GIS on the web is OK….sometimes
Something caught my eye the other day – it was a tweet about the usability of GeoExt as toolkit for building web mapping applications.
In the past couple of years it’s been popular to criticise web mapping applications which were\are designed based upon the expectations of desktop GIS users. Before we all jump on the band wagon we should remember that these were expectations built by the GIS industry advancing towards the web – vendors sold server software based upon the ability to share the power of GIS to the masses. Many of these applications were built by those that now openly criticise them. In some cases their critique has been justified based upon a failure to captivate a larger audience with these applications.
In the past 5 years in the GIS industry we’ve measured our success perhaps most frequently against Google Maps – have you ever heard a client or customer say “I want it to be as simple as Google Maps”? When we use Google Maps as our measuring stick we are looking at an application which has had universal success. However in our rush to disparage the last 10 years of web mapping applications in favour of simpler more targeted applications have we forgotten something which is valued?
Geographic Information Systems
Much of the criticism levelled at these ‘old school’ web mapping applications is justified and in my opinion directly caused by a belief that it was the duty of GIS teams to produce solutions we spent hours building endless applications which would fulfil the needs of our users, many of them with shocking user experiences. Driving these applications was a demand, a demand for tools to allow people to do their jobs more effectively, for these people, the applications are not GIS applications but a means to an end – in many cases whilst our newly found love affair with the aestheticly desirable make these applications seem tired, cumbersome, and overloaded, they are still used and useful to many people outside our own little world.
These applications in my mind are Geographic Information Systems – they are applications often dedicated to the sharing of spatial information and tooling – they may have business specific tooling incorporated, but they remain essentially, at their core, GIS. Discounting these applications in some way is discounting the usefulness of GIS (irrespective of their relative user friendliness). Personnally I hate the classic table of contents, I hate the fact that some people put search interfaces on top of table of contents! There are so many things I hate about these traditional GIS user interface elements, but my objections often stem from these elements being a barrier to wider adoption. My mother for example would be lost if I asked her to ‘select’ something on a map – but my mother isn’t using these applications.
There are many faults in these all encompassing monolithic web mapping applications – however I’m not convinced that the rise in replacement applications are improving the users lot. Are they essentially putting lipstick on the pig? Ensuring the application has rich capability may in fact be a valid use case based upon the needs of your audience, don’t then remove it or replace it with glitter because you can! I don’t think it is unreasonable to discount the prospect of applications that were once the domain of the desktop being available within a browser, on the other hand its not always necessary or sensible to have everything in there!
Targetted & Disposable mapping applications
The nature in which large organisations deliver and implement systems has to change – our expectations of how we interact with software is changing, think about how disposable an application is on your phone, I have downloaded applications, used them and disposed of them within the duration of a train journey home from work. Any system which takes two years to roll out is a system and an organisation which is failing. These new ‘disposable’ applications often have less scope, are targetted towards the presentation of information in such a way as to deal with a smaller problem space. They are clear, uncluttered and aestheticly well designed.
The very nature of IT System procurement and implementation can shape the outcome – the tendency towards building the all encompassing application can be caused by a desire to have a solution in place for x number of years – a solution which will satisfy all ‘stakeholders’ – a solution which is built around a strategy of expansion and compromise. The days of expensive web mapping frameworks is over (or at least it should be) – there’s nothing wrong with a web mapping framework which delivers configuration, ease of administration and rich GIS tooling, but don’t pay through the nose for it – why – because they have a limited audience and lifespan.
A good recent example of an web mapping application in this space is the Atlas of NSW. The first thing I like about this site is its name – its an Atlas – no fussy “geo-bollocks-portal’ nonsense – nice and simple – everyone knows what at Atlas is! I also like the way it makes decisions for the the user, you’re not overloaded with too much, you can change a map and but you don’t need to understand anything about layers. Even simple things like the extent of the map when the application starts is correct – this is a map about New South Wales so they don’t start the map at a scale showing the whole of Australia.
Information Systems
The Atlas of NSW application demonstrates a web mapping application which is centred on the map – I like this but it’s a very map centric view of information. There is a growing number of ways in which data can be presented and visualised and mapping is just one of these. That phrase ‘spatial is special’ is naval gazing tripe and more recently I’ve seen great sites which treat spatial information no differently to other data, these sites use maps as one mechanism to guide the user through a story. This is a much more developed view of information where presentation does not take precedence. I heard a great comment last week about letting the data speak for itself – I thought it was a wonderful way of describing what we should do more of. A couple of nice examples of sites which are taking this approach of combining maps into a broader information system are the NAI Violence against Journalism in Afghanistan site and the National Broadband Map site.
