in the early stages, but Firoz Verjee of the George Washington University and a bunch of other great people are doing great work here. You’ll find our worksite at http://www.humanitariangis.com.
More blog magic from a man who uses the same Wordpress template as me! Declan Butler is a journalist, writes a lot for Nature magazine, with a particular interest in disasters and a particular particular interest in GoogleEarth. Most recently, he’s posted a great piece on building maps in GoogleEarth for tracking Avian Flu - you can read it here.
In the paper that I recently wrote on accessible ICT in the response to Hurricane Katrina, I talked about - amongst other things - some of the map hacking that was going on, notably of Google Maps. I pointed out that future GIS for humanitarian response could perhaps learn something here - notably about what non-specialist users find useful in terms of geographic information.
Most of the comments I received on the paper were were positive, but two people expressed frustration at the confusion between Geographic Information Systems - which can be distinguished by their strong analytical component - and map viewers, such as Google Maps.
Google Maps can be customised for a wide range of uses - but this dynamic element doesn’t make it a GIS. That’s not really the point, though. Google Maps (and MSN Virtual Earth, and a growing number of other sites) represent something new in the public relationship with geographic data. The leveling influence of the internet is putting more information in front of people in more accessible forms than was ever possible before. This - combined with the widespread availability of GPS - is going to change the way we deal with geographic information forever.
This presents more of an opportunity than a threat, although GIS providers should be worried. One (not entirely precise) parallel is the shift from mainframe to desktop computing, a shift that not many saw coming, except the desktop pioneers themselves. The industry simply couldn’t believe that anybody would want a personal computer and they couldn’t believe that these computers would be able to perform any significant functions since they lacked the computing power.
We know how that story went - personal computing is now ubiquitous, the real centre of gravity in the computing world, although mainframes still carry some serious processing weight. I’m prepared to bet that GIS will go the same way. Lightweight, personal GIS applications - which may be little more than highly-functional data viewers - will take the market from existing GIS applications. Current GIS tools are unwieldy, require training to use, and are not suited to the day-to-day needs of most users.
Smaller and more flexible GIS won’t be able to carry out high-level analytical tasks - but most people neither need or want that level of functionality. I think it’s almost inevitable that users are going to drive these developments - the challenge for the GIS industry is to adapt to this brave new world.