Location as a Feature

In the last post on the GeoIQ blog we talked about possible contradictions in the definition of GIS.  Tom Buckley had an interesting point this may be more of an American phenomenon than a global one.  Several others were more blunt in their adherence to GIS as the catch all term for location.  Giving it some thought focusing on labels seems to run the risk of devolving into polemics.  I think Terry Stigers summed it up well that it is the mind set that needs to change.  Another way to say this is evolving the culture.  Changes in technology is just one half of  the equation.  In that vein I’m going to make an attempt at doing a short series of posts on where we see this shift happening across the market.  Starting with the emergence of “location as a feature”.

While “Geographic Information Science/Systems” has evolved along a path of increasing specialization and complexity, location has emerged as a feature in an increasing number of technologies.  First, GPS enabled a larger number of people to create geographic data. This was followed by the incorporation of GPS into commodity technologies like mobile devices.  In addition location has permeated up the information technology stack with W3C specifications for adding location to Web browsers, and even the inclusion of location into desktop operating systems and routers.

The location component created by these technologies is a feature of an existing baseline, and not a new stand alone technology centered on location, as was developed with GIS.  The assumption of GIS is that little to no data is being produced outside of the professional workflow.  Hence the need to create the concept of “volunteered geographic information” to address it.  In mainstream IT location is just one feature of many features that is being incorporated into applications.  There is a different mind set around how location is conceptualized.  Further, the technology used to manage location data by the GIS community and those incorporating it as a feature to their applications is different.

The adoption of “location as a feature” has been massive in scale creating a different set of requirements than the smaller community that traditional GIS serves.  The graphic below covers just the adoption of mobile/location technologies to drive social applications, but gives a good scope of how large the user universe is:

The creation and innovation of technology that drove “location as a feature” happened outside the paradigm of GIS.  This occurred for several reasons.  1) GIS was built exclusively for working with geographic data and location is the center of the operating system.  For the rapidly growing Social-Local-Mobile (SoLoMo) space (Meeker 2011) location was just one of many components that were being leveraged, and was not the center of the operating system.  2) Data flowing from mobile devices in general, and through social networks specifically, was dynamic and not static.  Further, the data was coming at high speed (big events like the Super Bowl and New Years Eve can result in rates of 5,000-6,000 tweets per second from a location) and in massive volumes (155 million tweets in a day) (Twitter 2011).  90% of all data created ever has been created in the last two years (Tofel 2011).  This was not the technology paradigm when GIS emerged – data was static, in relatively small volumes and intended for a relatively small audience.  This is not to say GIS has not evolved, but it has iteratively adapted to requirements in its niche of practitioners, and not to the demands of the larger market that is served by SoLoMo.

There are those in the GIS community that see the data emerging from SoLoMo as not being a viable data source.  While we can debate the value of individual social networks the fact that there are billions of mobile devices creating masses of geospatial data on a daily basis is a reality.  Some of the data will be worthless and some will be of immense value.  As technology has shifted to deal with it so will the mind set of how we manage and analyze it.  I don’t think the answer to that is treating it as “volunteered geographic information” but that is for another post.