Workstations or PCs for GIS? The long memory of the Internet

Over the past decade, different people either hailed or criticised the growing inability to forget in the digital age in which we are living. Logging on to Google Dashboard and seeing every single search that I carried out since 2006 is rather scary – especially as there is no guarantee that if I ask to delete my web history, it will be also deleted from Google servers – just anonymising the information which is not much, really. An interesting point of view on the virtue of forgetting in today’s digital world is available in Viktor Mayer-Schonberger’s recent lecture at the RSA .
And then there is all the public information about you that is already on the open web and that is going to be there for as long as the servers and the web continue to be around. While looking for my earliest internet trails, I came across a posting to the usenet group comp.infosystems.gis from 1994. Back then I was working on a large-scale GIS project for the Israel Electric Corporation and, as far as I can recall, I was asked to write a briefing about the direction that we should take regarding the hardware and software platforms that would be used by the client in the roll-out of the system, which was designed for IBM RS/6000 workstations.  The requests that I sent to the list and the discussion are summarised in a posting that is still accessible on Google Groups – so anyone can find it and read it …

In terms of internet memory, it does expose certain aspects that I’m now much more aware about – such as my control of English back then. Glossing over the grammar and spelling mistakes, the analysis makes interesting reading from 15 years perspective.

Firstly, it is interesting to note that the need for high-end computing in terms of operating systems and hardware for GIS remains a relevant issue. See, for example Manifold GIS’s use of 64-bit operating system or the issue of graphic capabilities and the use of General Processing of Graphic Processing Units (GPGPU) in GIS and Remote Sensing packages such as Geomatica. Another indication of the continued need for processing power is illustrated in the description of ‘who might need this?’ for high-end workstations – although in 1994 no one in PC Magazine ever mentioned GIS.

However, for the absolute majority of end-users who are using GIS for basic map making and processing, this is not true anymore and many are using standard desktop or laptop computers quite well. Over the next few years, as more of the processing migrates to the ‘cloud’, the number of GIS users who need high-end machines will continue to decline. In 1994 the expectation was that most users will need a workstation, whereas very soon they will happily use a low-powered netbook.

Secondly, it is interesting to see the changes in data sizes – I note in the text that 1GB data caused us difficulties in backups and the local network (10BASE-T). I recall complaints from the rest of the company, which was running mainframe systems with millions of alpha-numeric operations, when we ran performance tests because of the bandwidth that GIS processing consumed. This aspect of geographical information handling is still challenging, usually not at the local level – even for large-scale processing, the cost of storage is so low that it’s not a problem. However, for the people who manage the backbone of large-scale applications, say Yahoo! Maps, this is still an issue – I assume that video, images and maps are now major consumers of bandwidth and disk storage that require special handling and planning.

Thirdly, there is a lesson about ‘disruptive technologies’. The PC was one such disruptive technology and, even over a decade after their introduction, PCs were not comparable to workstations in terms of memory, processing, multitasking and networking. The advantage of workstations was clear in 1994. Even as late as 1999, when we ran the Town Centres project on Sun workstations, there was still an advantage, but it was disappearing rapidly. Today, UNIX workstations occupy a very small niche.

This is an issue when we think forward to the way GIS will look in 2015 (as the AGI Foresight study is doing) or 2020. Some of the disruptions to the way GIS operated for many years are gathering pace, such as the move to software and data as services where organisations will receive the two bundled from a provider, or using more crowd sourced information.

So sometimes it is useful to come across old writing – it makes you re-evaluate the present and consider the future. At the same time, it is only because I forgot about the post that it was interesting to come across it – so Victor Mayer-Schonberger is correct that there is a virtue in forgetting.

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.

OpenStreetMap: User-Generated Street Maps – IEEE Pervasive Computing paper

Earlier this year, in April, John Krumm from Microsoft Research, the editor of IEEE Pervasive Computing commissioned me to write a paper about OpenStreetMap for the magazine. The paper was written together with Patrick Weber, and it is finally out. It went through the magazine peer review process, and it is part of a set of articales in the October-December issue of the magazine that are dedicated to aspects of user-generated content.

The article was written for a general audience, and aims to provide an easy to understand introduction to OSM that is suitable for technically minded readers (such as the readers of IEEE Pervasive Computing!). It provides some history, a description of the OSM geostack and how it operates and ends with some open issues and challenges that the project is facing.

You can access the article from IEEE website, and it’s full citation is
Haklay, M. and Weber, P., 2008, ‘OpenDtreetMap: User-Generated Street Maps‘, IEEE Pervasive Computing, October–December 2008, pp. 12-18.

