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| GeoCommunity Mailing List |
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| Subject: | Re: [gislist] What is happening to GIS? |
| Date: |
10/03/2005 06:05:01 AM |
| From: |
John Lee |
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Dear all,
a few thoughts:
1. Don't despair, there's still lots of good stuff going on out there.
I'm thinking particularly of the open source community where there are
lots of tech-savvy GIS enthusiasts. For example, in reaction to the
dominance of a few software vendors I have started using as many open
source tools as possible - e.g. Mapserver
(http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/) and gdal/ogr
(http://www.remotesensing.org/gdal/ and http://ogr.maptools.org/).
Although these are tech-led they are very usable products and make GIS
exciting again (perhaps because they require a little more work then
merely clicking a pull-down menu!!). Read lots more about the open
source GIS world by subscribing to the geowanking newsgroup
(geowanking@lists.burri.to) and I can thoroughly recommend Mapping Hacks
by Erle, Gibson & Walsh published by O'Reilly (N.B I have NO links with
the authors/publisher, I just think its a good book).
2. I think we are all a bit guilty here. For too long we have been seen
as the 'mapping person at the end of the corridor': I don't think that
as a community we have 'advertised' GI as well as we might have done.
Consequently, 'geography' has been taken from us by the techy folks -
Google for example. Having said this I think there has never been a
better time to be involved in the GI sector: the excitement caused by
Google maps and others is fantastic (see above).
3. Perhaps GI has changed for ever - with the widespread availability of
easy to use GIS software and Internet-applications, GIS practitioners
perhaps face the sort of changes that typists faced with the advent of
word processing software. Of course, Word/WordPerfect etc. didn't sound
the death knell of the typed word or the secretary - in fact, the
reverse happened!
I say celebrate the fact that GI has such a high profile at the moment -
embrace those enlightened programmers who have an interest in the
subject and work with them rather than against them!!
Cheers
John
--
***************************************************
Dr. John Lee
Post-doctoral Researcher in Biodiversity Informatics
Spatial Ecology & Landuse Unit (SELU)
School of Biological & Molecular Sciences
Oxford Brookes University
Gipsy Lane
Oxford
OX3 0BP
UK
Tel.: (+44) (0)1865 483269
Fax.: (+44) (0)1865 483242
Email: jlee@brookes.ac.uk
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