GEOTECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY
It’s a Mean Pinball Game
Bruce Westcott

   I confess: I’m anxious. The next-generation Internet protocol will make it possible for every person or device (in the world!) to have an Internet protocol address. Maybe you or your organization can provide some sort of Web-accessible geospatial service, you know that I need, when hunger or disaster strikes. Now your updated imagery service, sensor, or spatial widget can have its own URI (Universal Resource Identifier)!

   The Information Policy Subcommittee of the U.S. House advises, “There are tens of thousands of entities securing and utilizing an almost infinite amount of data for their individual goals and missions—not to mention emerging ‘new’ uses of geospatial data.”

   I immediately envision a cyber-world in which I’ll be even more confused than I am now when I try to buy toothpaste at Wal-Mart. It will be a world in which the numbers of aisles, with their shelves of toothpastes, are endless. Viewed from another perspective, there will be a tube sitting on some shelf out there just waiting to ooze the right flavor for me, and its marketing maven will be anxious that I know precisely where it is. How will I find what I want? I envision a giant electronic game of chance.

   Behold: Google, Yahoo, and others will fight to give me personalized search results, and tell the toothpaste folks just how to tag their toothpaste URI so that my search will turn it up. Right? Not so fast.

   Isn’t all the hardware needed to “wire” the world falling into place? It’s cheaper, faster, and more reliable, too. Implementation of crucial protocols and standards is inevitable and moving fast (Figure 1); examples include the new protocol for URIs, interoperability specifications from the Open GIS Consortium (OGC), and others.

   All of this will give us an infinite pick list of spatial data and services at our fingertips, potentially enabling us to perform complex spatial operations with the best available data 24/365, right? What’s more, most of the required infrastructure and resources are brought to us at a marginal cost that is negligible or transparent. The potential payoff has already motivated the providers of data, services, and infrastructure to make the required investments.

   This is a cyber world which offers incredible value to all of us. Or does it?

   Rather, isn’t it really a world in which we have to hedge our bets on using most of these resources, those that we don’t know enough to trust? Aren’t we actually oblivious to who is putting what content out there, and to their motives and competencies? How am I to know whether the most timely pricing/availability/location information for my toothpaste is available at www.walmartdeals.com or at www.deepdiscountstuff.net?

   My concern is that the value potential for Web-based geospatial data and services (and toothpaste as well) is compromised by a gap in the chain from producer to consumer. The gap is called “quality.” This term encompasses many concepts: timeliness, truthfulness, completeness, integrity, appropriateness, and more. High quality geospatial data and services surely are abundant, but there is no systematic, reliable way for producers to describe their quality using the same terms and technology. And consumers must be able to easily access “quality” information in order to judge the relative value of competing toothpastes on that seemingly endless numbers of shelves and aisles. For example:

• United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) nutrition labels accomplish the basic purpose for consumables, but you wouldn’t depend on them if there were a chance of plutonium in your peanut butter. The value (risk) of going nuclear for lunch simply requires information of higher quality or greater depth. But you believe the USDA is trustworthy and you know how to contact them. That knowledge conveys integrity, which itself has value.

• Standardized geospatial metadata often provides some information about candidate data sets for your geospatial application, but the most valuable information it conveys is usually the contact information. This allows you to ask follow-up questions about the “who, why, when, what?” that assure the quality you require. But how do you feel about a dataset you can download from ftp.phaedrus. org that has skeletal metadata and no useful contact information? This doesn’t sound as warm and fuzzy as USDA, does it?

   Don’t we need to invest in better technology and in the “quality” information required to support high-value decision making in cyberspace? Otherwise, the Web is really just a big pinball machine, and we’re all “deaf, dumb, and blind” kids out there hoping for some luck. But you already know the lyrics and the rest of the story.

About the Author

   Bruce Westcott is Metadata Products Manager for Intergraph Geospatial and Mapping and Geospatial Solutions (http://imgs.intergraph.com/smms/). He assists spatial information managers with strategic metadata deployment for the enterprise, and is a past president of the National States Geographic Information Council (www.nsgic.org). He can be reached at [email protected].

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