That's right all of you oldschoolers out there. Neogeography isn't all that bad, in fact, it is actually really amazing. And for the uninitiated GIS luddites out there still banging away at there ArcInfo command line who are wondering what I mean by neogeography, you had better figure it out quickly.
It has taken me some time to admit this. I am an old school GIS pro myself. I too, remember the days of plotting maps using 1000's of lines of scripting code (AML), entering endless commands into a black consol screen, yielding mesmerizing screens of lines, nodes or vertices and transforming data coordinate systems -- manually (sorry neogeos, this only makes sense to us old folk)! People honestly thought us GIS folks were magicians, and we thought it too.
Then, it was finally possible to actually publish these complex, sophisticated, and elegant geographic products (maps, datasets, etc) on to the web while providing some kind of interactive capabilities as well. Sure it was slow and clunky but still pretty amazing. During this period, my career objective was to master this emerging technology. However, this meant a skill-set upgrade, even after graduating just a few years earlier. So off I went, emersing myself in web technology training and after a couple of years, I became pretty good at it. This was the start of my long lasting love/hate relationship with that ever popular Internet Mapping Server we all know and love . Providing GIS functionality online, now thats the Holy Grail. Wrong!
People don't care about GIS. Sure there is a niche for those of us who understand projections, geoprocessing functions, linear referencing, geometric networks, etc... but most don't. And now that the whole world is leveraging the geo portion of information and the web, we too must come to acknowledge this. And through this acknowledgment, an important epiphany, a least for me was not to discredit neogeos and their tools of choice but to embrace them. Think about it, what an advantage we old school GIS folks have if we only step back and realize that things are changing and it's not a bad thing. Don't think of it as a threat but an evolution of GIS into GIS 2.0 if there is such a thing. We can have the best of both worlds.
It has taken me some time to admit this. I am an old school GIS pro myself. I too, remember the days of plotting maps using 1000's of lines of scripting code (AML), entering endless commands into a black consol screen, yielding mesmerizing screens of lines, nodes or vertices and transforming data coordinate systems -- manually (sorry neogeos, this only makes sense to us old folk)! People honestly thought us GIS folks were magicians, and we thought it too.
Then, it was finally possible to actually publish these complex, sophisticated, and elegant geographic products (maps, datasets, etc) on to the web while providing some kind of interactive capabilities as well. Sure it was slow and clunky but still pretty amazing. During this period, my career objective was to master this emerging technology. However, this meant a skill-set upgrade, even after graduating just a few years earlier. So off I went, emersing myself in web technology training and after a couple of years, I became pretty good at it. This was the start of my long lasting love/hate relationship with that ever popular Internet Mapping Server we all know and love . Providing GIS functionality online, now thats the Holy Grail. Wrong!
People don't care about GIS. Sure there is a niche for those of us who understand projections, geoprocessing functions, linear referencing, geometric networks, etc... but most don't. And now that the whole world is leveraging the geo portion of information and the web, we too must come to acknowledge this. And through this acknowledgment, an important epiphany, a least for me was not to discredit neogeos and their tools of choice but to embrace them. Think about it, what an advantage we old school GIS folks have if we only step back and realize that things are changing and it's not a bad thing. Don't think of it as a threat but an evolution of GIS into GIS 2.0 if there is such a thing. We can have the best of both worlds.
