ACSM Bulletin | Junel 2011 | #251
New ways of thinking about new facts
Geospatial science and technology offer new ways of thinking about the world around us. To appreciate the choices we now have thanks to innovations in the past half a century, we only need to ask: Who would have thought that we would be navigating by satellite and think nothing about it? Who would have thought that we could go on a trip around the world, in seconds, zooming in and out of Google Earth? Who would have thought that we would get lured by "the cloud" to push our faithful servant, the computer, into murky oblivion? And who would have thought that both our children and our parents would be sending us photos and videos over the Internet?
But behind this gleeful absorption with geospatial technology is one hard decision which needs to be made—the decision about which technology we allow to be born and absorb, and what we leave behind in the process. The case of GPS demonstrates this point. The global position system, now mainstream, in precision positioning work and location-based services, was viewed as an encroachment on traditional surveying in the early 1980s. But, when the use of GPS was approved by NOAA for mapping, they became the first most ardent users of civilian L2C frequency. Currently, they are vigorously fighting to prevent any degradation of the signal by the expansion of broadband for mobile applications. Yet, not everything GPS is on in the surveying world—mathematically derived coordinates may be precise but not accurate. And here comes the moment of decision: what do we do about "precise but not accurate" ?
Other moments of decision loom ahead. Now that GIS has moved from managing data to transforming them into information, will the surveying community step up its involvement as information managers?