Sean Gillies wrote:
It's curious how alien the concept of geographic entities identified
by URIs is to GIS folks. See Adena Schutzberg (not a programmer, but
no dummy) scramble to make sense of it:
http://apb.directionsmag.com/archives/6086-Linked-Geodata-OSM-Gets-Linkable.html.
For all the talk of "GeoWeb" in GIS, we still don't quite get the web.
Well, when you pack 80 lbs of baggage into a 20lb suitcase, it makes
that suitcase surprisingly hard to lift. With sentences like this one:
"LinkedGeoData currently comprises RDF dumps, Linked Data and REST
interfaces, links to DBpedia as well as a prototypical user interface
for linked-geo-data browsing and authoring."
you're not going to reach a very wide audience. The unprepared mind
chokes on these gobbets of concepts, packed so tightly in one sentence.
Adena's right to point out that most of us have to look up about every
third word in that announcement and even then it's still hard to make
sense of it. Of course, that announcement isn't meant for everyone, but
it reminds knowlessmen like me that GIS on the web can get complicated.
And as long as it remains portrayed as that complicated, we're not
likely to get anywhere until Google simplifies it and shows us how it's
done, like they did with web mapping a couple of years ago.
In fact, that's happening already. Look around and you'll see a growing
number of interesting mash-ups with a Google map component being
developed by people with little or no GIS experience. People who don't
know the difference between large and small-scale maps, or which one's
the longitude in a coordinate, or what "geocoding" means, are coming
up with some pretty clever and innovative mash-ups where location plays
a part. If GISers (or geowankers) focus too closely on the minutia of
standards and protocols instead of what they're for, we'll get caught
flat-footed again. (But it was amusing seeing the dominant GIS companies
come up off their beds of laurels and scramble to come up with a
plausible response as to why they didn't get there first!)
- Bill Thoen
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