Geography in action

Friday, 3 September 2010

Technology

By Jianggan Li | 12 March 2009

Jack Dangermond, Founder and President of ESRI, is a firm believer that government should not only share GIS within its departments, but with the public too.

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INTERVIEW

For Jack Dangermond, President of ESRI, geography is a life long passion.

“Geographic information is critical to many aspects of governing,” he says. “It saves money, helps government managers make better decisions and increases collaboration. The evidence suggests that over the current and past downturns, GIS is a tool that is seen by management as progressive and important for running government.”

Dangermond founded ESRI in 1969, and the company that has subsequently grown into a major provider of GIS software and geodatabase management applications.

Defining moments for the past and current evolution of GIS, the American believes there have been four major phases.

GIS started as a research technology in the 1970s, when academics ran applications on mainframes for geospatial science research. In the 1980s, a few government agencies pioneered the use of GIS in more practical applications such as urban development and forestry.

Commercial GIS products running on UNIX workstations emerged in the early 1980s, which allowed systematic creation and sharing of geographic data for multiple applications outside the academia.

In the 1990s, GIS moved into PCs and became more affordable. It also created the foundation for GIS professionals, which number in millions today.

A witness of this evolution, Dangermond is keen about the fourth phase which is just beginning, with the implementation of GIS in a server/web services environment.

Simple web mapping became available in the late 1990s, and the first GIS server came on the scene a few years ago. “This allows the creation of geographical knowledge by a professional, which is put onto a server that serves millions of users,” notes Dangermond. “The result of this is more open government.”

Dangermond says that, as a businessman, he worries about the global economic collapse. But demand for GIS technology appears to be resilient. The challenge now, as FutureGov’s assessment of local governments [Nov/Dec 2008] indicated, is that GIS applications work in silos within each department, with lots of resource duplication and not much meaningful sharing.
Dangermond tries to put things in perspective. Desktop has responded very well to project-based GIS, where data is gathered and discarded when the project is completed. Subsequently it moved into a departmental system where the data sets were shared within a team.

“But the true vision is enterprise or societal GIS, with multiple agencies sharing common a geospatial infrastructure,” says Dangermond. “And the technology that allows that sharing to occur is server-based GIS.”

But there are obstacles. One is the typical government funding model. Each department is responsible for its own funding and competes for budget from senior management.

The emerging trend is to allow each department to build its own data sets within its databases and integrate them through web services, and through server-based architecture. So data sets are shared with each department. This calls for an infrastructure for integration based on standards and a strong network. Dangermond says such federated architecture is already emerging in many American cities.

This clears the path for an “active mashup” – a collection of mapping applications and web services that are combined into a single mapping application. Taking advantage of a variety of pre-developed services and functions, agencies can dramatically decrease development costs and data costs for their applications. In addition, performance is greatly improved.

“Active mashup is part of the vision for server based enterprise system,” says Dangermond. “However, the mashup is not the cause; server architecture is the real enabling technology.”

There are various possible models, such as a federated system with minimised leadership and a system where everything is centralised. But Dangermond favours a combination: a federalised GIS collaboration in the departments with a central leader like the GIS centre. Dangermond is sceptical about putting everything ‘in the cloud’. But he is optimistic about what cloud computing can offer. Some analytics can be computed in the cloud, as well as other services such as a library where people can easily store and retrieve data objects, and share data with others.

What might not be affordable to one agency may well be available in the cloud. In this way GIS allows people to spread the cost within the agency. Resources in the cloud can be paid for in a shared environment making it more affordable.

Although government pays for the collection of data, the cost of maintaining it in the cloud remains controversial. Dangermond calls it a ‘free way’ or ‘toll way’ issue.

Open to the private sector
Dangermond is an advocate for government to allow the private sector and general public to have free access to this information.

In the United States, a home delivery company spent US$3 million on a GIS routing system using government data. The result? The company managed to put the delivery time into a one hour span. It also made cost savings of US$43 million. Dangermond was challenged in congress as the government spent US$200 million over a 10 year period to gather all the data and built the system originally for censors. “They are making all that money out of us,” the congressman said. Dangermond responded by saying that government was already compensated by paying corporate tax to the sum of US$180 million over 10 years.

“The government gets a massive return on investment for sharing its data openly. And it’s not only a money issue. It’s a public policy one as well,” says Dangermond. “With better planning, companies leveraging this data save on fuel and reduce their carbon footprint, thus accomplishing another government mission.”

“We should perhaps be paying the private sector to use government data to make smart decisions,” says Dangermond.

This leads to the bigger issue of national security, highlighted by the news that terrorists used Google Earth to plan the Mumbai attacks. But Dangermond won’t take the bait. “Terrorists don’t need GIS to figure out how to bomb a building,” he says.