Snapshot Study – a Useful Usability Engineering for GIS Method?

For a while now, I have been calling for the development of usability engineering for GIS – a set of techniques and methods that will ensure that geographical technologies are learnable, efficient, easy to memorise, error tolerant and provide a satisfactory and enjoyable experience. While general usability guidelines are as relevant for GIS as they are to other computer-based systems, the use of maps as an interface and the nature of the data require the development of specific methodologies for GIS.

An example of such a method is a snapshot study. This is a simple usability study where we ask current users of GIS to take a snapshot of their computer monitor (by pressing Print Screen), fill in a very short survey and send the results by email. It requires very limited investment from the participants, but actually reveals a lot about the software packages that they are using.

The study that I conducted with Antigoni Zafiri in the summer of 2005 helped in understanding common screen resolution, the way users set toolbars on their interface and what type of maps they are looking at.

This type of study can be effective for the revision of products, to understand how they are used. It can also be used to understand the common computing environment in which the product is used.

The study has now been published in the Cartographic Journal – and can be downloaded from here. The proper citation for it is Haklay, M., and Zafiri, A., 2008, Usability Engineering for GIS: Learning From A Screenshot, the Cartographic Journal, 45(2) 87-97.

Noise modelling and public access

The new noise maps for England are yet another example of how environmental information is presented to the public in ways that do not make sense, and, I suspect, alienate rather than include people in understanding the state of their environment.

A few weeks ago, the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) release their modelled noise maps for main urban areas of England. There is no doubt about the popular interest in these maps – the site collapsed on the first day of publicity due to demand, and the message ‘Due to the popularity of the site we are currently experiencing very heavy load’ is on display.  This also happened to the Environment Agency when they released their ‘What’s in your backyard?’ and flood maps in 1998.

Yet, the maps are as difficult to understand as the previous version of the London noise maps that were released in 2004 (see image below from the now defunct site).

In the new maps, the maps are smaller in size than the London test site (occupying just 29.2% of the screen at 1024×768). They are either too generalised (Rail noise) or are detailed but without street names and landmarks (Roads), and, although noise is experienced as a combination of the impacts from industry, air, rail and road, the site gives no option of seeing all the layers together!

While the site makes it clear that the data is just modelled and was produced for strategic purposes, the message that ‘Users are strongly encouraged to read the explanatory information’ is not immediately visible – you need to scroll down to see it! Furthermore, the site does not explain what this ‘strategic assessment’ is – strategy of whom? For what end?

I do have sympathy with the designers, and I know from personal experience how difficult it is to display this information with all the political and organisational pressures, but without end-user testing and improvements the release of this information in such an inaccessible form can lead people to feel even more disenfranchised about environmental information…

London’s Suburban Town Centres Profiler – a Geovisualisation application without interactive mapping

This week, we have released the ‘Suburban Town Centres Profiler’. The application can be accessed from the Towards Successful Suburban Town Centres website, and was originally developed to support hypotheses development within the project’s team. It’s been quite a while that we’ve been working on the range of maps and information the profiler is based on, practically since last summer.

All the details about the profiler are on its website, but an interesting point that underpins it is that, in some cases, it is worth sacrificing the interactivity of the map itself to allow users to concentrate on the information. In HCI terminology, the main task is not about interaction with the map but with the information and its meaning, so providing interactive maps will actually reduce the usability of the application!

The maps on the profiler do not support zoom in, zoom out or panning. However, they are not meant to be interactive by themselves. The idea behind the application is to allow systematic and consistent comparison of many layers of geographic information across a range of 26 town centres in London’s suburbs. To achieve this task, the interface allows us to switch between themes and explore various datasets quickly, and, by ‘locking’ the map itself, we can ensure that we are looking at each Town Centre at the same scale and to the same extent. I’m sure that there are other cases where such an approach is the correct one – not all interactions are necessarily helpful to the user’s task…

MySociety’s FixMySteet is somewhat similar – it is holding the scale constant while allowing Panning.

AGI 2008 – engaging academia and industry

As in 2007, I am a member of the Association of Geographic Information (AGI) conference organising committee. Judging by the 2007 conference, this is going to be an excellent event. The range of papers, speakers and more importantly participants created an entertaining and educational two days, in addition to the networking and meeting of some familiar faces, including former students who are now part of the GIS industry.

However, over the past few years, the relationships between the academic side of GIS and industry – especially through the AGI – have not been as close and collaborative as they should be. This is a shame, as the many MSc courses in GIS programmes across the country are a significant entry route to a career in GIS. As I’ve noted, it is crucial for GIS professionals to keep up with the wider field and to learn about developments at every opportunity. This is not just true for people who are working with GIS on a daily basis, but also for academics who are carrying out research with or about GIS and GIScience and who educate future generations of GIS professionals. It is therefore unfortunate that only a few academics showed up to the AGI conference last year.

