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| GeoCommunity Mailing List |
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| Mailing List Archives |
| Subject: | RE: [gislist] RE: GISList: Cartography and Data Viewer |
| Date: |
08/28/2003 03:45:01 PM |
| From: |
Dimitri Rotow |
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Good... I like the specifics you raise because that lets us talk about
specific users and technologies. Let's dig in....
Well, I never indicated that there was anything wrong with FTP. In fact,
it's a great standard that enables interoperability. Also, you seem to
refer only to the "GIS user" in your use cases. What about folks that only
have a standard web browser and no GIS, even a low-cost one?
It's important not to broaden the term "GIS" so widely that it lose
effective semantic meaning. There are lots of people who look at maps and
would like to use maps as clip art. Such people don't use GIS as we know it
in the GIS community (for example, as a user of ArcView, MapInfo,
Intergraph, Manifold, Maptitude, etc might do to author a new map or to
examine data, analyze data, find existing relationships between data an
infer new ones, etc.) so I don't refer to them as "GIS users." Perhaps it
might be more appropriate to call them "map users" or simply "consumers."
If anything, one can conceive of a hierarchy of users based upon the
sophistication of their interaction with programs and data: I don't propose
these terms for common use, just to indicate what I see as levels of a
hierarchy:
Passive consumers - People who use maps as clip art with zero interaction or
configuration of the map. For them a map is but an image.
Active consumers - People who use consumer applications like DeLorme or
Streets and Trips to create elementary maps of their own within
highly-directed and constrained enviroments. For example, they might use
Streets and Trips or MapPoint to create an itinerary with turn directions,
etc.
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Power users - People who use programs like MapPoint or the more accessible
GIS programs like Manifold to create thematic maps, portray their data as
pushpins, etc, but basically constraining themselves to the existing map
data that's available to them. Such users are potentially voracious
consumers of data content from Federal holdings, because they are perfectly
capable of surfing the Web and downloading and using maps in a huge array of
formats. They also tend to often have surprisingly sophisticated abilities
to work with the data attributes of maps because even though they don't
necessarily want to draw new geometries, they sure as heck can have a lot of
experience from Access and Excel in dealing with data attributes. If the
price is right for real GIS and the GIS product is suitably Microsoft so it
may be easily learned, many of these people will step up to the next
category.
Beginning GIS users - People using classic GIS programs to do more
sophisticated analyses, create new maps based on existing data sets (perhaps
by editing, cutting, recombining, doing unions and the like).
Advanced GIS users - Do it all. Author new maps using sophisticated
techniques, mix remote sensing and raster data sets with vector content,
etc.
I've expressed the above hierarchy with examples of classic desktop
applications because that's where most people fit. However, in terms of
usage patterns you have to look closely at the technology to see where it
does and does not make sense to substitute a web-based or distributed or
DBMS-centric system for the desktop technology. For example, the first two
(and possibly the third as well) classes of users would be happy with
web-based delivery of images of maps. That's why millions of people use
MapQuest and similar services. In contrast the last two classes of users
very definitely get seriously unhappy when you constrain them with the speed
and poor user interfaces implied by poorly-designed distributed,
DBMS-centric or web-based technology.
Now, to answer your question about people who only have a web-browser and no
GIS. Those people are constrained by the nature of the choice they made to
not enjoying the capabilities they would have with a GIS. If they want
more, they can easily get more. However, they tend to be "above the line"
in the hierarchy above in that their use of the data is primarily passive:
they want to view things not work with things or create things and there
exists a large industry of user-friendly applications to service them.
Below the line comes a constituency of people who make active use of GIS
data.
There are various initiatives to combine functions in the hierarchy above.
For example, one might have a GIS shop in a county that does "real" GIS and
one might have a road crew that checks on maps they create using a portable
device that can browse the web.
Shouldn't they be able to access geospatial content as well and shouldn't
content providers be able to publish their content to make it accessible to
folks with a standard web browser that has no bells or whistles attached.
Yes and no. I don't think federal content providers should go into the
business of providing web
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