February 4, 2004
The Semantic Earth
I spent all of December and half of January working on an article for Esther Dyson’s Release 1.0. Man, did I learn a lot, including that Esther and Christina Koukkos are uniquely demanding yet patient editors.
The article’s just come out. Here’s the abstract:
Every business in the world is headquartered on earth. Every employee works somewhere. Every customer is at some location at every moment. Every product is delivered to some spot and every service is performed at some coordinates. Every transaction involves at least one place and usually more than one. And yet, until recently, businesses have systematically managed location information only for processes directly concerned with moving people and goods. Why has the literal common ground of business been largely absent from business applications?
The answer is obvious: Integrating information about locations – beyond including an address field in your customer database – has required specialized skills and a budget that often was larger than the potential benefits of such a project. And now we are integrating not just information about locations, but information into locations: PCs and PDAs and other user or sensor devices are aware of where they are and what surrounds them, often receiving local information in realtime and giving feedback. Location is more complex than simple longitude and latitude in a database, involving a world full of objects, people and processes that are moving around relative to one another and to the earth, referred to in terms that humans understand quite precisely but that can be impossible for computers to parse. Therefore, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have been stuck where information retrieval was in the early ’90s: a technology that could have transformative effects if only it didn’t require high priests to build and maintain it.
The problems of the GIS industry are so tough precisely because the earth is so simple. The earth is a wet rock. We inhabit it with meaning. Whether those meanings are discovered, invented or revealed, they are dependent on us. You see that dependency clearly in the diversity of maps we draw. Maps can be inconsistent and contradictory in every aspect – what objects we see, at what scale we draw them, where we etch the boundaries, which words we use as labels – because our human projects are inconsistent and contradictory. There is no more hope for a single, universal map than there is for a single, universal language, because the thing we are mapping – the earth – has no language, no culture and no projects of its own. It is too real for that. All its meanings are attributed.
The GIS industry is now breaking out of its box. The technology, data representation, economics and security-driven needs for real-time geographic information are coming together. Businesses are becoming location-aware, making existing processes more efficient and enabling new processes and new relationships to emerge.
But something even bigger is happening.
Thanks to the constellation of technology that enables digital networks to be laid over the places of the earth, wherever we are we will be able to hear the human conversation that has occurred about that place – the history that occurred there, the aesthetics to be savored, the commerce transpiring at that very moment, recommendations offered by strangers and friends. The mute places of the earth are being given voice, and the voices are, of course, ours. Meanwhile, the places themselves are becoming digitally alive and are noting our presence, too.
This is happening now. It is not just spawning innovative new businesses. It will change our most basic sense of what it means to be in a place.
