Neo and Paleo GIS – is the difference in the usability culture?

At several recent GIS industry and academic conferences, I was not very surprised to see GIS presentations in which the presenter started by talking about ‘usability enhancements’ and ‘we took usability very seriously in this application’ but failed to deliver. In contrast to such statements, the application itself was breaking basic usability guidelines such as not giving any feedback to the user about some activity of the system, or grouping related elements together in the interface, among other problems.

Then I came across a report from 1991, which talks about User-Centred Graphical User Interface for GIS and notes that ‘It is not unusual for more than 60% of the code in a complex software system to be dedicated purely to the user interface. This stands in sharp contrast to the 35% dedicated to the user interface in early GISs’. This is still true in spirit, if not in percentage. GIS applications require sophisticated data manipulation, and most of the development effort of GIS vendors or Open Source GIS projects is focused on the information itself and its manipulation. The interface is probably seen as an add-on – the ‘fun’ bit of the development that you leave to the end after cracking all the engineering challenges that make the application work.

What I would argue is that, as a result, GIS as an industry doesn’t have a ‘usability culture’. Compare that to Apple, where usability and interaction with users has been at the centre of what they are doing since they started. Or with e-commerce which also shows a ‘usability culture’ because, if you fail on usability, there is a direct link to loss of sales. These are examples of organisations and sectors who know that usability is important and commit resources to ensuring that their products are usable.

In contrast, in the GIS industry there is a feeling that usability is a ‘nice to have’ element of the development process, so there is no practice of involving usability experts in software development projects. There are relatively few examples of user-centred design in GIS, and they are mostly in research papers, very rarely in practice.

Neogeography is changing it somewhat, since parts of it are coming from companies and developers who see the value in understanding the users. Maybe the competition between the existing developers of GIS and neogeography companies will cause the former to change and they will become more serious about usability.

Terra Future 2009 – OpenStreetMap and Ordnance Survey

I have checked on Twitter to see how the follow-up meeting to Terra Future 2009, last Friday, went. It was a very pleasant surprise to see that the idea that I have put forward in February, that the Ordnance Survey should consider hosting OpenStreetMap and donate some data to it, was voted the best idea that came out of Terra Future 2009. With this sort of peer-review of the idea, and with the added benefit of 2 months for rethinking, I still think that it is quite a good idea.

The most important aspect of this idea is to understand that OpenStreetMap and Ordnance Survey can both thrive in the GeoWeb era. Despite the imaginary competition, each has a clear value to certain parts of the marketplace. There are a very clear benefits that the OpenStreetMap community can gain from working closely with the Ordnance Survey – such as some aspects of mapping that the Ordnance Survey are highly knowledgeable about, and vice versa, such as how to innovate in delivery of geographical information. A collaborative model might work after all…

I wonder how this idea will evolve now?

The implications of the ten-year lag of geotechnologies

If we take the lag of geotechnologies behind mainstream computing as a common feature of this type of technology, there are quite interesting conclusions that can be drawn in terms of developing new applications and products. For example, it can help in predicting when certain technology will be ready for wide application in the geographical field.

Here is an example: very recently, Jakob Nielsen reported that he was positively surprised with the quality of reading from the Amazon Kindle 2, and that this is leading him to withdraw his conclusion that the efficiency of reading from a computer screen is low.

I’ve written about the problem of computer monitor resolution and the use of small screens for urban navigation – such as the use of maps for tourism where you would like to have a map that gives you a wider context of your area than the ‘tunnel vision’ that is provided on today’s mobile phones.

So here is my guess: in about 10 years, Kindle 10, or whatever its equivalent at that point, will be a suitable platform for delivering clever maps that can be as effective as paper maps. That means that if you are in the business of creating maps that will be used on these devices, you should start exploring how best to deliver them in about 5 years.

I can also guess that it will be more energy hungry, wasteful and way too expensive when compared to the paper tourist maps of today, but the prediction is about technology – not about what I think about its use…

Do Geotechnologies constantly lag behind the mainstream by about ten years?

