Mapping Hacks

The following is an except of an email exchange between me, Jo, Rich, and
Tyler. Rich’s response to Tyler’s question was so good that I just had to post
it here.

> You know we are different breeds though, right? You guys
talk ‘location’, I talk ‘GIS’ - is that fair to say?

At one level, thinking ‘locative’ means doing geo stuff
without actually having learned the traditional geo toolsets

Dirk-Willem van Gulik talked about the newspapers publishing information
on tidal levels/flood warnings in the Netherlands (where he is from). The
hard core GIS folks were against it, talking about how the newspaper was
using imperfect data, and how that precision mattered. How, in fact,
inches of error made the difference literally between life and death.

As it turned out, the public loved the data, imperfect as it was, and
turned out to be perfectly capable of applying the appropriate quality
filters To not make life or death decisions based on the morning’s post.

This brought up the whole issue of precision versus ubiquity. Which is
better, a limited high resolution data set, or a crappy data set with
universal coverage? The answer to me seems obvious: ‘yes.’ Some folks
get stuck on either side of that, arguing furiously for precision, less
often for universal coverage at the cost of precision/accuracy.

I think that the whole of existing GIS practices and tools are
interesting, but they often are trying to answer questions that I am not
that interested in asking, or perhaps better stated, they don’t address
the questions that I am interested in.

Read the rest of this post…

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