The end of the ‘ARC/INFO driving licence’ era

The discussion about the future of the GIS ‘profession’ has flared up in recent days – see the comments from Sean Gorman, Steven Feldman (well, citing me) and Don Meltz among others. My personal perspective is about the educational aspect of this debate.

I’ve been teaching GIS since 1995, and been involved in the MSc in GIS at UCL since 1998 – teaching on it since 2001. Around 1994 I was contemplating the excellent MSc in GIS programme in Edinburgh, though I opted to continue with my own mix of geography and computer science, which turned out to be great in the end – but I can say that I have been following the trends in GIS education for quite a while.

Based on this experience, I would argue that the motivation for studying an MSc in GIS over the past 20 years was to get the ‘ARC/INFO driving licence’. I use ARC/INFO as a metaphor – you can replace it with any other package, but ARC/INFO was the de facto package for teaching GIS (and its predecessor ArcGIS is today), so it is suitable shorthand. What I mean by that is that for a long time GIS packages were hard to use and required a significant amount of training in order to operate successfully. Even if a fairly simple map was needed, the level of technical knowledge and the number of steps required were quite significant. So employers, who mostly wanted someone who could make them maps, recruited people who gained skills in operating the complex packages that allow the production of maps.

The ‘ARC/INFO driving licence’ era included an interesting dissonance – the universities were telling themselves that they were teaching the principles of GIScience but the students were mostly interested in learning how to operate a GIS at a proficient level to get a job. I’ve seen and talked with enough students to recognise that many of them, in their daily jobs, rarely used the spatial statistical analysis that we were teaching and they mostly worked at ‘taming the beast’, which GIS was.

As expected, at UCL there was always a group that was especially interested in the principles of GIScience and that continued their studies beyond the MSc. But they are never the majority of the cohort.

The model worked well for everyone – universities were teaching GIS by a combination of principles and training of specific packages and the students found jobs at the end and joined GIS departments in different organisations.

The disruption that changed this arrangement started in the late 1990s, with Oracle Spatial starting to show that GIS can be integrated in mainstream products. The whole process accelerated around 2005 with the emergence of GeoWeb, Free and Open Source GIS (FOSS GIS) and the whole range of applications that come with it. Basically, you don’t need a licence any more. More and more employers (even GIS consultancies) are not recruiting from GIS education programmes – they are taking computing professionals and teaching them the GIS skills. Going through an MSc in GIS to be proficient with a tool is not necessary.

So in an era in which you don’t need a licence to join the party, what is the MSc in GIS for?

The answer is that it can be the time when you focus on principles and on improving specific skills. Personally, that was my route to education. I started working in GIS software development without much more than high school education in 1988. After hearing people around me talking about registers, bugs, polygons and databases I was convinced that I must understand these principles properly. So I went for a degree that provided me with the knowledge. In the same way, I would expect that MSc programmes cater for the needs of people who gain some practical experience with operating geospatial technologies and want to learn the principles or become specialists in specific aspects of these systems.

We already see people doing the MSc while working with GIS – currently studying an MSc by distance learning or in the evening is very popular and I expect that this will continue. However, the definition of what is covered by GIS must be extended – it should include everything from Bing Maps API to PostGIS to ArcGIS.

I can also see the need for specialised courses – maybe to focus on the technical development of geospatial technologies or maybe on spatial statistical analysis for those who want to become geographical information analysts. I would also expect much more integration of GIS with other fields of study where it is taught as a tool – just look at the many MSc programmes that currently include GIS. I’m already finding myself teaching students of urban design, development planning or asset management.
All in all, I’m not going to feel sorry that the ‘ARC/INFO driving licence’ era is coming to its end.

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.

Nestoria interview

Nestoria is a property search engine covering the European market, based on Web 2.0 technologies such as mashups; in this case, a Google Maps mashup to show the locations of the properties. The company blog run a monthly interview and I had the pleasure of being the Nestoria interviewee for this month.

The interview addresses several aspects of neogeography, including the reasons for its rise and the implications for professional GISers. I comment on results from my evaluation of OpenStreetMap data and the implications of crowdsourced geographic information on businesses such as Nestoria.

The interview can be accessed on the Nestoria blog.

WUN Global GIS Academy Seminar – What’s So New in Neogeography?

These are the slides from the Worldwide Universities Network Global GIS Academy Seminar from the 22nd October. The seminar’s title is ‘What’s So New in Neogeography?’ and it is aimed largely at an academic audience with background in GIScience.