While working on a text about HCI and GIS, I started to notice a general pattern of ten years or so delay between the dates a new functionality starts to become ‘mainstream’ in general computer use and when it becomes common in GIS.

Here are some examples: the early use of computers in the business environment was in the mid to late 1950s, but we had to wait until the late 1960s to get the first full-scale GIS (and even that was fairly primitive). Personal computers and microcomputers appeared in the late 1970s with machines such as the Apple II, which started to be used by many small offices for word processing and accounting, but the first PC GIS application, Mapinfo, appeared only in the second half of the 1980s. Human-Computer Interaction emerged as a field of research in the early 1980s, but only in the early 1990s was it recognised by GIS researchers. Graphical User Interfaces were first implemented in mainstream computing in the very early 1980s, and didn’t arrive to GIS until the 1990s. Finally, notice how e-commerce, e-mail and other Web applications were very successful in the early 1990s, but only in the mid 2000s did the GeoWeb emerge, with the success of Google Maps.

Several other examples of this gap exist – for example, the use of SQL databases. Even if you search for the earliest research paper or documentation for a major GIS functionality with a parallel in the mainstream, this lag appears. Some very early research appears around 5 years after the mainstream use (see the first HCI and GIS paper as an example) but it will take at least another 5 years to see it in real products that are used outside research labs.

This observation explains, to me, two puzzles: first, why is it that, for the two decades that I’ve been working with GIS, it keeps being referred to as an ‘emerging technology’? The answer is that it is always catching up so, for the journalist, who is familiar with other areas of computing, it feels like something that is emerging; second, why are companies that are getting into geotechnologies early either failing (examples aplenty in the Location-based services area in the 1990s) or needing about 10 years of survival to become successful? The reason here is that they are too optimistic about the technical challenges that they are facing.

I think that the lag is due to the complexities of dealing with geographical information, and the need for hardware and software to get to the stage when geographical applications are possible. Another reason is the relative lack of investment in the development of geotechnologies, which were considered for a long time niche applications.

What is your explanation for the gap?

Public geographies and accidental geographers

In the post about the Engaging Geography seminar, I’ve discussed how different levels of engagement with geography can be used to define if a person using a system should be considered a ‘public geographer’ or just a consumer of geographical information in a passive and ephemeral way.

Thinking more broadly on geotechnologies, it is appropriate to include the people who are producing many of the everyday geographical representations. Frequently, the people who are producing these representations use GIS.

When thinking about the Web, it’s clear that the vast majority of the people involved in public geographies do not have any ‘formal’ geographical background. You might think that, in the case of GIS, because of the barriers to entry, the situation will be different.
This is not so. As Dave Unwin noted in his paper in 2005, many of the people operating GIS are actually ‘accidental geographers’. When you take the number of GIS users worldwide, it is clear that only a few have gone through formal geographical education beyond basic school geography. Unwin notes that ‘accidental geographers’ have naïve conceptualisations of geography (for example that it is all about the location of factual objects in space), lack of understanding of spatial analysis and sometimes have a dismissive attitude to the academic disciplines of geography or cartography.

Neogeography is putting these accidental geographers in a new light. Some users do indeed see geography as uncomplicated and GIS as the ‘something that produces maps’. However, as a person is exposed to systems that are dealing with geography for a sustained period she is more likely to start questioning the nature of this geography and the way that it is represented. After a while, these questions will lead to a process of learning about geographical concepts – and the fact that so much information is now available on the Web will certainly help. Sometimes, the commitment to geography might lead to joining organisations such as the AGI and maybe even becoming Chartered Geographers (GIS).

So, in summary, there is a whole range of commitments and interests in geography, and both accidental geographers and neogeographers can be positioned along a continuum from ignorance to expert knowledge. I think that most will move through this continuum and enjoy the process of developing geographic knowledge.

Public geography, public geographers and neogeography

Engaging Geography is an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded seminar series, originally conceived by Duncan Fuller, who is sadly missed. The seminars are an appropriate tribute to his memory. The first seminar was held in Newcastle at the end of January and there will be 5 more over the next 2 years. So there plenty of opportunities to join!

