The New Brave New World: Geography, GIS, and the Emergence of Ubiquitous Mapping and Data

Abstract

office at the University of California, Santa Barbara.(1) We spoke of the debates that were raging in geography about the role of GIS with an emphasis on identifying productive ways of engaging GIScientists with their critics from human geography. Among the issues that emerged were individual privacy, epistemology, infrastructural changes wrought by localized data collection, and Big Science. Ten years later I interviewed Professor Goodchild again. Since then,Web 2.0 and the ubiquity of data and mapping have radically altered the intellectual landscape of GIS. In this new interview we discuss the possible eclipse of GIS by free, web-based technologies that include Google Earth, mash-ups, and data scraping. Not surprisingly, issues such as individual privacy and critical GIS remain relevant, but they are joined by a host of previously unimaginable phenomena that bear scrutiny by geographers. Web 2.0 is the host for the emerging technologies that have so altered our environment in GIScience. Web 2.0 broadly refers to a new generation of Internet services and technology. `The participatory web' as opposed to the `web as static information source' is frequently attached to descriptions of Web 2.0; user-created content and collaboration are its hallmarks. The concept that the average Internet user can create content is considered an essential element of Web 2.0 (Hendler and Golbeck, 2008). Web 2.0 promises to democratize the Internet to a degree not seen (Barsky and Purdon, 2006). Recognizable applications include wikis, blogs, mashups, and, more recently volunteered geographic information and citizen sensors (see also Elwood, 2008). Overall, the target of Web 2.0 is a richer more complete Web experience available to all Internet users. The implications for geographers are, however, extensive. Neogeography is one term that has emerged to describe a set of Web 2.0 techniques and tools that fall outside the realm of traditional, proprietary GIS such as ArcGIS (Turner, 2006). Neogeography is bringing traditional cartographic and GIS skills to the masses. It is democratizing a once exclusive domain (Boulos et al, 2006), but in the process removes authority and certainty (unwarranted in some cases) associated with GIS maps. GIS and geography have to adjust to this dynamic technical and social landscape. Mapping has evolved rapidly from paper, to GIS, to web-based mapping. Each transformation is associated with profound social impacts. We face scenarios, previously unimaginable, of human beings as sensors gathering constant information with their cell phones and reporting back information to central, web-based data-collating sites. These data could be as innocuous as snow quality on ski hills or animal deaths on the highway with GPS locations. Or they could include The new Brave NewWorld: geography, GIS, and the emergence of ubiquitous mapping and data