Neogeography v Paleogeography : Round 1

I just use ‘geo-spatial’ and do my magic. Let the others waste their time.

The perceived distinction was made apparent to me last year’s OS Mashup where Peter Trevelyan (Met Office) railed against mashups as simplistic toys. I felt there was something for all of us to learn and making friends would have been a good start. (In his defence, though, he does keep a database of every particle of air over the UK rather than ‘myfavouritedoggingspots.com’)

People attempt to redefine existing professions and define divisions between this and that, in order to ring fence their own supposed but incorrectly stated right to an existing, new or speciality area. As much as what we do now is technologically light years from old pen and ink map scribing; the fundamentals are the same. Neo and Paleo. It’s horse-sh*t and those who spout it, know it. Ultimately, it’s also pretty insulting. Dinosaurs never died out. They evolved.

I feel some in the GIS world are feeling somewhat insecure! These so called divisions I think are destructive, and they certainly don’t forward the use of GIS by all. This argument is not about GIS in general, it is about GIS application technologies and publishing of map data via the web. The bottom line is a map is a map regardless of what you can do with it. The basics of cartography have not changed in decades only the medium on which the map data is displayed! If GIS is to have a bright future, then the more accessible GIS technologies are the better! I welcome young blood into the GIS industry; their ideas and enthusiasm are most welcome!

[...] Basically they have different strengths.  Recently I have got really tired of the paleo vs neo geography debate.  It should be about using the right tool for the job and working to integrating them [...]