CoastGls'99: geomatics and coastal environment
The Web
At present the Web's main impact relates to its use for discovery, to use
it to find where other people have data, and help you get in touch with
them. Once you find out where certain data may exist, you can then
speak to the owners of those data on the phone, or perhaps send them
a fax or an e-mail, to find out more about the data. Whereas the Web
of the future is likely to be more interactive, and this will have an
impact. We will use the Web not to deliver data, which is what it can
do today, but as a means to deliver information. At present, you can
download data from the Web, you can download sorne maps, you can
find sorne metadata, but the day will come when it delivers you sorne
information which you can then use to build up knowledge. But the
Web is never going to deliver you sorne knowledge.
Away trom maps?
At the Cambridge Conference this year (sponsored by the UK Ordnance
Survey), there were 240 members, representing 72 mapping agencies
from around the world. It was interesting that the main conclusion to
come out of this conference was that most mapping agencies are trying
to re-engineer themselves. A few of them, for example those in Sweden
and New-Zealand, no longer talk of themselves as mapping agencies:
they are geographic information repositories; they are geographic information resource centres. They are actually producing new marketing
literature, to get away from the fact that they once made maps. In the
future, a map is just going to be a by-product of something they do.
Now this is a radical change coming from the mapping side of GIS, and
it is an underlying model that goes much deeper. The coastal zone
corn munit y is a user community of maps. We also do create maps,
mainly for visualisation purposes, to get information across to a local
council or whoever, but this latter role is also now being taken on board
by mapping agencies themselves, partly because they are going digital. The Ordnance Survey in Great Britain no longer has any maps;
there is no map library any more; the "map" is completely contained
within the computer. You want a map? They will create a map for you.
They can create whole new products in two days, a product they did
not have two days earlier. It is aU on the database.
Managing 3D and 40
Looking at GIS generally, and coastal zone managers as users, GIS is
extremely important, both as a data visualisation tool and as a spatial
analysis tool. But it goes back to a paradigm from the early sixties,
when it was developed in Canada. It was two-dimensional, whereas in
the coastal zone we have always needed three-dimensional. AIso, GIS
has never had a time base on it - it is not temporal which is also something we needin the coastal zone. It was interesting to hear the heads
of two or three major GIS vendor companies in the last year, talking
about the se issues at major conferences, suggest that "these are technological problems with GIS, but do not worry, we are moving ahead, and
314
The Web
At present the Web's main impact relates to its use for discovery, to use
it to find where other people have data, and help you get in touch with
them. Once you find out where certain data may exist, you can then
speak to the owners of those data on the phone, or perhaps send them
a fax or an e-mail, to find out more about the data. Whereas the Web
of the future is likely to be more interactive, and this will have an
impact. We will use the Web not to deliver data, which is what it can
do today, but as a means to deliver information. At present, you can
download data from the Web, you can download sorne maps, you can
find sorne metadata, but the day will come when it delivers you sorne
information which you can then use to build up knowledge. But the
Web is never going to deliver you sorne knowledge.
Away trom maps?
At the Cambridge Conference this year (sponsored by the UK Ordnance
Survey), there were 240 members, representing 72 mapping agencies
from around the world. It was interesting that the main conclusion to
come out of this conference was that most mapping agencies are trying
to re-engineer themselves. A few of them, for example those in Sweden
and New-Zealand, no longer talk of themselves as mapping agencies:
they are geographic information repositories; they are geographic information resource centres. They are actually producing new marketing
literature, to get away from the fact that they once made maps. In the
future, a map is just going to be a by-product of something they do.
Now this is a radical change coming from the mapping side of GIS, and
it is an underlying model that goes much deeper. The coastal zone
corn munit y is a user community of maps. We also do create maps,
mainly for visualisation purposes, to get information across to a local
council or whoever, but this latter role is also now being taken on board
by mapping agencies themselves, partly because they are going digital. The Ordnance Survey in Great Britain no longer has any maps;
there is no map library any more; the "map" is completely contained
within the computer. You want a map? They will create a map for you.
They can create whole new products in two days, a product they did
not have two days earlier. It is aU on the database.
Managing 3D and 40
Looking at GIS generally, and coastal zone managers as users, GIS is
extremely important, both as a data visualisation tool and as a spatial
analysis tool. But it goes back to a paradigm from the early sixties,
when it was developed in Canada. It was two-dimensional, whereas in
the coastal zone we have always needed three-dimensional. AIso, GIS
has never had a time base on it - it is not temporal which is also something we needin the coastal zone. It was interesting to hear the heads
of two or three major GIS vendor companies in the last year, talking
about the se issues at major conferences, suggest that "these are technological problems with GIS, but do not worry, we are moving ahead, and
314