Special Report

GEOtec Event, Toronto 2002

by Susan Smith

The GEOTec Event kicked off Tuesday, April 9 with an introduction from conference show manager Matt Ball, who introduced Ray Mears, Founder, Woodlore, Etchingham, UK. Mears explained how indigienous peoples worldwide are coming to realize environmental changes. He has traveled and lived among First Nation peoples, getting involved in their search for food and medicines, and other basic activities. He suggests that in our quest to map the world we draw on the experience of indigenous peoples.

Michael F. Goodchild, Professor, University of California, Santa Barbara, California, spoke on the topic, "Geospatial Data: The Bottom Line." Goodchild is well known as the author of numerous books, research papers, and as a pioneering force in the NCGIA.

Goodchild said that Canada is the location from which many early developments arose in GIS. In 35 years of GIS, he asked, what has remained the same?

Education in principles and training in today''s technology are essentially the same, although the tools have changed.

The following were areas of discussion:

• Know where the data is - hunting the web
• Why GI can never be perfect
• Role of human - to replace or augment human reality?

Outside Geotec

Know Where the Data Is

Organizing information by location requires

• Information with a geographic footprint - if you can hunt via location, then you can hunt for other kinds of information.
• Organizational metaphors, which include desktop, files, hierarchical systems, or surface of the earth, a map or latitude-longitude coordinates

Geolibraries such as the NRC Report, Distributed Geolibraries Spatial Information Resources 1999 (www.nap.edu) allow us to seek all information on a subject in minutes.

Search engines don''t work for GI. Object level metadata (OLM) provides a description of individual datasets. People need to be able to divide the world so the average user can find sites of information.

Search heuristics include finding servers close to the footprint, and finding agency footprint that most closely matches the desired footprint. Once you know what server to look at, i.e., Geography Network, then the information stays on the server. You never have to have the information on the client.

Show floor

Collection level metadata (CLM) describes collections on servers. They include data types such as Landsat, describe by regions. A new type of search engine is needed that can search by range of latitude/longitude, recognize GI, and map fusion - where you can tell the search engine to search for GI datasets and figure out what they are. This can now be done over a local network, but the capability is needed over the web as a whole.

Why GI Can Never Be Perfect

"GI can never be perfect, there is always a measurement error," says Goodchild. GPS will never be perfect, with generalization, there is loss of detail. Although there is uncertainty in data, no one should wait for the perfect data.

Location based technologies know where they are, provide information accordingly and move with the user. With these come advantages such as emergency calls, commercial uses but also issues of privacy and surveillance. "The value of the advantage of visible locations is lessened as you can use augmented reality," states Goodchild.

UCSB is experimenting with some interesting wearable technology-such as a whole keyboard embedded in the user''s shirt.

GEOtec Event, Toronto 2002 Continued…

The Role of the Human

The old model of GI was institutional - the government had all the data and the libraries served the local user. The new model suggests that everyone can produce GI data. Artificial intelligence can''t fully replace the human.

The role of the human calls for a collaboration: GIS = collaboration of human and machine. According to Goodchild, "GIS can augment what we sense directly and what we know in our heads."

"The Value of Sharing Geospatial Data Panel," speaker Todd Bacastow, Assistant Director of the Penn State College''s Earth and Mineral Sciences Environment Institute and Chair of GeoData Alliance Council of Trustees.

The Value of Sharing Geospatial Data - Panel Discussion

Presentations by GeoData Alliance Council of Trustees members Marilyn Otto, Vice President, Information Business, MapInfo Corporation, and Todd Bacastow, Assistant Director of the Penn State College Earth And Mineral Sciences Environmental Sciences Institute and Chair of the GDA Council of Trustees sparked a lively discussion on sharing geospatial data - and what monetary value should be placed on such data.

Kathy Covert, Acting Executive Director, GeoData Alliance

Web Services

Jack Dangermond, Founder and President, ESRI, presented a luncheon keynote on Wednesday on the topic, "Web Services: A New Set of Technologies and Architecture for Distributed GIS." He spoke of how we are seeing numerous changes in the earth, and that geography provides a "unifying set of theories, quantitative tools, methods and technology that focuses on integration." GIS creates "information communities," as we move to the internet and the "web becomes a GIS."

He reiterated the need for a common spatial data model, which requires conceptually coming to an agreement. "We don''t have decades to do this," Dangermond warned, but stated that a "national GIS technology is evolving."

Products

Although few new products were actually released at GEOTec, many had been released a couple of weeks prior at GITA in Tampa, Fla.

Idelix at GEOTec

Some Canadian companies saved their announcements for post-show: MapCloud Services, Inc. of Vancouver, announced geoCette, a web-based software platform for creating customized mapping applications on the Internet. What is unique about this application is that is based on GML and allows the integration of multiple proprietary GIS data formats into a single web map, with links maintained to the original GIS data. GeoCette also supports flash-based client technologies, as well as compressed SVG (scalable vector graphics) which makes it especially suitable for wireless applications and LBS platforms.

MediaMapper from Trimble is a nifty tool that has been around but it was the first time I''d seen it. With Trimble''s GPS Pathfinder and a digital camera you can take a photograph in the field that is automatically linked to a GPS position. This product requires little training for the user and crews can quickly record what they see in the field.

Ecognition is an object oriented image analysis tool offered by PCI Geomatics, created by Definens. It is based on the concept that important semantic information to interpret an image is not represented in single pixels but in meaningful image objects and their mutual relations.

TELUS GeoExplorer is built on Autodesk''s MapGuide and links data so that it can be graphically displayed on a map. The benefit of this product is that over 300 sets of data are already resident in the application, including the entire Canadian Census, which unlike U.S. Census data, has to be purchased from the Canadian government. For most GIS solutions, Canadian users must purchase data plus the application, and in this case it is all rolled into one. GeoExplorer allows you to view, manage, and edit your information.