The seminar gave special attention to public geographies – such as films that are an output of academic geographical research; photography and exhibitions by artists who deal with geographical issues in their work; and the wide range of examples that are coming out of the work of geography teachers and school geography.

The seminar was thought-provoking with lots of practical demonstrations and discussions about many issues – including how gender influences public geographies, the impact of communication, private geographies and many other issues that were packed into the two-day seminar.

During the discussions, Daniel Raven-Ellison, who runs Guerrilla Geography and Urban Earth, noted that the rapid increase in digital geography (neogeography) where geography is ‘used’ by many is one of the best examples of public geographies. This made me think more about the meaning of public geography and public geographers in the context of neogeography.

I would argue that we should differentiate between systems (websites) that are not based on user-generated content (mash-ups and public mapping sites) and those that require active geographic contribution from the user.

As Byron Antoniou (who is doing his PhD at UCL) noted, within the websites that are based on user-generated spatial content, we should differentiate between geographically explicit systems (OpenStreetMap, Geograph) and geographically implicit systems (Flickr, Wikipedia). The latter can hold geographic information, but that is not their main objective.

So, when users use a public mapping site passively, they don’t engage with the geography of the place fully. They consume a geographical image and, because of the nature of browsing, this image will disappear in the general haze of the many pages and images that they are exposed to. Considering that the average user might view up to 150 pages a day, this is no more ‘public geography’ than a map in a newspaper. Even the programmers that construct mash-ups are not ‘public geographers’ – they are concerned with the automation of the representation, and very rarely consider the visualisation carefully. Not surprisingly, the exceptions (such as London Profiler) have been created by people with a deeper understanding of geography.

In geographically implicit systems, there is some engagement with geography, but it is limited and might even be mechanical. For example, if GPS information is used to automatically geotag an image on Flickr or Picasa, the user is not actively engaged with the geography of their image. The engagement can be higher for example when a person creates a memory map, or manually locates the image position on the map, as it forces the person to recall the real world geography and match it with the map.

Finally, geographically explicit systems are, in my view, mostly public geographies. Because of the task that they were designed for, contributors are aware of the geography that they engage with both in the digital form and in the real world. For example, when a participant captures a road in OpenStreetMap, she is forced to consider the real world characteristics of the street as well as its digital representation. Thus, a meaningful engagement with space and place is an integral part of working with these systems.

Yet, because of participation inequality, even in geographically explicit systems only a small group of participants (about 10% or maybe less) are becoming deeply engaged with the process and working with the system for a period of time that allows them to develop a fuller geographical understanding of projections, scale, place, space and other ‘deep’ geographical concepts.

So while it might seem that there is an explosion of digital mapping information and applications, the number of public geographers – while growing – is quite small.

Geographic information or environmental information?

One of the changes that is currently happening in the area of geographic information in the European Union is the roll-out of the Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community directive (INSPIRE). The text of the directive uses the issue of sharing environmental information as a justification for the creation of a national spatial data infrastructure:

‘Community policy on the environment must aim at a high level of protection taking into account the diversity of situations in the various regions of the Community. Moreover, information, including spatial information, is needed for the formulation and implementation of this policy and other Community policies, which must integrate environmental protection requirements’

Interestingly, this blurring between geographic information and environmental information can be traced back to 1970. Then, in a conference that was dedicated to environment information systems, Roger Tomlinson (who is credited with coining the term Geographic Information System) noted that:

‘The essential difference between most data and those describing the environment of the surface of the earth is that the latter frequently have a location identifier as part of the data element … throughout the symposium the terms “geographical data” and “environmental data” were used synonymously as were the terms “geographic information system” and “environment information system’. (Tomlinson, R. F. (Ed.) (1970) Environment Information Systems, Proceedings of the UNESCO/IGU 1st Symposium on Geographic Information Systems, Ottawa, Canada.
p. 1)

So nothing new – and the confusion between what is environmental information and what is geographic information is bound to continue.

