The following article is an excerpt from “The Power of Where: A Geographic Approach to the World’s Greatest Challenges,” which will be released next month. Written by Esri president Jack Dangermond, the new book explores the many ways spatial analysis is helping individuals and organizations across the globe perceive and understand data to solve some of today’s most complex problems.
Maps in some form have always supported and extended our innate desire and ability to understand where we are in relation to the natural and built environment. Maps show us where we are, lend order to complex environments, and put our surroundings into context by layering in new information to reveal patterns and trends.
Nowadays, we apply digital technology to mapmaking. Like all fields of human endeavor, the digital revolution has transformed cartography—the art and science of drawing maps. Maps are a simple and efficient way to understand and communicate quickly. Looking at a spreadsheet, we see rows and columns of data. Using charts and graphs, we see patterns.
But when that same data is presented on a map, we suddenly have locational context for the information. Because most of us are already familiar with geography, we can understand the data much faster and more intuitively when we see it as a map. Maps are a sort of cognitive prosthesis. They extend and amplify human thought and analytical reasoning in three primary ways:
Archiving information: Because humans can hold only so much in their heads at once, maps record information that can be recalled, used later, and disseminated, similar to the way that the invention of writing enabled us to communicate across time and space.
Seeing the unseen: Maps show us an invisible world beyond our direct (and limited) sensory perspectives. They are not merely recording the world like a photograph. A map may show the layout of a city seen from above, an animated humidity pattern for the past month, or a predictive model of a disease outbreak. Maps expand our cognitive playground outward so we can better understand our world.
Reducing complexity: Maps derive much of their value from reducing the messy and overlapping complexity of reality into something focused and understandable. Maps embody the art and science of data reduction as intentionally abstracted representations of our world. A map of rainfall doesn’t literally draw raindrops; it uses symbols to stand for things, what academics call semiotics.
Web Mapping: A New Geographic Language
Online maps are ubiquitous on our laptops, smartphones, smartwatches and other devices. Consumer mapping technologies such as MapQuest and Google Maps helped make using digital maps as routine as sending a text or browsing the web.
Intuitive and relatively easy to use, web mapping brought geography into our everyday lives, and we give it hardly a thought. Mobile apps allowed people to navigate and see where things are located, search by location, and get from one place to the next.
Geographic information system (GIS) technology has pushed this concept much further. Every web map is an app. These more intelligent and capable web maps support analytics and the ability to drag new data onto them. They support sketching and sharing and allow access from almost any device. They also allow access to almost unlimited amounts of geographic information behind the map.
Web maps help users work and interact with geographic content organized as layers. Organizations and just about anyone can share these maps on the web and across smartphones and tablets.
Each web map contains a reference base map, additional data layers, and GIS tools that work with these layers. The tools can do simple tasks, such as panning, zooming, or measuring distances, or opening a pop-up window when we click on the map, or do more complex work, such as performing spatial analysis on crop production across the more than 3,200 counties of the United States.
The internet is the most significant catalyst for the information society we live in today. The development and growth of the web has connected everyone to a common virtual geographic information system for the planet.
Geospatial data resides on the web in public sites such as ArcGIS Online and centers of information, or portals, maintained by thousands of government agencies, private companies, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). GIS and its many components—maps, apps, analytic tools, and geographic information databases, are increasingly online and available.
Advances in GIS technology have brought a surge of new, highly focused geocentric information products, such as this dashboard of Australian tree crops.
Information technology has reached an inflection point around how we work, collaborate with others, and share information. Society has embraced apps to manage virtually all aspects of modern life.
We carry pocket-sized devices that hold more computational power and data storage than computers that filled up entire floors of buildings when I attended graduate school in the 1960s. And artificial intelligence (AI) has rapidly permeated the online environment (and our social and work lives) in intriguing yet sometimes concerning ways.
Because of advances in GIS technology, we are
- shifting from standalone databases to interconnected global Web GIS,
- using mobile, automated, secure, and configurable GIS,
- adopting individual user identities and access based on our credentials,
- accessing the increasing availability of innumerable intuitive maps and apps on the web, much of it freely available, and
- creating digital models in 2D or 3D to show layers of Earth as snapshots in time, over periods of time, and in real time.
These advances are the result of thousands of GIS departments, groups, agencies, and nonprofits building and sharing geospatial data infrastructures to support their decades of work. Their work includes the compilation of foundational data layers and standard basemaps that underpin their geographies and applications.
Just as the internet emerged to interconnect everything and all of us, the emerging geospatial infrastructure promises to help address the complex human challenges we now face.
Yet even with all these advances, technology alone will still not be enough. We must also continue to think creatively, apply our best geographic tools, and affirm the rigorous science behind our work to build public trust.
These challenges are a big set of problems, but I’m an optimist. I think we’re up to it.
We all have roles to play, from GIS professionals and civic leaders to community scientists, students, educators, and people who use GIS because they want to solve a problem in their neighborhood. That’s the bottom line. Each of us in our own way, with our unique understandings, skillsets, and tested methods, can do our best work through the magic of our maps, visualizations, and analyses.
Learn more about how individuals, communities, and nations are using modern mapping technology to build a better future, as detailed in “The Power of Where: A Geographic Approach to the World’s Greatest Challenges.” The new book from Esri Press is available in paperback and as an ebook August 6.
Visit powerofwhere.com.
Disclaimer: Views Expressed are Author's Own. Geospatial World May or May Not Endorse it