This year, the AGI has very generously put in a special effort to outreach academia. Two opportunities are available – for students there is a competition for a free day pass and an opportunity to meet prospective employers. For academics and researchers who submit a paper to the conference, there is another competition which is based on the papers that have been submitted with an award of significantly subsidised conference fees. So that’s a clear signal that the AGI is keen to see the academic side of GI at the annual conference – now we, as academics, need to do our part!

Confusing interfaces…

The Manifold training course that we ran earlier in February is always an excellent opportunity to observe how new GIS users interact with such a system.

Running a training session for new users of any GIS will expose major usability problems with the interface. Many of these problems are unnoticeable to experienced users, since they have learned the idiosyncratic aspects of the interface. Usability problems surface in such a session through misunderstandings and questions that the participants raise.

With Manifold, one of the interesting problems that came up is with the query toolbar (see below):

The way the query toolbar works is that you select a field in the left drop-down list, an operator at the central drop-down and a value in the text box on the right and click on select to see the result. For example, if you enter 5 in the toolbar in the picture, it will lead to a selection of the 5 polygons on the map with the smallest area.

The confusing part of the interface is the ‘not’ between the left drop-down and the central one. For a new user, the interface reads ‘find objects on the map where the field Area (I) are not the bottom X’. The ‘not’ in this case is a toggle button that can be activated to negate the operation that was selected in the central drop-down. Clearly, it would be better if, when not activated, it had the word ‘is’ (Area is the bottom 5) and ‘not’ appeared only when it was active. This is one of the cases where usability enhancement could be carried out in less than a minute of a programmer’s time – and surely makes life less confusing to many novice users…

How can we ensure that GI is a good career choice?

This entry is based on my article that was published in GIS Professional, December 2007 issue. Reproduced with permission from GIS Pro.

AGI’07 was the setting for a provocative debate on whether “GI is a bad career choice“. Speaking for the motion were GiSPro publisher Stephen Booth and AGI past chair Simon Doyle. Vigorously opposing were Gesche Schmid of Atkins and The Geoinformation Group’s Dr Seppe Casattari.

The debate, which worryingly for the AGI was only marginally lost, sparked lively interest from the audience. The text below argues that the more important question is “How can we ensure that GI is a good career choice?“

This article is mainly aimed at professional who are working in GIS at all levels.

It seems that there was never a better time than the present to be a GI professional – demand for skills is high, pay is good and prospects are rosy. It was a delight for many of us to read the famous article in Nature in 2004, announcing increased demands forpeople with knowledge and the ability to operate geospatial technologies. According to the US Department of Labor, GI is ‘one of the three most important emerging and evolving fields, along with nanotechnology and biotechnology. Job opportunities are growing and diversifying. . .’ What could be better?

Veterans of GIS can attest to the dramatic increase in awareness and knowledge of geospatial technologies. If you have been working in GIS for more than five years, then you belong to the generation which, when trying to explain what your job involved, would launch into a convoluted explanation, only to end with “oh, well, it’s complex”. The advance of satnav, geobrowsers such as Google Earth and the ubiquity of web mapping sites such as Multimap and Google Maps, together with those “mash ups” that bring new applications on top of them, are making it much easier to explain what we do and the importance of maps and how the use of geographical information can help in daily routines and in business. So, you conclude, GI is an excellent career choice with a fantastic future.

Is the picture quite so rosy? The rise of ‘neogeography’ is highlighting some risks, and there are certainly cautionary tales to be learned from our professional allies: land surveyors, photogrammetrists and cartographers. A significant reason for concern is that in the era of ‘neogeography’ many core geographical concepts are seen as unproblematic and not worth bothering about, as Dave Unwin noted in his 2006 AGI Educational Lecture (or a similar paper in Geoforum). There are some issues that matter greatly to GI professionals but which the vast majority of users don’t seem to care about. One example is the lack of metadata in applications like Google Earth, e.g. the ability to tell when the data was collected and the currency of each piece of information. Some users of these systems even think that they can log on and check if their car is still parked in front of their home!

Or consider the place of cartography. It seems that a large proportion of the new web mapping applications are ignoring many important cartographic principles – look at some of the current sites and you can spot the lack of legends, poor selection of colour for thematic mapping and other aspects of properly composed maps. Yet, for many users and for too many applications, this problematic world in which geography is useful, but cartographical and geographical information science principles do not matter, is a very satisfying world and many are happy to live and use geography in this way. In such a world, what will prevent your future employer from saying: why do I need a person that costs me so much, when we can hack something easily with a web mapping API (Application Programming Interface)?

