How Implicit Geography is Making Geodata Mainstream

One of the things that was driven home to me at AAG was how geographers and GIS folks have always treated geography as something explicitly separate and special. If you were not trained in spatial theory you probably should not be mucking about with the geographic aspects of things. When we want to find geographic data we go to specialized geodata repositories. Even GeoCommons is centered around the explicit nature of geographic data and maps.

Increasingly I see this changing. Geographic attributes of our lives are becoming implicit. This is especially true when it comes to our digital lives. We expect when looking for information that if there is a geographic component then it will be made aware to us. The geography of information will be determined by the back end of technology and we the users will not explicitly have to ask for it.

This evolution was further cemented with Google announcing they will be mapping results for non local (read geographic) queries. Below you can see a search for “pizza” I did. The results assume that I may be looking for pizza near my geographic location, Arlington VA, and maps out pizza restaurants near by.

This is a subtle shift but I believe it has important implications for those of us into all things geographic. How can the rest of geographic data and analysis begin to become part of everyone’s implicit search for information?