Ron Lake, CEO of digital mapping company Galdos Systems, is concerned about the world-wide dependence on private mapping systems, such as Google Earth. Lake, who wrote about the issue for the 2008 GeoWeb conference, states that digital maps are becoming an essential facet of public and government information and he thinks that it’s too important for private companies to handle alone. Instead he proposes a single, government funded virtual map of the earth.
Currently, there are a number of digital mapping systems maintained by different private companies, including Microsoft and Google. Lake believes this could lead to problems when private data is used in official capacities. For example, emergency services might need far more accurate digital maps of a specific area than a consumer-oriented online service can provide. Also, other geographic regions might resent that most of the world’s digital mapping research and collection takes place in the United States, and want information developed and centered in their own home countries.
Instead of the current mapping systems, Lake proposes a radical solution -- a government funded, privately maintained virtual globe. This would be the final word in geographic information, fit to be used in any official government capacity. It could be used to store many features related to geography, including weather patterns, historical records, oceanic trends, and any information which can be mapped. Interested governments would pay to maintain, serve, and check the data, while a private organization would do the gathering, updating and general maintenance.
I wonder whether or not Lake's solution reflects the old, centralized way of thinking about data -- the idea that a centralized organization or contractor is responsible for collecting, vetting, and storing data. One crucial aspect of Google Earth is that it relies on a wiki-like model to acquire and tag a stunning amount of data and information from around the world, contributed and checked by legions of ordinary users. Even though Google’s offices reside in Silicon Valley, its contributors span the globe. Corrections, notes, and interesting data appear all over, allowing anyone at any level to double-check the data.
In addition, a noncommercial effort focused on gathering and maintaining geographic data already exists, albeit on a limited scale. The UN Cartographic Section maps represent an official stance on country boarders and disputed regions. The information distribution system is archaic compared to the gobs of virtualized data Google Earth holds. It would be interesting to see if a joint project between Google and the UN could yield a politically and socially valuable tool, which could be relied on by both public individuals and governments to be the final world in mapping.
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