Interesting points Alan and Landon, and I agree we have a long way to go handle the masses of geodata that exist today and the additional masses that will be available tomorrow (when Landon's next gen GPS comes to pass).
Maps are inherently models or abstractions of reality (despite our acceleration towards mirror worlds). In many ways this gets back to Renee's MAUP problem - one of the easiest way to abstract data is to aggregate it to larger units (census tracts, zip codes, counties etc.). While the promise of always working at the raw data level is tantalizing we are still a long ways off of that on the GeoWeb. If we look at the limits of KML file size support in Virtual Earth and Google Maps today it is roughly around 2mbs. There are limits of what you can handle in memory and limits on how much data you can render on the map. So, while you could conceivably have massive spatial databases of information your ability to serve up that data and make it consumable by the public is still severely limited. Just think about how hard it is to display an average size GIS data file in a GeoWeb application, especially a browser based application. The GeoWeb has done a great job dealing with points of interest and segmenting them into manageable chunks, but I agree with Landon that going the next step is going to take an incredible amount of work. Although it is definitely work worth doing. I believe the upside will dwarf what we've done with mostly local point data to date. FortiusOne Inc, 2200 Wilson Blvd. suite 307 Arlington, VA 22201 cell - 202-321-3914 ----- Original Message ----- From: "Alan Keown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [email protected] Sent: Wednesday, July 2, 2008 7:43:17 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern Subject: Re: [Geowanking] Critical Theory I agree with Landon, Sean a very interesting article. I can't accept the premise that "Scientific Method is dead" but, paraphrasing Landon, I believe there are models that are so vast that they can't be tested by experiment (eg the impact of climate change on crop production). In 2004 I attended a conference that had as its major theme the idea of sensors scattered through the environment as dust to provide data that would (more) precisely model the agriculural and ecological environment and lead to better responses to changes. I was struck at the time that managing this data would be a difficult, almost incomprehensible, task. In pondering this problem I had the idea that location (2D, 3D or 4D as required) provides a unique key for any model element in a database. (No two things can occupy the same location if your coordinate precision is fine enough.) Now that the "Google method" has become spatially enabled maybe they will be able to "move from traditional maps to a massive database of spatial information like the world has moved from print publications to the digital information available on the web" (to quote Landon). Cheers AlanK -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, 3 July 2008 1:02 AM To: [email protected] Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Geowanking] Critical Theory In light of the conversation on critical theory vs. positivism I thought folks might find the new Wired cover article interesting: The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory It is a biased link to post on my part, but interesting reading all the same. The debate in the comments is probably better than the article. In the print edition there are some cool geo visualizations of massive datasets (crop production in Iowa and FAA flight tracking over a day). best, sean FortiusOne Inc, 2200 Wilson Blvd. suite 307 Arlington, VA 22201 cell - 202-321-3914 _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
