Dave Bouwman gave a nice presentation on “Usability in the GeoWeb” at the Texas GIS Forum. I found it very good and each of the 140 pages worth to look at. It has some really enlightening remarks on today’s usability issues with WebGIS sites. In fact most of today’s WebGIS applications are way too complex, intimidating and not focused on the applications real purpose. A plethora of incomprehensible toolbar items, table of content widgets, generic search formulars will overstrain users and slow down the whole interface.
I strongly agree with Dave Bouwman’s assumption that this is the result of a long lasting strategy of trying to cram desktop GIS into the browser with GIS manufacturers concentrating on developing utterly generic “out-of-the-box” WebGIS products. So this wants us GIS developers make to believe that we are able to produce WebGIS applications in a jif. But the simple fact is that 99% of so called WebGIS apps have a quite narrow purpose, thus need pretty focused functions and user interfaces instead of bloated generic UI’s.
Am I afraid of web designers eating my lunch?
… Nope, quite the contrary! Good web sites need a lot of knowlegde in usabilty design. And since web designers usually offer this kind of knowledge, I would appreciate a much closer collaboration with them. Web design actually is not my bread and butter. I would rather like to concentrate much more on things like backend GIS functions, geocoders, tile servers etc. In other words, as a GIS developer I’ll gladly share my lunch with web designers where this task-sharing increases my margin for more potentially feasible projects. Finally, I think this way everyone will get more lunch by letting everyone do what they do best.
“Demolishing thousands of years of history…”
September 5, 2008
Can you remember the time when the prophets announced death of cartography by Google Maps & Co? Well nevertheless today we are experiencing lots of high quality cartography products; just have to look at the Le Monde diplomatique and the Atlas of Globalisation (for one thing). Even on the internet: for instance look at all those map making going on at the Wikipedia. Nope, cartography is still alive and well. Actually it is so alive, that it is called neogeography by some other prophets.
Now there is another discussion raised in the UK, whether british history and cultural heritages is threatened by …you have three guesses… Google Maps? The accusation: many internet maps fail to show interesting land marks such as flea markets, museums and other tourist traps. “Corporate cartographers are demolishing thousands of years of history” said Mary Spence, President of the British Cartographic Society. Yet once again, after motorcycles replaced horses, the civilised world is on the verge of doom. Isn’t it? No (not this time); for a simple reason: If I want to get into tourist traps, I buy me tourist map. Google Maps itself is like a road map, specialised for navigating from A to B. Whoever wants to stroll from Queensway station to the Royal Geographic Society and loves to discover all those beautiful roadside attractions would likely use another kind of map.
So, to make a long story short, if there is a problem, then most likely it will be of the same type as: “I can’t see the sky while travelling on the tube“.
However, recently Google added a layer of georeferenced Wikipedia articles to it’s Map. And this simple example shows the true challenge the Geoweb is facing right now. We shouldn’t blame internet map providers for showing or not showing this and that on their maps. Instead we should care about how to spatially connect all those information flying around the web in a semantic way. How can we draw spatially related information out of Wikipedia, categorise and connect it with other data or drawing geocoded locations out of books from the Project Gutenberg.
Dickens' London Map
Just for an example lets take this nice Charles Dickens’ London Map I’ve found. Ambitious efforts are now being made to produce similar maps from any arbitrary digital text due to sophisticated geocoding techniques. These are the true problems to be solved. Then I’m pretty sure we will see better and far more interesting city or tourist guides online then ever printed to date. Imagine, Wikipedia or OpenStreetMap could answer questions like “Where are settings or locations of plot events of victorian novels located in London’s Soho?”.
