On 25/06/2007, at 8:19 AM, Frank Warmerdam wrote:
Well, it might qualify as arrogant to think I'll just take your
word on this.
Of course, though I was hoping that the merits of the point made is
independent of how famous I am... even if I was Noam Chomsky, a
healthy degree of scepticism is still worthwhile!
I think you would have to provide a more detailed explanation
of what it is the GIS folks have wrong and why it is our problem to
resolve it.
I believe that the goals and aims of geographical systems is to
connect people with available information. While the general populace
is not regularly using such systems, then I would deem those systems
as failed. The first real success will be when the general populace
routinely use such systems, and we're starting to see the first hints
of that with Google Maps.
I acknowledge that this is an arbitrary measure that ignores the many
years of useful results that have been extracted from GIS systems,
however I anticipate the days where mobile phones and monitor glasses
provide augmented reality overlays, and believe that we need to have
systems that can handle the full range of the human experience.
In particular, I remember reading a section of Feynman's
autobiography where he noted with amazement that students in his
physics classes didn't make the connection between polarised light
and the reflected sunlight coming off a lake of water. I would love
to render additional information over the human senses, so that
polarisation is visible.
The long term objective would be to allow people to directly perceive
long term trends and collected information, rather than reacting only
to immediate stimuli. Unfortunately, GIS is self-selecting itself out
of this domain of research, despite specifically being named as
though it should be handling this kind of thing.
On the other hand, I don't define my project in terms of standards,
and I
free go beyond them, or develop my own approaches where there is
nothing
appropriate.
Sounds like a well balanced approach. Thanks for responding.
Steve.
--
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