MapBrief™

With the extra reflection that comes with any new year, I’ve been pondering a peculiarity of the presumably exciting geospatial industry: no one likes their business model.  Forget the giddy enthusiasm of 4-5 years ago, with the promised federal cutbacks at DoD/Homeland Security, along with the in-progress shrinking of state and local budgets, many shops are wondering how to keep treading water, let alone surf the wave of the next, ‘new’ thing.  How to explain this dissonance between a “cool” technology becoming more mainstream and the disquiet of not knowing how to profit from it?

Even though the Internet specializes in amplifying Moral Outrage, I’ve been taken aback by the public relations backlash against Google for having the temerity to charge its heaviest users of Maps. Well, more like reassured, since if Google (and Bing) has trouble explaining its pricing structure, then those of us who sell web-based services are allowed to cut ourselves some slack:

Reason #1:  No One Knows What Stuff Is Supposed to Cost on the Web

It’s been interesting to observe how the dominant vendor ESRI is playing their cloud-based offering. Since no one knows what things are supposed to cost on the web, using shrink-wrapped software analogs with which customers are already familiar helps…a lot. If you’re paying ‘x’ for an ArcServer license, then being able to do replicate the same end-user experiences using their online service for 60-70% of ‘x’ seems like a good deal.  A pronounced advantage to be sure, but competing on pure web experience is a punishing game, and so it’s even more important to lock in customers by any means necessary (including prodigious amounts of marketing).

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There’s this upscale-ish farm-to-table place in my neighborhood where the wait-staff has been trained to regale first-time visitors with their ‘story’.  I’m hungry, I’m ready to drop coin, and your story is delaying my eating experience.  My enthusiasm has been converted to the singular wish that the wait-person just shut up right now.  I think we in technology are too often like that wait-staff, excited to overwhelm our customers with technical minutiae that fails to address their fundamental needs…

Reason #2: We Like Technology and Read Obscure Blogs; Our Customers Like Beaches, Kids’ Soccer Games, & Napping (and Don’t Read Obscure Blogs)

As an enthusiastic user/promoter of open source software, effusively digging into minutiae and wondering about business models is second nature.  Indeed, I recently received an email asking for advice on “open source business models” and my immediate thought was…I wish I had one. Luckily, someone much brighter than myself, Paul Ramsey, gave a great talk on this very topic at FOSS4G last year.  While Paul does a great job unpacking the complicated relationship between price and value, and how those signals can sometimes get very crossed, let me add a more general observation…

Reason #3: We Get Excited by Free, Cutting-Edge Technology; the Words “Free” and “Cutting-Edge” Make Middle Managers Very, Very Nervous

A couple of weeks back 60 Minutes profiled Alex Honnold, a guy who “free-climbs” cliff faces without any kind of safety equipment.  Brushing aside questions of safety and living with no margin for error, one was left aghast watching him calmly negotiate one life-threatening obstacle after another. Where he enthusiastically talked of future challenges, the viewer is unable to shake that this young man will meet a grisly, premature end.

Unfamiliar technology with unfamiliar licensing terms take many managers out of their comfort zone, without a safety net. Paradoxically, in a tough economy when their own positions are more tenuous, the appetite for anything resembling risk is minimal indeed.  I know, the availability of source code is the ultimate safety net. Have you seen the average manager’s pupils dilate in fear and confusion the first time you show them GitHub?

But let’s not make the managerial class the target of our animus, but rather evaluate honestly whether we’re opting to spend too much time in the World-As-We-Wish-It-To-Be instead of the World-As-It-Is.  Our clients and potential clients managed to stay in business before we showed up on their door step, so let’s temper the perma-sugar high of techno optimisim with a measure of old-fashioned humility.

In next week’s post I’ll discuss my best guess as to the key components of the still-elusive 21st Century Geospatial Business Model.

—Brian Timoney

End-of-year summaries and next-year predictions are the web’s way of helping you pass time during the most unproductive work week on the calendar. Or save you from continued contrived conversation among those with whom you share little except a similar genetic imprint. Rather than go the solipsistic blogger route and explain why The Decemberists put out the best album or that Incendies was my movie of the year, I’ve chosen a tack in which I’m more heavily invested. For “hotness” here refers not to PR buzz but tools that can solve both my clients’ current problems and their soon-to-be problems.

The next great GIS isn’t a “GIS”–but rather the statistical package R.  It’s the nexus where modelling, statistics, and graphics meet.  An open-source project with a large community and big developer momentum, there’s a critical mass of know-how such that you’d be hard-pressed to come up with a quantitative challenge that hasn’t already been tackled by the R community.  For mapping, the obvious starting point is the maptools package, but there are also hooks to familiar tools such as GDAL (RGDAL) and PostGIS, as well as the recently released GUI DeducerSpatial.

Let’s be clear, it isn’t about trying to replace your trusty GIS with statistical software. It’s about acquiring a more robust quantitative toolset to wrestle with a multi-variate world. Statistical clustering (spatial and non-spatial), principal components, multi-dimensional scaling, etc. will all be go-to techniques in a world that can no longer be explained by a single variable displayed on a map.  We all laugh at “red-dot fever” where lazy analysts overwhelm a map by displaying every coffeeshop, every bank, every whatever, creating visual confusion instead of anything approaching meaning. But the crashing of the tides of “Big Data”, the “sensor web”, and the “Internet of Things” upon our shores is imminent, and wrestling with those datasets with advanced statistical techniques will be the prerequisite for making meaningful maps.  A small taste of what’s possible in R is one of this year’s most compelling maps:  the Facebook map.

