Stephen, >From my experience this issue has been a "bug-bear" for GIS since almost the very beginning... and in any forum where I've seen it raised it always gets passed over in favour of "More Standards", "More Technology" and/or "More Data". (And: No matter how many times you say "I'm not bagging anyone's efforts, there will be people who think you are.)
So, for my part, I'm not surprised it hasn't grabbed a lot of people. At the risk of leeching some of of your "whipping boy" status I'll venture my opinion on why this is so: Search Engines are a lot of work and they are not cool. RDF, Categorisation, Taxonomy, Ontology, Organisation - they all take a lot of effort and there is very little JLAT (Jesus, Look At That) factor involved in the result. If you need any reassurance as to the importance of the points you raised remember that Google, ESRI and Microsoft have already announced significant investment in building up the Search & Recovery infrastructure available to gisers. Google and Adobe (who have now "gone geo" with the release of Acrobat 9.0) as well as many others, are building up the capabilities for "offline" persistence of online services and data... These are small steps but there is serious effort here. It is a significant problem for paleo gisers as well as for neos. Keep asking, keep thinking - there is a solution out there somewhere. Cheers AlanK -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of stephen white Sent: Thursday, 26 June 2008 9:23 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Geowanking] Spatial analysis was Re: MapMaker On 26/06/2008, at 2:04 PM, Mike Liebhold wrote: > And despite Stephen White's and Schuyler Erles earlier comments > diminishing the importance of "red dots", besides 3D, another > important frontier is learn true geospatial analysis; learning to form > proper queries for the -specific- dots, lines or blobs from what is > growing into an immense web of geocoded data. I'm a bit surprised to find myself the poster (or whipping) boy for wanting to go beyond map mash-ups. It just seems very obvious to me that mash-ups of all kinds will always be specialised interfaces that have, and suffer, from all the same problems as layers in GIS. When trying to find information, what is the difference between a clumsy search field, a clumsy layers box, a clumsy bunch of red dots, or basically any of the current approaches? They all end up at the same original problem of being unable to specify what is wanted. There are two components to this problem. The first is being unable to accurately, without bias, specify what is being searched for. The second is being unable to accurately, wihtout bias, sort information into searchable categories. That is the same valley of death that mash-ups dive into every time. They always categorise information in the first place, then want the information searched by category. Categories are the problem. Categories are not the solution. Hence my push to look back towards the original data with its 3d, time, location, and photographic capture by nature. Now given a bunch of raw data, how CAN it be organised (not categorised) such that it can be searched by the same means? I can only be the poster (or whipping) boy for one topic at a time. So I won't expand further until the discussion is more amenable to this specific avenue. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