The aim of the talk is to critically review Neogeography: explain its origins, discuss the positive lessons from it – mainly in improved usability of geographic technologies, as well as highlighting aspects that I see as problematic.

The presentation starts with some definitions and with the notice that mapping/location is central to Web 2.0, and  thus we shouldn’t be surprised that we’ve noticed a step change in the use of GI over the past 3 years.

By understanding what changed around 2005, it is possible to explain the development of Neogeography. These changes are not just technical but also societal.

The core of the discussion is on the new issues that are important to Neogeography’d success, but also raising some theoretical and practical aspects that must be included in a comprehensive analysis of the changes and what they mean to Geography and geographers.

The presentation is available below from slideshare, and the (very rough and without proofing) notes are available here.

AGI GeoCommunity ‘08 – some reflections

The AGI GeoCommunity ’08 is over – and it was a great conference. Building on the success of last year, the conference this year was packed with good papers and with 600 delegates. I found the papers from Joanna Cook, of Oxford Archaeology, about the use of Open Source GIS as the main set of products in a business environment, and from Nick Black, of CloudMade, on Crowd Sourced Geographical Information especially interesting.

What is especially good about the AGI in general, and the conference in particular, is that unlike other forums that cater for a narrow audience (say mainly neogeographers in Where 2.0, or academics in GISRUK), the AGI is a good forum where you can see vendors, commercial providers, veterans and new users all coming together to talk about different aspects of GI. Even if they disagree about various issues such as what is important, having the forum for the debate is what makes this conference so valuable Just look at the blogs of Ed, Adena, Joanna, Andy and Steven for such a debate to see that there are issues that people will argue about quite fiercely – which is a sign of a great conference.

I’m especially pleased with the success this year of bringing in people from the academic community who presented papers and attended the conference. This interaction is very significant as, through our teaching programmes, we are actually training the people who will join this crowd in the future, and we should keep an eye on the trends and needs of the sector.

For example, one of my conclusions from the conference is that the existing ‘business model’ of the M.Sc. in GIS programmes, which was, inherently, ‘we’ll train you in using [ArcGIS|Mapinfo|other package] so you can get a job’, is over. The industry is diverging, and the needs are changing. Being a GI professional is not about operating a GIS package.

We should now highlight the principles of manipulating geographical information, and, as Adena Schutzberg commented during the debate, train people how to ask the right questions, and to answer the most important ‘So what?’ question about the analyses that they are producing.

We should also encourage our students to participate in forums, like the AGI, so they continue to learn about their changing world.

OpenStreetMap Quality evalution and other comparisons

A comparison of my analysis of OpenStreetMap (OSM) quality evaluation to other examples of quality evaluation brings up some core issues about the nature of the new GeoWeb and the use of traditional sources. The examples that I’m referring to are from Etienne Cherdlu’s SOTM 2007 ‘OSM and the art of bicycle maintenance’, Dair Grant’s comparison of OSM to Google Maps and reality, Ed Johnson’s analysis this summer and Steven Feldman’s brief evaluation in Highgate.

Meridian 2 and OSM in the area of Highgate, North London

The first observation is of the importance and abundance of well georeferenced, vector-derived public mapping sites, which make several of these comparisons possible (Chedlu, Dair and Feldman). The previous generation of stylised street maps is not readily available for a comparison. In addition to the availability, the ease with which they can be mashed-up is also a significant enabling factor. Without this comparable geographical information, the evaluation would be much more difficult.

Secondly, when a public mapping website was used, it was Google Maps. If Microsoft’s Virtual Earth had also been used, it would arguably allow a three-way comparison as the Microsoft site uses Navteq information, while Google uses TeleAtlas information. Using Ordnance Survey (OS) OpenSpace for comparison is also a natural candidate. Was this familiarity that led to the selection of Google Maps? Or is it because the method of comparison is visual inspection, so adding a third source makes it more difficult? Notice that Google has the cachet of being a correct depiction of reality, which Etienne, Dair and Bob Barr demonstrated not to be the case!

Thirdly, and most significantly, only when vector data was used – in our comparison and in parts of what Ed Johnson has done – a comprehensive analysis of large areas became possible. This shows the important aspect of the role of formats in the GeoWeb – raster is fabulous for the delivery of cartographic representations, but it is a vector that is suitable for analytical and computational analysis. Only OSM allows the user easy download of vector data – no other mass provider of public mapping does.

