EOM April 2005 > ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE

Mark Eustis

Working in the geospatial trades today is like traveling by train 150 years ago. We travel down tracks built to fit the train we're on, and every railroad runs a different gauge. We make our own connections, ask permission to move from one platform to the next, carry our own baggage, and hope we don't forget something along the way. Transfer cost and complexity lock us onto our linear paths, isolated from lower-cost open development tools by proprietary systems and protocols. It doesn't have to be this way.

Back in the mid-1800s, there were a quite a few steam train suppliers, each with their own design philosophy. Theirs was a new market, and steam technology evolved on the job. If you were an early investor, your supplier specified the width of track to fit your engine, and provided engineers to help build your system. As demand grew, so might your track miles. Thanks to this custom approach, track gauge changed either at the end of your line, and almost certainly at the border, as did passengers and their baggage. Freight agents may have been pleased, but travelers were not. So, after decades of paying transfer costs, large shippers and consumers called for standardized track dimensions. In the U.S., the entire southern rail network was torn up and re-gauged to the Northern (and present) standard of 4ft, 8 1/2 inches on May 31st and June 1st, 1886.

Proprietary was fine in geospatial's early phase, but if we are ever to leave the tracks we're on now, we'll need content standards and easy access to common storage to make the transfer. Standards-setting (and seeking) groups in government, the private non-profit arena, and cross-industry consortia are all working toward this common goal. And although various interests drive the process, the move to common standards has developed real momentum. Just as it was in the age of steam, the largest users and consumers of the technology are the prime movers behind standards.

Open, accessible, and simplified standards in service, content, and implementations will transport the geospatial technologies from niche tools to an intrinsic part of the global IT infrastructure. But open tools and content are only part of the story. Program managers should start thinking in a less tool-centric way and instead follow a more action-focused (what information does the end-user really need?) development culture. Better access to geospatial technology will simplify and expedite the lives of the people who deliver our government, safety, and services . . . people who are the most logical and active users of context-sensitive information. Right now, when compared to general IT development, GIS is expensive and arcane. But when the lingua franca of GIS becomes as usable as HTML, then we'll really start going places.

Will the GIS market move across the proprietary divide onto a common platform? Nope, professionals will always need specialty tools. The content they create, however, will more frequently be written in standard formats, and loaded into common storehouses for easy access. Will the standards we adopt be an entirely new construct? Assuredly not: just as past is prologue, future standards evolve from the shape of current practice. How soon will a move to standards occur? Change will take longer than its advocates would like, although probably faster than proprietary folk would prefer... I think we'll see more and more open-standard programs within the next two to three years. One thing is certain: without a move to content standards, open storehouses, and cross-platform digital transparency, GIS will sit disconnected from the train of commerce like an unclaimed suitcase.

About the Author
Mark Eustis has almost twenty years of experience across the geospatial industry. He was part of the original Landsat commercialization team, held senior positions at major GPS manufacturers, built partner networks for a web mapping software company, developed wireless location-aware solutions, and introduced the ISTAR-process digital photogrammetric mapping system to the United States. Mr. Eustis lives and works in the Mid-Atlantic area.

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