MapBrief™

Since the rise of “neo-geography” 5-6 years ago, there has been heavy deployment of the adjective “authoritative”, especially by vendors who serve traditional producers of geospatial data . Unimpeachable accuracy and the gravitas of expertise are what is being implied here, especially in contrast to the unruly new worlds of crowd-sourcing and mashups of heterogeneous information. But the problem is that professionals define authority in units of centimeters while users–aka the public–define authority very differently.

Authority? That’s your position in Google’s search results.

In the US, real estate sites dominate address search results with "authoritative" geo info nowhere to be found

And that’s where our friendly neighborhood realtor enters the story. With beaming faces on business cards and the unshakable faith that it’s always a great time to buy, realtors have figured out search engine optimization (SEO), much to the detriment of the geospatial industry.  Because at least here in the US, type in any residential address into a search engine, and you’ll be sifting through a blizzard of real estate results before you’ll uncover any links to authoritative content directly produced by geospatial professionals.  Of course we users of the web don’t “sift”: if it’s not on the top half of the first page of results, it’s dangerously close to being invisible.

A couple of years ago, Jason Birch of Nanaimo, BC blogged about making municipal data more user-friendly by optimizing its Google-ability.  He laid out the rationale for creating searchable sitemaps for GIS data so it could be discovered the way people are accustomed to finding other information: via the search engine.  With the ascendance of REST-ful architectures that enable access to individual spatial features as unique resources via a standard HTTP request, all of the ingredients seemed to be in place to make authoritative geo information easily discoverable.

But it hasn’t happened. Instead we get ever more complicated, er, “rich” web mapping portals with one way in, and icons normal users often find confusing. Let’s start prioritizing SEO for Geo with the premise that Google may be a person’s first stop when looking for information. Sitemaps for search engine indexing are not a complicated technology. We recently rolled out a small project for a municipality with limited web resources, with SEO, that has yielded decent results in the first few weeks.

There is a great quote from Bill Parcells who was fond of assessing his teams’ performances by saying “you are what your record says you are.”  As an industry we need to wake up to the fact that in web mapping we’re playing by the rules of the web where what you are is largely a function of your search engine ranking. If reaching the public with your information is indeed the goal, then measuring authority strictly in terms of spatial accuracy misses the point in an impatient world where accessibility and findability trumps all.

Just ask a realtor.

—Brian Timoney

For better or worse –ok, worse–CNN’s John King remains the popular face of choropleth mapping in the US for his election night wizardry.  (Our friends across the pond definitely have the better of it with the BBC’s Emily Maitlis–I could watch this crisp analysis, touching on the areal unit problem even, for hours.) But with mapping tools such as Google Fusion Tables, GeoCommons, Tableau, et al,  now well within reach of non-GIS specialists, we are going to see proliferation of all manner of thematic maps on the web.

A few months back, a map of US Passport ownership by state, created by CGP Grey, a blogger with no particular mapping background, went viral, getting picked up by The Huffington Post, Andrew Sullivan, and urban theorist Richard Florida, among many others. Of course my professional eye was immediately drawn to some problems with the cartography, but something larger didn’t seem right:  frankly I didn’t believe the map.  To think that in some of our most populous states (CA, NJ, NY), more than 6 out of every 10 people you pass in the street have a valid passport? That didn’t pass the smell test, and in digging around for answers some larger themes emerged.

First, the obvious carto-geek stuff.  A blue color ramp with a blue background? Not recommended. The lighter hues of blue being associated with higher values should be reversed–increased saturation should reflect “more” of whatever variable is being mapped. If casual mappers take any tip to heart, it should be to visit Colorbrewer.org to get solid color ramps with which to represent your data.  The data breaks chosen work pretty well: round number increments that don’t confuse the viewer while showing the variation in the data, especially the states at each extreme of the distribution.

As for the data, the blogger should be give major props for explaining his assumptions and linking to a Google spreadsheet of his data.  Since state-level data was only available for 2007-2010, he extrapolated backwards another six years (passports are valid for 10 years) to get his estimates. But in 2007 there was a major change in US policy where, as part of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (Orwell-speak alert), passports were made mandatory for travel to Canada, Mexico, and parts of the Caribbean. Using 2007-2010 as a baseline then skews the numbers upwards: indeed his estimate of overall number of passport holders (@ 149M)  is about 30% higher than the actual aggregate number (114M) found here. More importantly, our map no longer says what we think it says since the high estimates would be concentrated in states that border Mexico and Canada, or have a disproportionate number of residents who travel to the Caribbean (think of the immigrant populations of NJ/NY/FL/IL). This fixation on the data is admittedly pedantic, but the map becomes significantly less compelling once these factors are weighed.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~

But let’s not bury an amateur mapper. Because in the cutthroat competition for attention on the Internet, he absolutely nailed it: he found a dataset others found compelling and mapped it in a way where dominant patterns were quickly perceived.  Bluntly put, people inferred the story he was trying to tell. In our world of ubiquitous data the skill of visual storytelling, especially on the ADD savanna of the web, is something we who “do” cartography and GIS on a daily basis would do well to ponder more deeply in our everyday work.