Finally, there is the issue of access to information, tools and knowledge. As a team that works at a leading research university (UCL), I and the people who worked with me got easy access to detailed vector datasets and the OS 1:10,000 raster. We also have at our disposal multiple GIS packages, so we can use whichever one performs the task with the least effort. The other comparisons had to rely on publically available datasets and software. In such unequal conditions, it is not surprising that I will argue that the comparison that we carried out is more robust and consistent. The issue that is coming up here is the balance between amateurs and experts, which is quite central to Web 2.0 in general. Should my analysis be more trusted than those of Dair’s or Etienne’s, both of whom who are very active in OSM? Does Steven’s familiarity with Highgate, which is greater than mine, make him more of an expert in that area than my consistent application of analysis?

I think that the answer is not clear cut; academic knowledge entails the consistent scrutiny of the data, and I do have the access and the training to conduct a very detailed geographical information quality assessment. In addition, my first job in 1988 was in geographical data collection and GIS development, so I also have professional knowledge in this area. Yet, local knowledge is just as valuable in a specific area and is much better than a mechanical, automatic evaluation. So what is happening is an exchange of knowledge, methods and experiences between the two sides in which both, I hope, can benefit.

Can the US change to 100% renewable energy in 10 years?

A speech from Al Gore was published last Thursday in the New York Times calling for the US to go on a 10 years project to switch to 100% renewable energy (well, electricity). The link is to the annotated version from Andy Revkin, the scientific correspondent of the paper – which adds an important insight.

It makes a very interesting reading about the links between climate change, energy security, the economy, and the ways in which the challenges of moving to an environmental sustainable mode of economic activities will be negotiated by society.

Especially interesting is to read the text critically, and to consider what is included, and why. Noteworthy is the roles of different domains of human activities  – science is used to demonstrate the problem, technology to offer a solution and the power relationships in society in both the financial investment and the political arenas are playing their part to benefit from the potential disruption of climate change.

Mapping for Sustainable Communities – presentations

The Mapping for Sustainable Communities seminar that was organised by myself together with London 21, on the 17th June, was a fantastic event that I thoroughly enjoyed. With over 100 participants, coming from academia, practice and from communities across London and further afield, it was a unique opportunity for discussion between these 3 groups which, unfortunately, is rare.

The day was fairly intensive with a series of presentations from a wide range of speakers, providing a range of views and opinions. At lunch, and especially during the afternoon workshops, there was more time for discussion and exchange of experiences. It was very satisfying to see people stand and discuss the various aspects of participatory and community mapping during the reception at the end of the day, after a heavy day of listening and talking about these issues.

The seminar covered the whole range of technical options – from paper to 3D computer mapping. It also covered various views – from the more theoretical to the practical.

As a conclusion from the day, it is clear that there is a good potential for community and participatory mapping in many aspects of life in the UK. Particpatory mapping can we be used to celebrate the wonder of places, find about their history, or identify issues that are of concern to the community. We need to take into account the local organisational and governance structures, and be sensitive to the needs of the communities within which we operate. There is an ethical dimension that should not be overlooked, but it is important to find the cases where we can make an impact with these tools and use them to make places more sustainable.

In case that you have missed the seminar, or would like to see the presentations from it, here is the outline of the day, with a link to the presentations on SlideShare:

• Muki Haklay (UCL) – Participatory mapping: a conceptual framework & Introduction to the day

• Steve Cinderby (SEI York) – GIS for Participation (GIS-P) methodology

• Duncan Fuller (Northumbria University) – Participatory Geographies and the role of mapping

• Kieron Stanley (Environment Agency) – How can we map Cumulative Impacts and aspects of environmental inequalities?

• Panel Discussion: between participation and technology – The paner included 4 short presentations: Richard Kingston (The University of Manchester) discussed aspects of the digital divide; Sophie Des Clare (UCL) talked about participatory mapping in the marine environment; Andrea Berardi (Open University) focus on the aspects of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ brain thinking for participation; and Louise Francis (London 21) highlighted the benefits of paper based mapping when combined with GIS analysis.

• Chris Church (London 21) – Introduce some of the practical aspects of community mapping

• Chris Perkins (The University of Manchester) – Community mapping with focus on cartographical and social aspects

• Colleen Whitaker (London 21) – Community mapping as a tool to identify local environmental issues and concerns

• Mike Batty (UCL) – Participation through Online Technologies: Experiences with 3D-GIS, Second Life and Multimedia in London (Mike’s presentation was too interactive – so for more information about the issues that he presented, see the CASA website)

• Community Showcase, where five of the communities that we are working with talked about their experiences.