A lot of mapping shops will be scratching their collective heads this year figuring out how to serve a public that uses everything from Internet Explorer 6 to the iPad, as well as your preferred smartphone. With the mobile web leaving the worlds of Flash and Silverlight behind, where to turn for interactive vectors in the browser. Why not plunge into the future and go pure HTML5/SVG? Because the mapping community, with the large presence of government agencies at all levels has a disproportionately high use of older versions of Internet Explorer. Recent stats from ESRI suggest that visitors to ESRI.com use IE 6-8 at a rate roughly double that of the overall web user population.

Raphael is a javascript library that bridges the gap by rendering vectors natively as VML in Internet Explorer 6-8, and as SVG in the newer web browsers. Hence you get “live vectors”: rollovers, tool tips, click events, etc. without requiring plugins such as Silverlight or Flash.  Of course, rendering tens of thousands of vertices won’t go so well in older browsers, but for everyday thematic maps, such as this example of US States, it is perfectly serviceable. With 2012 being a Presidential election year in the US, expect many news organizations to move away from Flash to Raphael for their choropleth-ing of results.

Some of the most innovative work of 2011 came from Washington DC-based Development Seed. First, their open source TileMill cartographic studio is a much-needed tool that enables the making of visually compelling maps without GIS. This is a huge boon to the geospatial sector where too many of us, present company included, have been all too content to crank out always utilitarian, sometimes ugly, maps for our clients. Better still, the styling specifications use the CSS-inspired Carto language, making for easy re-use and sharing of styles.

And that’s not all. Using the very clever UTF grid approach, maps created with TileMill and served up via TileStream (also open source), feature interactivity that is also cross-browser–from Internet Explorer 6 to the iPad.  And because the interactivity is pixel-based, it can handle many, many thousands of features without killing your browser.

The coup de grace is the MapBox iPad app. All your great cartography created in TileMill with the full experience available in disconnected settings. In important ways, I see the iPad (and, hopefully, future tablets that can match the user experience) as a great second chance for mapping on the web. Because the first time around we as an industry failed our users by insisting on a desktop-GIS-inside-the-browser metaphor that was utterly foreign to anyone except fellow professionals. I’d love to see the default standard be a well-designed, informative basemap plus once “clickable” layer: enough information for 85% of your users without introducing the confusion of dozens of layers (tucked within layer “groups”!). And my observation tells me that there’s an intimacy users have with their iPad that is very different that their relationship to their desktop machines. Simple to use, informative, and aesthetically thoughtful is the big win here.

So the excitement about these new tools and capabilities would naturally lead to a conclusion that “it’s never been a more exciting time to be in geospatial.” But there’s also an underlying lesson in highlighting projects that don’t come out of the traditional group of GIS vendors: geospatial is attracting significant outside attention and people are getting things done using tools and methods that are unfamiliar to many industry veterans. Combine that with the contraction of the public sector that is a huge component of GIS employment, and the more sober conclusion is that our little niche traditionally off-to-the-side is more mainstream and much more competitive. So think about and spend time with some of these new technologies not for the “cool” factor, but to ensure the continued relevance of your skill set.

—Brian Timoney

“Sometimes I think the education we dispense is better suited to a fifty-year old who feels he missed the point the first time around. Too many abstract ideas. Eternal verities left and right. You’d be better served looking at your shoe and naming the parts.”

–Father Paulus confesses to Nick Shay in Don DeLillo’s Underworld, pt V, ch 3

 

Or, alternatively, looking out your window and cataloging what you see.

I started this blog invoking Halford Mackinder, discussing his evangelization efforts on behalf of an analytically robust Geography that would no make apologies for standing astride the physical sciences and the liberal arts. However being neither-fish-nor-fowl has not served Geography well as it has been found ill-suited for both the abstraction-heavy model of education imported from aristocratic Europe  as well as the hyper-specialization of academia. In one of those ironies in which the Internet excels, geographic reasoning has its own platform on one of the web’s most popular blogs.

 

    Locating window views brings out everyone's Inner Geographer

Blogging politics, religion, and pop culture, Andrew Sullivan began posting reader photos of the view from their window as a mere diversion, which led to a book , which in turn led to a “where in the world” contest to give away copies of the book.   And people got into the contest.

Way into it.

And a much-anticipated ongoing weekly ritual was born.

Architecture, landscape analysis, license plate styles, and sun angles are all grabbed in an effort to piece to together the riddle of Where.  The best part are the excerpts of user submissions and their line of geographical reasoning.  And boy can that reasoning be wildly off-base.  Take this scene:  people forthrightly place it continents away. At the other end of the spectrum are the Google Maps commandos who are 3-letter-acronym levels of scary in their ability to track down exact buildings and windows using familiar consumer mapping platforms. (Ed. note: author has only guessed correctly once, a scene from Cartagena, Colombia).

But what makes it particularly fun are the personal stories people share that are attached to their memories of place, accurate and otherwise: Geography as a trigger of memory and the sharp edges of lived experience too easily dulled by the passage of time. While there is indeed an intellectual rigor to piecing the clues together, the peculiar connection of location with emotion–which we all feel intuitively–is less categorizable but no less powerful, terrain navigated by few but most compellingly by Yi Fu Tuan.

At the risk of killing your productivity for the next couple of hours, here is a link to the Google Search page for past View From Your Window contests.

Returning to DeLillo, let’s give Father Paulus the last word:

“Everyday things represent the most overlooked knowledge. These names are vital to your progress. Quotidian things. If they weren’t important, we wouldn’t use such a gorgeous Latinate word. Say it,” he said.

“Quotidian.”

“An extraordinary word that suggests the depth and reach of the commonplace.”

 

 
—Brian Timoney