| Art Botterell |
Mapping The Future: Beyond GIS
| Art Botterell maps the technology terrain by hand from a hill overlooking San Francisco Bay. |
This article can be found on
page 94 of the Nov/Dec 1997
issue of 9-1-1 Magazine.
It's almost hypnotic, the charm Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have for some non-technical managers. "Here it is at last," you can almost hear them think, "the answer to uncertainty, the high-tech cure for our information anxieties."
GIS rolls out the magic of computers on two dimensions everyone understands and values: the east-west and north-south of a map. And these maps can change to reflect changing reality. No wonder GIS has won so many hearts, minds and checkbooks.
At least for a while. Visit some of those same managers a year or two later and you might hear them think, "It's a black hole... tens of thousands spent and all we have to show is a handful of maps we could have bought off the shelf and a cabinet full of requisitions for databases, more equipment and extra staff."
The truth, of course, lies somewhere between elation and despair. GIS as a function can do wonders. It can show patterns in what seem like scattered events. It can fuse masses of information into a single, coherent picture. It can do calculations to measure, and sometimes even predict, the results of a change in resources or environment.
But GIS as an organizational unit can easily fall heir to the shortcomings of the old-fashioned "glass room" data-processing shop. Response to users' requests can be slow, involving elaborate forms and bureaucratic procedures. Requests can trigger demands for extra funding for additional databases. And nobody wants to accuse anyone of anything, but the GIS crew do seem awfully chummy with their vendors...
The problem is that GIS isn't really a thing in itself. GIS is the application of three distinct technologies database management, presentation graphics, and a handful of specialized spacial-analysis computational techniques to a particular problem: the visual display of spacial information.
The era of centralized GIS has been punctuated lately by "desktop GIS" offerings from the major suppliers of GIS software. The idea is that end-users can render their own maps based on a shared database. All they need is a lightweight version of the GIS software running on their own computer.
It's an appealing idea... end-users get responsive GIS, and vendors get to sell their programs in quantity. It's caught on slowly, though, because the number of users prepared to pay for and then master these complex and powerful programs is relatively small.
Meanwhile (as usual) the Internet has come up from behind and threatened to upset the apple cart for GIS specialists and vendors alike.
It started early. One of the first interactive services on the World Wide Web was a world map server operated by Xerox at its legendary Palo Alto Research Center. Starting from a view of the world, Web users could point-and-click their way to any scale of map centered on any location, and add or subtract various "layers" of detail such as waterways, railroads, political boundaries and the like. The maps were simple, line-drawn, and limited in detail, but they were adequate for many uses.
There were obviously limits to the sort of GIS that could be delivered over the Web, but that was offset by two huge advantages. No special software was required; anyone with a Web browser was fully equipped. And no special training was required; the instructions were right there on the screen.
Xerox retired its mapping service recently, apparently satisfied that they'd made their point. Its place has been filled by a number of online mapping services. Two are of particular note for public-safety users.
The first is the "Tiger Map Server" operated by the U.S. Census Bureau. The graphics are better but the interface is basically the same as the Xerox service. The big difference is that the underlying database includes census data. Need a quick demographic study of a neighborhood, say, to find out what languages are spoken there? Just point your browser to http://tiger.census.gov.
Another online mapper, notable for its speed and street-level detail, is offered by Microsoft as part of its "Expedia" travel site at http://maps.expedia.msn.com. This site offers an address finder function that returns a map locating any address in the country. Microsoft also lets anyone embed the Expedia mapping function in their own Web pages.
Without up-to-date input, though, mappers are just big electric atlases. The fun really starts when we find ways to gather realtime information and plot it (for example, http://www.incident.com) or even let users exchange information by posting and updating it on a shared online map (e.g., the incident tracking section at http://www.incident.com/sf).
The goal is to gather information and communicate it meaningfully. GIS is one approach, but it does not stand alone.
