Usability in the GeoWeb. Or: Am I afraid of web designers eating my lunch?

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…”

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?”.

When Geodatabase Design becomes Rocket Science

Some time ago I’ve read two interesting articles by Dave Bouwman about several problems with designing/upgrading ESRI ArcSDE geodatabases and that the whole design process actually should not be as hard as rocket science. Though for some reasons lots of things involved in this actually are cumbersome and in some area really feels like rocket science. One big issue with ArcSDE is the lack of tools DBA’s usually love to do backups, imports, exports, upgrades with. I think ESRI noticed that and eventually invented the Visio UML modelling tool. If you ask me… improvement for the worse.

“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.” D.N.A.

The whole ArcCatalog schema wizard thing (probably been extremely costly to develop) is not practical for database change management; neither scriptable nor automatable. It might be a convenient way to set up a database from scratch but it’s rather useless for upgrading existing schemas. So finally it is nothing else then the very dark side of ArcCatalog.

If I want to roll out a set of DB schema changes, I’ll release a bunch of SQL files. But what if I want to roll out changes specific to the geodatabase – like adding topological network rules or modifying a feature class? What I need for ArcSDE is a dead easy way to deliver short, comprehensible scripts that contain all this DDL stuff.

Just because I’ve had very good experiences with Apache Ant to handle database change management, I started to develop some Ant task’s for ArcSDE. For example if I want to add a column to a feature class, now I can add a simple task along with my usual Ant build scripts.

  <sde:addcolumn connection="sde.conn" tablename="BUILDINGS">
        <columndef name="BUILD_DATE" type="date" nullable="false"/>
  </sde:addcolumn>

Push all of the capability of ArcSDE down to the database level

Hopefully ESRI will continue the process of pushing all ArcSDE capabilities to the RDBMS, as it already been done with the implementation of the st_geometry type. And thus hopefully someday we’ll be able to do all the DBA tasks on the database level where it belongs.

The Ghost Map – A Tale of Victorian GIS Technology

The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic–And How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World

I just got a copy of Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map which came out in paper last week. The reason I’m really excited about this book is that it is amongst others about history of analytical cartography and solving urban sustainability problems as seen by Victorian London in the mid 19th century. In fact, as Johnson mentioned, there was an open question that time about whether such huge cities like London (over 2.5 million population in1850) will be still sustainable or whether it will collapse just as the ancient Rom did at a certain point.

The Story takes place in August 1854 when a cholera outbreak was raging in London. Dr. John Snow, a private physician and kind of Sherlok Holmes-like cross-disciplinary thinker, was able to link the epidemic to contaminated drinking water source from public pumps. He was drawing a map with elements like fatalities, water pumps and streets to advance an argument about the nature of the disease.

Yes, it’s a remarkable example of how people started to recognize the importance of spatial dimensions for better understanding complex problems in an urbanizing world. But it’s also a remarkable historical example of how map-making pretends to be objective, where there is a clear author’s intention behind. In this particular case, Snow’s intention was to reinforce his theory on the cause of the disease. In fact, his map was rather a graphic description or summary of his studies than an analytical tool.

The Ghost in the Map

Nevertheless, there is a memorable GIS story coming out of the book: the way of taking advantage of local knowledge and (amateur) cross-disciplinary thinking on a local level. It shows the importance to empower communities through GIS technology and participation.

For instance the 2005 Hurricane Katrina GISCorps disaster response is a good example for the importance of participatory GIS and community mapping. Teams of volunteers organized by the GISCorps responded very quickly and produced maps for the initial responders and briefing maps showing things like power outages or road closures. They also helped rescue teams through geocoding (translating) addresses into GPS coordinates. The nub of the matter: all these efforts could only be accomplished by the community itself (in close collaboration with private industry).

PS: Seems that the guys from Riverhead Books produced a little trailer cartoon, which by the word of Steven Johnson can be described as “Yellow Submarine meets 28 Days Later” :)

Intergeo – 2 days to go

Intergeo is now just around the corner, bags packed and ready to go to Leipzig this week. Unfortunately, this year the event clashes with FOSS4G in Victoria, Canada, so i’ll miss out on some GIS fellows.

In the run-up to the Intergeo, I was glad to read a good in-depth article on Geoweb from the german weekly newspaper Die Zeit.

After last years success, OSGeo will organize another Open Source Park as part of the exhibition.