> > And what do you mean here by "the Geographic is unique, significant"? To > a computer scientist, this sounds at best funny I think. >
I get this a lot. One of these days, I'll develop it into an entire theme. Geographic Information is an attempt to represent the world around us in computer terms. This seems pretty easy if you start breaking down reality into features and attributes. Roads and rivers then fit nicely into a database. However, this representation, like a map, is inherently a lie. Much of Computer Science avoids these lies by focusing on "realities" that are inherently simplified. People want Google Earth to function like Second Life. The problem is that in Second Life the "reality" is the simplification - it is the lie. In Google Earth, all you get are lies with constant reminders of the difference between those lies and reality. When you zoom in on your house in Google Earth, does it look like it does right now? Who's car is parked out front? What season is it? If you attempt to create a representation that avoids these lies, you end up with the mythical one-to-one scale map. Modeling the world in a computer faces the flip-side of the same challenges facing artificial intelligence. Our immersion in the world around us is at one what makes us human (dasein) and enables our intelligence. But this immersion is consistently taken for granted but Computer Scientists while it is the very core of Geography. -Eric -- -=--=---=----=----=---=--=-=--=---=----=---=--=-=- Eric B. Wolf 720-209-6818 USGS Geographer Center of Excellence in GIScience PhD Student CU-Boulder - Geography
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