Here is where we need to look at the lessons learnt by land surveyors, photogrammetrists and cartographers. Not so long ago, maybe 15 or 20 years ago – well within the span of a professional career – being a surveyor or a photogrammetrist seemed like an excellent career choice. For photogrammetrists, the increased use of digital aerial photography meant that there would be a need for their skills and for the surveyor the requirement of ever increasing complex civil engineering projects and the need to understand how to use GPS, meant that they, too, should have a secure future. But look at what has happened to those professions today. The entry salary for a photogrammetrist is very low (that is, if you manage to find a job) and the same is true for land surveyors. This is reflected in the demand for academic courses.

Importantly, it is not the case that automation has eaten away all these jobs, though to some extent it has. Nor can it all be blamed on outsourcing and off-shoring. What happened is that more and more employers think that because of automation, GPS, total stations and satellite imagery, they do not need the highly paid skills of the professional photogrammetrist or the surveyor – they can just hire a technician and the machine will do all the calculations. . . Of course, many practising surveyors can provide tales of companies that have discovered midway through a project that they actually need the skills – but now they don’t have them. This attitude has led to widespread errors – but the overall trend doesn’t change.

Arguably, what happened with these professions is that they failed to convey the importance of the skills and knowledge that they bring to the marketplace. This risk is true for GIS professionals too. The following is taken from “Prospect” – the UK graduate job site which describes the job prospects of cartographers: “With relatively low salary levels and small numbers of job vacancies, this role is often seen as more of a vocation for people with a strong interest in maps and geographical information.” Will the GI profession follow the same pattern?

For too many employers, the justification in employing GIS professionals is that the software used to create maps is very complex, so having specialists who produce maps is justified. But if it is possible to create maps with a simple API instead of buying an expensive and difficult to maintain Internet mapping server software, or if it is enough to analyse the data by creating a point map on Google Earth – then why keep the expensive professional?

Therefore, we need to change the question from the passive ‘Is GI a good career choice?’ to ‘how can we ensure that GI is a good career choice?’ There is a clear need to move away from the conception that GIS is all about making maps. It is actually about analysing geographical information, and in order to do this properly you need a GI analyst – a professional who understands the underlying data structures, the way in which the data can be manipulated and how to visualise the output of the analysis in a meaningful and effective way.

As for yourself, dear reader, if you are a GIS professional – it is worth considering how you structure your career so it does indeed become fulfilling, enjoyable and long. There aren’t many jobs in the IT sector that offer a variety of tasks like GI. Develop your skills by ongoing training – and while you are at it, why not become a Chartered Geographer? Read books that help in understanding how rapidly the world around you is changing – Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat (2007) is one of my favourites. Most importantly, start your own local campaign to explain to your employer, if you are working for an organisation that doesn’t specialises in GIS, or to your clients, if you are working in a GIcentric organisation, how special is spatial? And in what ways the knowledge and skills that you’ve got are contributing to the operation of the organisation. By collaborating and promoting the wonders of GI we can ensure that GI is indeed an excellent career choice.

The formatted version of this article is available here (Include Gesche Schmid comment – which reaches a similar conclusion).

Getting the right projection – a helpful usability feature of Manifold GIS

UCL’s licence for Manifold GIS 8.0 finally arrived. While testing the new 64-bit version I was reminded of one of the interface features of Manifold that I believe many other GIS should have as standard – a request to verify projections when a new component is added to the project.

One of the most confusing issues for new GIS users is to use projections within their workflow. Nowadays, it is common to integrate data from different sources, such as information gathered by GPS receivers with data from the Ordnance Survey, or any other data that is using a local projection. Therefore, it is important to ensure that the system ‘knows’ what the projection of each layer and image is.

Without proper configuration when trying to put all the data together, it doesn’t work because the projection of one layer doesn’t match another layer.

In Manifold GIS, when an image or vector layer is imported, when it is opened for the first time, the system asks the user to verify the projection, and opens the interface that allows the assignment of the current projection. Unfortunately, Manifold GIS does not give the option to set the most common the default projection for the locale in which the system is used – or at least set a group of favourite projections. Room for improvement there!

As for Manifold GIS 64 bit – it seems to work faster, although it was a surprise to see that in some operations the 4 cores were not busy at 100% or even 50% even though the system loads the data slowly. Apart from that, Windows Vista 64 bit is quite incompatible with many legacy applications and it is quite a pain to use. Maybe it’s time to return to Windows XP…