Hm, how fancy. ESRI has gone live with a site called “ESRI: Training and Education” that’s devoted to, you know, training and education. A lot of this seems to recycle material that was already available, but one thing that’s now up front is a link to search the Training and Education Library. I like it. But what they need is a site devoted to teaching me how to geocode a decimal address.
So this document was left to its own devices for about two weeks and I see that nothing got done. I was busy building a web site devoted to our GIS efforts here (don’t laugh, it actually took a decent amout of work to get the php/mysql/rss combination to all flow together on a brand new dedicated Apache install), and another prototype for a site that endeavors to collect into one place some of the spatial analysis projects that are happening on campus. Plus, I hired a grad. student to help in the lab and with some other work, bought and listened to Dylan’s Modern Times, custom-built some hillshades for a professor (well, you know, adjusted some settings during a conversion from DEMs), and seemed to make some advances toward being a recognized support person on campus. And while I did all of that, this blog sat and produced nothing, which of course disgusts me.
But what I spent the most time on by far was a very interesting project that predated my arrival here by, I don’t know, years maybe. I can’t really say much about it, unfortunately. It’s not secretive or black helicoptor or anything, it’s just not my work and I haven’t asked permission to talk about it. But what’s interesting about it is that these researchers had been collecting and working on data using custom conversion algorithms and their own formulas for this and that but hadn’t really gotten around to putting it on a map yet. So after a considerable amount of time spent in Postgres and MySQL, we finally put some of these resultsets to their respective geographies (grid for one, U.S. counties for the other) and something very interesting came out.
One of the images below has some data attached to it and it all looks okay; there’s some pattern, but it’s not obvious to those unfamiliar with the data what’s going on. Good, most maps are like that. The other one has at least one very obvious problem (no, not the null values in NM). Do you see it? It’s shaped like Florida. Maybe you can’t see it on these tiny versions. The point is that Florida’s gridded values are all much higher than most of the rest of the country, indicating to the team that something was wrong somewhere.
The lesson? Well, if there has to be one I guess it’s either A) get your data to a GIS as early in the process as possible, or B) sometimes GIS can be more helpful than you want it to be.
AllPoints mentions a new search mechanism for retailers. This is more or less what I intend to build (that’s right: in my spare time), but for libraries. And in 3d. Right down to the shelf (z=8 ft.).
I’ll let you know when I’m finished.
Last Monday (2006.08.07) CarbonCloud revisited an earlier post about democratic access to geospatial data in light of a recent development on Geowanking.
"As we all know," he writes, "Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have all started providing different kinds of location content to consumers and technical folks alike through mapping services, allowing a bit more ‘democratic’ access to location-based content."
And it’s true. But the development that warranted a revisit involves Google’s exclusive license to imagery data such that a nonprofit agent looking to get a little piece of a picture of the earth is refused and given this:
"As you are a non-profit, you might be able to convince Google to allow for
this application."
My guess is this doesn’t make me as fearful as other people. It sucks, for sure. But in the same way it sucks that I can’t get a Pepsi on any college campus I’ve been on in the last 5 years, that it’s Coke or nothing. My point is that it’s just not surprising in the least. But what about this democratic access issue? If the surge in social networking is destroyed by a rush to license and own the highest-resolution data, I’m not going to get all that busted-up over it. Social networking is very, very interesting, and really a delight of this age. But it’s not vital except in its ability to democratize a social network into a movement. In other words, if an emo kid’s MySpace goes away the country isn’t necessarily worse off (argument appreciated). But if a watchdog blog gets shut down? More appropos still: if a civic agency, nonprofit, or even just a politically-minded individual becomes unable to do GIS should they want to; if their access to the same geospatial data and tools and applications that their governors have gets closed off, probably by those governors; if they are made less unable than before to draw, model, test, analyze, represent, and write their own spaces (be they neighborhoods or gerrymandered political districts), then a true failure of democracy will have occurred. The only variable in that equation is whether Google is a governor as such.
And what of libraries, erstwhile protectors of information and data (probably more often than not protectors from governors) and professed bastions of academic freedom and democracy? Very few of us are collecting and archiving geospatial data, except that which perhaps comes through the GPO. And none of us can compete with a commercial powerhouse of any kind, least of all Google (should they go evil as people fear). Maybe if we team with Coca-Cola?
…but not on Bald Mountain. I know it’s bad form to announce an absence of something, but the last week found me driving across Texas and Louisiana, then north to Indiana, which meant I did not have time to post much. There is a lot going on that I intend to comment about, but it’s just not going to happen in the next 3 or 4 days.