—Brian Timoney

“Imagine if only the manufacturer of a rifle were allowed to clean, fix, modify or upgrade that rifle.”

As a fire-team leader in the Marine Corps infantry in the early 1990s, a GPS was considered too costly and sophisticated to entrust to a grubby, lowly corporal such as myself. That the collective GPS/wayfinding technology of a batallion twenty years ago is easily bested by the kit bandied about by the typical suburban Boy Scout troop today is another banal example of the pace of technological change. But what is more interesting to ponder is that GPS was a very 20th century example of a military technology that eventually migrated into the consumer space. What happens when innovation happens in the other direction?

Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn has a bit where he contrasts the Pentagon’s 81-month IT procurement process with the development of a certain Apple product:  after two years, the former may have an approved budget, but “Steve Jobs is talking on his new iPhone. It’s not a fair trade.”  It’s this recognition of the importance of rapid iterations of innovation and deployment that make the recently released document Open Technology Development (OTD): Lessons Learned and Best Practices for Military Software such an interesting read.  Part philosophical overview, part detailed hashing out of gritty issues such as forkability and licensing, it takes as its premise that the US military is in need of a new “…way of developing, deploying and updating software-intensive systems that will match the tempo and ever-changing mission demands of military operations.”

The largest international gathering of open source geospatial professionals coming to Denver this September

An ever-quickening tempo and end-user requirements constantly in flux: does that describe your business environment? As a user of open source geospatial software (alongside commercial products) for the last half-dozen years, I’ve been fascinated by a decided shift in the rationale for open source adoption.

Hint: it’s no longer price.

Indeed, in the OTD document where they tick off the positives of open technology, cost is only mentioned after Increased Agility/Flexibility, Faster Delivery, Increased Innovation, Reduced Risk, and Information Assurance & Security. More than mere white papers, however, the DoD has begun to lay important groundwork for supporting open source development efforts with Forge.Mil (SourceForge-ish collaboration tools), and a more grass-roots military/civillian group Mil-OSS.  From this outsider’s view, it appears there are substantial attempts to work the problem from both the top-level macro view–procurement, licensing, and support issues–and just as importantly, creating a mechanism for bottom-up innovation where the women and men in the field can quickly and easily share best practices, specific problems solved, and field-tested hacks.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Perhaps the greater glory of the US military is not an ideological priority of yours.  Fair enough. But in your favorite sprawling,white-collar bureaucracy is software part of the problem or part of the solution?  More to the point, do internal attitudes towards software–the weary cynicism that nothing is to be done and let’s just be patient waiting for the Office 2007/Internet Explorer 8 upgrade–highlight a troubling passivity towards problem-solving in general? If the Department of Defense, where the gears grind exceedingly slow, see software not as a tedious IT procurement issue but as a strategic advantage to be exploited, then one can only hope that the boardroom (and its evergreen fondness for martial metaphor and analogy) will eventually be equally as perceptive.

<beginPitch> If the operational value of open source resonates even faintly within your organization, then we cordially invite you to join us in Denver this September for the FOSS4G International Conference covering all things geospatial and open. In addition to a broad-ranging program covering both beginner as well as deep-dive geeky fare, we’ve designed a standalone one-day program specifically for managers to understand how the different components of geospatial open source mesh together as well as co-exist with commercial assets (e.g. Oracle databases).  Just as important, we’ll  be discussing the financial value proposition of geospatial FOSS in both internal contexts as well as building profitable businesses on top of open source assets. </endPitch>

The contradiction of the 21st century battlefield is that despite the billions spent on sophisticated weapons systems, success is dependent on small-unit decision-making and tactical improvisation.  This crucial element of improvisation is greatly aided by tools that are open to field mods in response to ever-changing requirements.  Or, as memorably summed up by an Army attendee at the inaugural Gov 2.0 Summit, “only pack it if you can hack it.”

—Brian Timoney