There’s certainly a move towards using maps as a visualisation mechanism in broader information systems and thankfully traditional mapping applications are moving past *Portals* and “GeoGuff* sites into something a whole lot more palatable for anybody to understand and use, but lets not get swept up and totally dismiss the use case for Geographical Information Systems and yes – sometimes its Ok to do this stuff in a browser, have tools on a toolbar and a table of contents (….I can’t believe I’m saying this!)
Hmmm…. So holy trinity not quite dead.
Excellent article with great examples. I recently had an experience with a large project that used a complex and poorly designed GIS add-on destined for use by non-GIS users and had to reference the NSW Atlas as a user friendly way of achieving the project objectives.
[...] Mapbutcher has a great post on Web-Based GIS. He makes some great comments and provides some great examples about how difficult and complicated the mapping tools have been in the past. I appreciate what he has to say, and I have a some comments: [...]
actual conversation….
Dad: I know it is hard to do homework or tidy your room. I went downstairs to do some work and ended up reading Mr Poo-head’s blog.
Daughter: Mr Poo-head has a blog? What’s it about?
Dad: Geographic Information Systems.
Daughter: Never mind.
I think there is something in that for all of us…
As it happens, I went to a “GIS dev meetup” on Thursday, and took along a “discussion document” which asked two questions.
The first was my “GIS challenge” -to show me a real application of GIS (as opposed to a GIS application, which is quite different i think)
The second began, “What would it take to do ‘old school GIS’, in the cloud”.
So your comment…
>>However in our rush to disparage the last 10 years of web mapping applications in favour of simpler more targeted applications have we forgotten something which is valued?<<
…has some resonance, for me anyway.
As you know, I have been pushing the "keep it simple and targeted barrow" for years. EMAML was my attempt at making GIS "just more content", and it explicitly opposed what I called the "toolbox" approach (by which I mean, the model of a skilled user, with a very general tool like Arcview).
While I have professionally taken a leave of absence from GIS for the last year, my favourite problem to think about while lawn mowing is presently:
1. Has "geo-spatial and mapping" become mainstream enough that the core of "real GIS" has expanded beyond Roger Tomlinson, Jack Dangermond and Kim Ollivier? Is it time to revisit it?
2. How could we do this stuff "in the cloud" (viz. host-based, not distributed (beyond the data centre and thin client) and rolling with the power-wall/manycore/paralellism thing)?
3. Could dear old ESRI software be coaxed into such a role -or is a single threaded black-box just impossibly unworkable (even setting aside the licensing)?
I do hear a few people talking about "real GIS" these days, and I guess this is a natural response to being roundly disrupted by Google etc.
I have an idea to have a crack at such a thing in an academic context -perhaps targeted towards being a "teaching GIS" (I do wonder if the very best thing that the "professional GIS" industry can do is re-invent itself as a school for neo-geographers)
Hmmmm
You should know better than to attend a ‘GIS Dev meetup’ they’re bad for your health.
I think you invented the ‘embed map in website’ shit about 10 years before i ever saw it used in anger – i also seem to remember you had a penchant for tabs. In answer to your questions:
1. Most definitely yes
2. Not sure i understand your question – but what stuff can’t be done ‘in the cloud’?
3. I think Esri is doing this – or as close to it as they think they can get at the moment – the very idea of the ‘webmap’ *format* is very EMAML. Interestingly enough ArcGIS Server 10.1 is more of a black box than it has been before – this seems to be the way they want it – stop asking questions about what’s in the box – just use it – I’m on the fence about their approach.
I think the very best thing ‘professional geographers’ can do is to stop reinventing themselves every week and move themselves past the fact that they are ‘geographers’.
Simon
ps hmmmm
>>but what stuff can’t be done ‘in the cloud’?<<
I don't think *anything* interesting can be done in the cloud -but my definition of interesting is off in the weeds somewhere.
Having lost my GIS mojo, "interesting" has started to mean "not interesting to the throng, and hopefully way too hard".
And I'm into GIS devolution. For example:
-a younger telly-tubby has often pointed to services like "google transit" as a GIS ideal (well specifically precursors to google transit -which worked fine, but just weren't googly enough). –A non trivial problem (routing people from one address to another across this odd temporally discontinuous network) -with a dead simple UI and being used by punters to solve real problems and NO GIS badge at all.–
From my new perspective in the weeds, such things are boring *and not GIS at all*. GIS is the R&D dept for such things.
'Proper' GIS technology is a grab bag of absurdly general functionality -a swiss army knife able to do lots of things but nothing well. GIS users must be skilled and experienced to be at all effective,and must (like all geographers) be plagued by doubt in the whole endeavor. Essentially: all the things that I have previously argued that GIS needed to escape from..
GIS applications? No such thing. The minute those boys arrive with their .Net, or their Eclipse or their geo-django -or their Dart (I see that some fool has already registered dartgis.com -heaven help us) -the minute they arrive and start writing "applications", the GIS vanishes -poof!
