NeoGeography vs. GIS: The Steel Cage Death Match Continues

There has been a flurry of blogging the last couple of days over a post on the “All Point Blog” that “Neogeography is not GIS“. The most interesting part has been seeing the response from friends like, Peter Batty, Andrew Turner, and Daniel Flatla, who’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the topic in general. All three, and many others, had excellent points and I’ve been thinking on what would be valuable to add to the conversation.

I ended up with two relevant points 1) GIS and the GeoWeb are converging and will not be two distinct worlds for long and 2) it is all about the democratization of the technology. Several folks have blogged about the difference between GIS and the GeoWeb/Neogeography. I think it is like trying to draw lines in a river – as soon as you make them things change and they wash away. Why? Because geospatial technology in general is being democratized to allow non-professionals to utilize it. As the mass market demands increased functionality any division we artificially construct between GIS and the GeoWeb/Neogeography will be knocked down. The market does not care about definitions and boundaries they simply want solutions for their problems.

If this is true why all the dissonance? In short the answer is the market is being disintermediated. Which is a fancy b-school term meaning the middle man is being cut out. In order to make a map we used to need a GIS professional or back in the day a full blown cartographer. Now, in order to make a simple map we no longer need a GIS professional. We can go directly to a software application and make our own without any professional training. The middle man – the GIS professional – has been disintermediated. Removing the middle man never leaves the established industry very happy. In most drug cartel movies this is where lots of people get shot (Scarface, American Gangster, Blow etc.). Under the circumstances we should feel fortunate it is just a blog flame war

Does this mean the GIS professional will disappear? No, not at all, if anything it will make them more valuable. The democratization of the technology will make many more people aware of the benefits of geospatial technology and the many problems it can help solve. The skill sets of GIS professionals will likely change and be less centered around only operating a desktop application and incorporate more and more development skills, but the handwriting is not on the wall as to exactly where everything will go. As Andrew Turner wrote this is nothing new and lots of technologies and professions (journalism/blogging, office admin/word processing, television/YouTube, accounting/spreadsheets) have gone through very similar evolutions. The question is who will prosper from the evolution and who will fail.

Darwin never fails in this context – the species who best adapt survive. The “All Points Blog” post and Pitney Bowes lands squarely in the “not adapting” category. Nick Black of Open Street Maps / ZXV put it best when describing this type of traditional GIS behavior as “building complexity to ensure exclusivity”. The concept that those outside of the profession cannot understand the complexity of the science and it is no place for amateurs. In this case Pitney Bowes Software president, Mike Hickey boldly stating “there is no data creation and no spatial analysis” in neogeography. As many of the bloggers pointed out previously this is flatly false, but more importantly we will see more analysis and data creation tools coming out of neogeography. After spending two plus years working or making GIS data and tools more consumable – the challenge is not the complexity of geographic science, the challenge is how to simplify it for the general public. We’ll be putting our money where our mouth is, and next year showing what we’ve learned from the first try and how far the boundaries can be pushed.