The Economist, mainstream media, and the geoweb meme…
This week The Economist has picked up the baton for propagating the ‘geoweb’ meme that has rippled through mainstream media this summer. Obviously, it’s great the see the importance of geography, and geographic information systems (GIS), recognised in such an authoritative publication…but for such a fiercely independent newspaper, I’m a little disappointed with their article ‘The world on your desktop’. Frankly, it amounts to little more than a rehash of material published previously elsewhere…and is no more than a brief introduction to the plethora of Geobrowsers.
The Economist prides itself on informing (and challenging) business, political and financial decision-makers. It was first published in 1843 to take part in ‘a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing progress’. With such a marked purpose, I really think they’ve missed the economists’ story in their coverage of the much talked about geoweb…
How has the emergence of Google Earth changed the business model of data providers? How have geospatial markets responded to such disruptive innovation? What can these markets expect in future? Specifically, I’d be interested to read an article from the The Economist that discusses the present accessibility of UK geospatial data and it’s impact on the geoweb; the merits of the free our data campaign, or a private alternative; and the adequacy of the trading fund model that currently underpins the Ordnance Survey? But then I guess I’m not really the business, political and financial decision-making audience they have in mind…oh well.
4 Comments, Comment or Ping
Brian Flood
I love The Economist, I honestly think its the best magazine covering world events right now. I was excited to see the geoweb article mentioned in last week’s issue but alas, it does seem like a rehash of existing information.
cheers
brian
Sep 10th, 2007
Perry R. Peterson
Its good to see some high level attention to the GeoWeb. Similiar to “Nature’s” interest last year. We all sense there is something happening, but come away feeling somewhat disappointed. Perhaps it is that real life is still so much more…real.
I think the Geospatial Web is a good thing because it puts forward a challenge to those of us who have accepted GIS as a digital way to produce maps and Google Earth as a global basemap. We have an opportunity to build something even greater!
Intuitively, location should be a major framework for organizing disparate information. When we organize all the information available through the internet using location as the organizing structure then we will have the true GeoWeb. How will we know? When one can ask “What is here” and get a reply..
The Economist should surely have put forth a higher vision or at least asked, “is this it?”
Dr. Charles Herring, who should go down in history as the inventive lead on the GeoWeb, postulated that in order to “Spatialization of the Internet” we need a digital indexing much more powerful than geographic coordinates. He speaks of cyber physical addressing capable of reproducing physical objects in cyber space addressing, time and location.
Although this sounds a bit technical, I think we need to take a good hard look at why geospatial reference causes data complexity instead of being its key structure. Call it Digital Earth, GeoWeb or GeoInt 2.0, On-Demand Mapping - until we can stream together and interact with vastly differernt data all coelesed and organized around location, I think The Economist should call this article “Prototypes on Your Desktop”
Sep 12th, 2007
Rob
Brian \ Perry, thanks for the comments. I agree The Economist is a good read and I do appreciate its breadth of coverage, personally I find its one dimensional approach to issues a little frustrating – maybe if I didn’t read it so often it wouldn’t be a problem
Yes, disappointed with the rehash, I guess I have grown to expect more.
So we need more than coordinates for the geoweb? Some sort of dynamic URI for every geographic feature?
Sep 13th, 2007
Perry R. Peterson
Rob, We need location that is like a URL or IP address. Geographic location is almost never a high level object in a database, but almost always a low level attribute. I believe, like analog signals, conventional coordiantes reference continuous location and so can not act provide this capability. When we have a spreadsheet or tiling of multiple resolution cells representing any location, we can use these to populate attributes of location. Please read more on our web site and appreciate comments.
Oct 21st, 2007
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