And "spatial media" -maps as some kind of carrier wave for collaborative, spatially focussed communities of thought… "social gis" as it were?? -give me a break
Taking the opposing view isn't what it used to be!
Firstly, we GIS folk have long tended to argue most data has a GI element, However, the approach should simply be there is the data, what is the best way to put that data out there.
Now onto whether Desktop or Web, as per GI. As I see it, rarely has there been a need for suite of GI tools, for a whole organisation, and I feel this is where people get too tied up in designing Carlos Fandango solutions. Too often, I have seen single sign on role based GI applications, which combined heavy GI tool use for certain users, and light, what I’d call map viewing, GI capability á la Google maps. These take years to develop and, quite rightly, quickly become bigger than Ben Hur over the course of the project, as reqs always grow, regs change and stakeholders change direction.
Simply put, too much emphasis has been put on deploying complex solutions over the web, where the reality is that complex GIS should stay on the desktop for the very few people who need to use them, and GIS map viewing/map querying should be deployed via the web. The only thing needing enterprise scaling is the data store.
IMVHO
[...] Client has a web mapping application. Does not want to split into multiple smaller applications. Although this goes against what the modern day approach is for maps on the web, (i.e. lots of focussed web-map apps over one main web-map) I strongly believe that for some users, trying to replicate a GIS application on the web is ok (sometimes). [...]
@MrPooHead, I agree – the phrase ‘spatial is special’ is too often used by ‘GIS folk’ who believe incorrectly that they’re the only people on the face of the planet who can read a map.
With regards to bloat-ware – i have found in the past that vendors are driven by a very small percentage of ‘GIS administrators’ who apparently act as representatives of their own user communities – it is these folk who tend to drive the feature creep in these solutions – IMVHO I think that quicker we were able to utilise the basic tenets of the internet to allow people to navigate and traverse spatial relationships the better. We really need to be doing more to deliver data via semantic linkages than overcooked unmanageable web mapping solutions.
With the growth in cloud based spatial databases with simple and effective API’s we should hopefully see another growth spurt in the adoption of spatial information and technology, and this time it won’t be just slippy maps everywhere.
Simon
-hey whats up with this blog app? -it mangled my comment and doesn’t even give me a preview button to test it-
—as i *tried* to say——
For my money (full disclosure: I have no money)… -there is no point in re-stating the old argument: “the ‘GIS’ industry should stop deploying complex things, especially over the web”.
That notion has been doing the rounds since the 90′s (probably earlier). It isn’t that its wrong, as much as it is boring -and well and truly mined.
I’m hearing a possible challenge to that old chestnut from mapbutcher (in the post and subsequent comments). Given a couple of pints and a motorway to stand on, he might really come out and say it.
This Poo Head fellow on the other hand… [aside: Two Poo Heads?? Where I come from Poo Head == mapbutcher. Who is this other Poo Head??. Usurper!! ]
Mr Poo Head says: –Simply put, too much emphasis has been put on deploying complex solutions over the web–
Yawn.
Mr Poo Head says: —where the reality is that complex GIS should stay on the desktop for the very few people who need to use them,–
Snore.
Snap out of it Mr Poo Head! Why not try to up the number of people using them? Resist the easy, lazy position “don’t make me think” (viz. users are endlessly dumb -we need to build ever-dumbed down ‘content’ for them, that anticipates their every requirement… (GIS become the spaceship in the film ‘Wally’ -or ‘soma GIS’ if you prefer something older))
Have listen to (the notorious court jester) Mr Yegge speaking at oscon 2011. http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail5073.html He is onto something.
Mr Poo Head says:
–The only thing needing enterprise scaling is the data store.–
Now that is just plain wrong IM-VFU-HO. “Enterprises” have pissy little datasets and handfuls of users. The driver for the “no sql” thing is *web-scale* requirements after all.
Mr Poo Head says: — and GIS map viewing/map querying should be deployed via the web.
–
As should “desktop” GIS. Seriously. The key is to let go of “cloud GIS” (don’t get me started on “cloud”) and instead get serious about “grid” GIS. The grid is where a)all the data is b) all the processors are. Sadly, the desktop is toast.
[aside: you might quibble thussly: a) "but the data is on the net" -yeah yeah -but as far as possible we want to get it into one place to seriously crunch on it b) "there are plenty of processors in seti/folding/blah@home" -again, thankyou for pointing that out -meanwhile in the pragmatic, and post power-wall world....]
–WE INTERUPT THIS BROADCAST—
I was about to get into “what is the desktop and how can we do desktop on the web” but I realise that I have become bored with this comment. If you are actually reading it, you must be super-bored. Sorry about that I will sto
[...] Client has a web mapping application. Does not want to split into multiple smaller applications. Although this goes against what the modern day approach is for maps on the web, (i.e. lots of focussed web-map apps over one main web-map) I strongly believe that for some users, trying to replicate a GIS application on the web is ok (sometimes). [...]