The first ever Human-Computer Interaction and GIS research

Trying to track down the source of a term is one of the more interesting academic tasks. For example, finding out when people started researching Human-Computer Interaction and GIS is a bit like following the thread. First of all, the term Human-Computer Interaction is sometimes presented as Computer-Human Interaction, especially in the early 1980s, when it emerged – the ACM Special Interest Group still uses CHI and not HCI. Before that, the common term used was Man-Machine Interaction which was actually a term that came out of studies in the 1940s. The way to uncover this terminology chain is to find papers that mention both terms and follow it through. Quite quickly you develop an understanding of the chain…

Then there is the issue of GIS – after all, the term was invented only around the mid 1960s: surely many people outside the small circle of researchers that became familiar with the term used other terminology. So you need to look for other terms, such as geographic information (as well as geographical information), maps, etc.

Following this approach, I have found a paper from 1963 by Malcolm Pivar, Ed Fredkin and Henry Stommel about ‘Computer-Compiled Oceanographic Atlas: an Experiment in Man-Machine Interaction’. The paper is as interesting as its writers – with Pivar and Fredkin among the Artificial Intelligence group at MIT, and Stommel a leading oceanographer. The data came from surveys that were part of the International Geophysical Year (1957/8 ) – and the paper shows that information overload is nothing new.

For me, the most interesting passage in the paper is:

‘[I]n preparing a printed atlas certain irrevocable choices of scale, of map projections, of contour interval, and of type of map (shall we plot temperature at standard depths, or on density surfaces, etc.?) must be made from the vast infinitude of all possible mappings. An atlas-like representation, generated by digital computer and displayed upon a cathode-ray screen, enables the oceanographer to modify these choices at will. Only a high-speed computer has the capacity and speed to follow the quickly shifting demands and questions of a human mind exploring a large field of numbers. The ideal computer-compiled oceanographic atlas will be immediately responsive to any demand of the user, and will provide the precise detailed information requested without any extraneous information. The user will be able to interrogate the display to evoke further information; it will help him track down errors and will offer alternative forms of presentation. Thus, the display on the screen is not a static one; instead, it embodies animation as varying presentations are scanned. In a very real sense, the user “converses” with the machine about the stored data.’ (Pivar et al., 1963, p. 396)

What an amazing vision in 1963 – it would take another 30 years and even more before what they are describing became a reality!

OSM Quality Assessment – S4 presentation

The following presentation is a summary of the OSM quality assessment paper that I’ve posted here in August. It was presented in the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) S4 event which was held on the 8th January 2009.

The presentation does not include additional analysis to what included in the paper, apart from a graph that analyses the bias of coverage in comparison to the Index of Multiple Deprivation (Slide 37) which shows the analysis for urban areas only. In the slide, only areas with size up to single standard deviation from the average are shown. By and large, this means that only urban areas are included.

The success of collaborative research

Just as 2008 ended, Marc Farr, Jess Wardlaw and Kate Jones were awarded the IJMR Collaborative Research Award from the Market Research Society. Jess is working with me on the Knowledge Transfer Partnership with Dr Foster Intelligence, while Kate is leading the GIS work on the Towards Successful Suburban Town Centres project. They’ve joined together to write the paper:

Farr, M., Wardlaw, J. and Jones, C. (2008)  Tackling Health Inequalities using Geodemographics: A Social Marketing Approach. International Journal of Market Research, 50, 4, pp. 449-468.

As the title suggests, the paper was about Dr Foster’s social marketing work and how we use geodemographic data to target health interventions, and compared the methodology to traditional market research methods. The statement from the award commission is rather nice:

‘This new Award recognises genuine co-operation between the practitioner (agency, client, etc.) and academic communities. Tackling Health Inequalities using Geodemographics – A Social Marketing Approach is an excellent example of the innovative methods being applied to the challenges faced by the UK public sector. It demonstrates how social marketing is being adopted in targeting healthcare priorities, and the role played by Dr Foster Intelligence as a public-private partnership in providing information to help achieve this goal.’

So well done to Jess, Kate and Marc!