Conclusion
Making GIS more user-friendly
On the wider stage, there has been much discussion, and development
efifort, devoted to making GIS more user-friendly. The means of achieving
this has been a frequent topic for debate in many GIS-related meetings and
on-line discussion groups in recent years. The main concern here is to
make GIS more accessible and thus optimise effective GIS use, because GIS
is still often seen as being very complex. While these are important
matters, are we approaching the problem from the right direction?
Should we be trying to make GIS more user-friendly? Perhaps we
should accept that GIS will always be inherently complex, since the
systems are designed and developed to help us manage geographical
complexity, and instead concentrate on providing appropriate training
and education for users, in order to better equip them to use the technologies available. If not carefully thought-out and executed, enhancing
user-friendliness could run the nsk of coming perilously close to a
“dumbing down” of GIS.
Institutional questions
We also need to consider the type of role that GIS is expected to fulfil
within an organization, because this is yet another area where changes
seem to be m progress. If we look at the early years of GIS, most of the
pioneering systems tended to fulhl one of two primary functions, namely
the digital production ol maps on the one hand, and adding spatial
search and retrieval functionality to databases on the other. In many
contexts, GIS is still used for digital cartography, or as a means of storing,
retrieving and displaying data using geography as the primary search
mechanism. However, there is a move now beyond such uses, towards
more integrated and advanced decision-support systems, where the GIS
is actually helping decision-makers plan strategies and undertake other
policy-making tasks. Going even beyond this important step, there is
evidence that GIS is becoming mcreasingly adopted as part of a much
wider scientific research methodology: this was particularly demonstrated in a number of presentations from our French colleagues at this
meeting, where we saw GIS being used as an aid to better understanding
of coastal processes, and other phenomena.
Standards
Somebody once said, rather cynically perhaps, that the nice thing
about standards is that there are so many to choose from”! We have heard
much discussion here about standards. We were told how the researchers
were faced with a choice between American and European standards
for metadata, and m the end decided to take a hybrid. While it is all
too clear why such a decision might be taken, one also wonders whether
a hybricl between two standards is not rather defeating the purpose of
having these standards in the first place? If the standards are not good
enough, then perhaps they need revisiting and reassessment or revision.
That is another question, but if we have standards, we should make
every endeavour to adhere to them.
309
Making GIS more user-friendly
On the wider stage, there has been much discussion, and development
efifort, devoted to making GIS more user-friendly. The means of achieving
this has been a frequent topic for debate in many GIS-related meetings and
on-line discussion groups in recent years. The main concern here is to
make GIS more accessible and thus optimise effective GIS use, because GIS
is still often seen as being very complex. While these are important
matters, are we approaching the problem from the right direction?
Should we be trying to make GIS more user-friendly? Perhaps we
should accept that GIS will always be inherently complex, since the
systems are designed and developed to help us manage geographical
complexity, and instead concentrate on providing appropriate training
and education for users, in order to better equip them to use the technologies available. If not carefully thought-out and executed, enhancing
user-friendliness could run the nsk of coming perilously close to a
“dumbing down” of GIS.
Institutional questions
We also need to consider the type of role that GIS is expected to fulfil
within an organization, because this is yet another area where changes
seem to be m progress. If we look at the early years of GIS, most of the
pioneering systems tended to fulhl one of two primary functions, namely
the digital production ol maps on the one hand, and adding spatial
search and retrieval functionality to databases on the other. In many
contexts, GIS is still used for digital cartography, or as a means of storing,
retrieving and displaying data using geography as the primary search
mechanism. However, there is a move now beyond such uses, towards
more integrated and advanced decision-support systems, where the GIS
is actually helping decision-makers plan strategies and undertake other
policy-making tasks. Going even beyond this important step, there is
evidence that GIS is becoming mcreasingly adopted as part of a much
wider scientific research methodology: this was particularly demonstrated in a number of presentations from our French colleagues at this
meeting, where we saw GIS being used as an aid to better understanding
of coastal processes, and other phenomena.
Standards
Somebody once said, rather cynically perhaps, that the nice thing
about standards is that there are so many to choose from”! We have heard
much discussion here about standards. We were told how the researchers
were faced with a choice between American and European standards
for metadata, and m the end decided to take a hybrid. While it is all
too clear why such a decision might be taken, one also wonders whether
a hybricl between two standards is not rather defeating the purpose of
having these standards in the first place? If the standards are not good
enough, then perhaps they need revisiting and reassessment or revision.
That is another question, but if we have standards, we should make
every endeavour to adhere to them.
309