i like the latest killer app which delivers pure data and requires no app development at all – a pigeon with a flash drive attached:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8248056.stm

Now imagine upgrading the bird to a 1 TB hard drive and some steroids, then we can all go back to working on data rather than delivery mechanisms.

Thierry

“What is a GI professional?” Is it someone who builds a soon out of date mashup using Bing maps then quickly moves on to the next web 2.0 hype that takes their fancy? Or is it someone who actually knows about handling GI data properly and cares about whether it’s used appropriately?

“Why does nobody listen to us?” Easy. Cooking up a whizzy new app gets attention (as evidenced by your blog posts), but what really matters is ensuring the data behind the apps is correct. I suspect this is because it’s easier to get funding to develop a new app than it is to get funding to clean data, and that apps are often ready to go but the data is not sorted. Then, to meet the launch deadline, the data issue seems to be ignored or shifted to “phase 2″ before being quietly forgotten. Only the “Paleotards” keep banging on about it.

“We should stop fighting amongst ourselves.” Yes we should. No we shouldn’t.

While some people have their heads in the clouds (no pun intended) of the future (and we need people like that), the “Paleotards” are often working in the real world. Sometimes what’s needed is not a new system, but better data in the existing system. What tends to happen is that a new system is implemented with the same old bad data.