Pat McDevitt

Worked in “University cap and gown” as a student. Seasonal business. Would go out and deliver these and return them later. Would load boxes into vans. Dispatcher give us list of addresses and directions. His van had no radio and no speedometer. Would get very used to finding signs of where schools would be, speeds changing. People would generally know where schools would be. People would say “it’s just down the street, you can’t miss it”. “just down the street” means different things in different people.

More recently worked at a company that would map hazmats. We would pull out these directions from envelopes. Asked colleagues for strangest things they’d found. One set including going to the end of a fence, continue north for the distance of two cigarettes on a slow horse. Not an uncommon measure of surveying in texas.

“All ‘navigation’ is local” “‘Where’ is relative”

Why in the past 25-30 years has this content been concentrated in a small number of companies?

The Long Tail. Hit based - older companies map places that get more “traffic”. “Niche”-based is newer organisations.

In the past this data was hand created. Eventually GIS applications became standard, modern, affordable. More people found they could become creators of GEO content. Local councils started having “geo” divisions. They could collect information that wouldn’t be economic for a big company to collect.

More recently tools were launched that would allow almost anyone to map data. We see that people will still go in and hand digitise this data. Filtering technologies are becoming much more important in where this long tail is going to go.

There’s a future that will contain both paleogeographers & neogeographers. I think the answer is “yes”.

Graph showing the types of data that people are mapping, words like “popular” “scenic” “clean” don’t describe data that a huge mapping company is likely to collect, but smaller more local ones might.

The smaller data could be collected better by local communities so we think we might leave it for them to collect.

Navigating the Future: Mapping in The Long Tail

Technorati tags: thelongtail, teleatlas, map, where, where2.0, where2008