Our Shrinking World
by Susan Smith




While I was in Ireland this month, it suddenly came to my attention that the world is far smaller than it had once seemed. The small outlying farming and fishing villages that are nestled against a backdrop of deep history now have fiber optic cable lines and DSL lines. The Aran Islands have satellite TV and cable, phones etc. A delivery of computers arrived just as I was catching the ferry to leave, wiring the community to the mainland. Young people everywhere carry cell phones. In fact, you see more cellphones there than you do in the U.S., perhaps because more people walk around with them than in the U.S.

In Ireland today, construction proliferates. Across the road from abandoned famine farmhouses, land is torn up to set down new sewer lines. Two months later, the same patch of ground is torn up to place down phonelines or electrical lines, with no coordination between the agencies offering these services. One centralized GIS would end this redundancy of effort and waste of taxpayers' money.

Humans are not always as efficient as they could be. It seems that the more rooted a country is in the past the slower and less efficient it is implementing change.. The same bureaucratic lockdown occurs everywhere, blocking progress with the fear of change. Yet whether a country is old or new, the world is on a journey into a new frontier-the frontier of high technology.

This month's feature story "Stalking Wild Geography" focuses on the processes in place for mapping remote regions of the world. Although there are certainly fewer remote regions, there are areas that have been mapped poorly or not at all. Police forces, search-and-rescue teams and health agencies do not have adequate maps for rescues, criminal investigation, and providing medical treatment in many remote regions. Cell phones don't work in these areas. The world may be shrinking, but large portions of it still remain uncharted and inaccessible.

The International Global Spatial Reference Network ensures that those areas mapped precisely will be tied into a network that establishes geodetic control. In years to come, we may see the entire globe tied into this network, changing our entire relationship with the world and how far we venture into the wilderness.

Some of our writers this month offer a global view of GIS:

Kyle Bohnenstiehl, a geographer from Flagstaff, Arizona provides us with a review of GPS receivers that he has used in his travels to remote regions such as South Patagonia .

Lili Eylon, freelance journalist from Jerusalem, offers us an application story on forestry in the U.K.

An interview with founders of the newly emerging VoiceXML standard demonstrates the growing importance of voice technology and the need for a standard, just as we have an XML standard (see September's article "XML, GIS and You" by Adena Schutzberg).

Topping off the lineup of quality editorial is Jane Goodman's informative article on "Raster Imaging in the Geomedia Environment."

I hope this issue offers something for everybody. Please do write and tell us about what you have read here (susan.smith@ibsystems.com). We gain many new readers daily and look forward to your comments.