cc >> Tom Zinnen: Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for the UW Extension
Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those organizations and our partners, Wisconsin Alumni Association, the UW
Madison Science Alliance and Wisconsin Public Television, thanks for coming for Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight I'm delighted to be able to introduce to you Jim Lacy.
He is the associate state cartographer with the Wisconsin State Cartographer's Office, and that's a statewide office housed
here at the Department of Geography at the UW Madison. He holds a bachelors in science degree from the UW Green Bay and
a masters degree from UW Madison. His professional interests include web enabled mapping
systems, aerial photography, and educating the public on mapping and geospatial technologies. He serves as editor for the
State Cartographer's Office's online mapping newsletter which is called the Wisconsin Mapping Bulletin.
Jim is a native of Madison and a current resident of McFarland. He's a rookie kayaker. I'm not exactly sure what that
means. You can ask him. He's a pilot wannabe and the official chauffeur of his two
pre-teenage daughters. My condolences to Jim and please join me in welcoming Jim to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
[APPLAUSE] >> Jim Lacy: Tom's a hard act to follow. So I've got expectations here.
I should add the 10- and the 13-year-old are both going on 17, so please give me your sympathies for that.
Well, thank you all for being here tonight. I really appreciate it. You have a choice for how you
spend your evenings so I'm glad you showed up tonight. We're going to spend some time talking about the world of maps,
mapping, and how really how things have changed, and they really very much have changed over the years.
So thank you. So I'm a wanderer so Bruce said I can't wander beyond here, so if I start to do this, pardon
me. I like to wander. So I've got a fix here. So we're going to talk a little
bit about how things have changed over the course of the past 10, 15, 20 years or so. I'd like to you leave tonight
with a appreciation for how those things have changed. If you're a computer user, I'm going to give you some things
can you try at home. If you're not a computer user, that's okay. My hope would be you walk away
thinking I didn't know that was possible. So those are really my goals for tonight.
Does that sound okay? Great. In many ways I feel like I'm an ambassador here tonight because
the mapping sciences at UW Madison have actually been a very strong area of excellence on this campus since really the
1930s, dating all the way back to the Department of Civil Engineering and their land surveying program, all the way
up to the 1940s, post-World War II, lot of excellence in cartography since that time. And yet today there's a lot of,
I'll define the term in a little bit here, geospatial technology use here on campus as well. So there's a very long and rich
history dating back very many years on this campus. So again, I feel like an ambassador talking to you all
tonight. It's interesting, geospatial technology is actually a very high growth profession right
now, but yet most people really haven't heard about it. For example, in going back many years ago when I was in high
school, I didn't know what a cartographer was. I had no idea, quite frankly. So I thought I'd talk just a
little bit about how I fell into this field, and literally I did fall into this field, because I think it's really relevant to
our discussion tonight. So going back to high school I had interest in art. I took a lot of art classes.
I was very interested in that. Took a lot of mechanical drafting, architectural drafting, things like that.
So I had that sort of aptitude. Then this was the mid to late '80s so I really had an interest in technology and computers, so
I thought, well, computer programmer that seems like a lucrative field to get into these days.
So I thought I'll be an computer science major when I get to college. Semester in, unh-unh, I don't
want to be a computer programmer the rest of my life. But I had these skills going back, again the drafting and so
forth. And as it turns out when I was a freshman, my very first semester in college I actually took an
introductory mapping class. And I thought this was interesting. And I went to the professor and
I said can you tell me about mapping and computers, is there some kind of a combination of the two that I could look into
for a career? And a light bulb went off and he said oh, yeah, I'm going to tell you all about geospatial
technology. And here we are 20 years later standing before you I'm going to talk about that tonight.
So it was very much and accident. Like I said, I had no idea what this technology was back in the
day and one thing led to another. I want to talk a little bit about where I work.
As Tom mentioned, I do work at the State Cartographer's Office. I'll probably refer to us as the SCO for short a couple times
tonight. We're not a state agency, despite the name. We're actually based here on
campus in the Department of Geology. A small staff. There's five of us that make up
the staff and right now three students. So a fairly small group. In terms of what we do, largely
what we do is we really focus on the mapping professionals in the state. When I say focus on, we provide
support for them in terms of training, technical publications, helping them be effective in their jobs is a lot
of what we do. We do a lot of web application development, meaning we put a lot of information out on the
web for folks to use. And I'll show some examples of that in just a little bit here. So we focus a lot on that group
helping them be effective, but another very important part of what we do as well is actually working with the general public.
I typically will answer our main phone, and we field calls on where do I find an air photo of my farm, where do I find a map
of this, just from the general public. So that's another very important function that we serve trying to
help folks out there use mapping technologies, or more generally just maps, if you will. So that's, really a lot of you
I'm sure have heard about the Wisconsin Idea, the boundaries of the university, the boundaries of the state and
beyond, that's very much important to what we do. We're out there to help folks and try to connect some of the
things we work on to real world problems and solutions. So in a nut shell that's some of what we do.
If you go to our website, you've got, by the way, a hand out. Let me just pull that up here real quick.
Geospatial web links right at the top is our website address. If you're a computer user, feel free to check that out sometime.
A lot of stuff on our website including things like where to find common types of maps that we get asked for.
Things like land ownership maps are really very popular that we get asked for all the time. Aerial photography, things like
that. So visit our website. Give us a call. We're there to help so please
feel free. So that's a little bit about what I do. An example of an application
that we've put out there, this is kind of neat, gotten a lot of usage recently. So the oldest statewide set of
aerial photography, pictures taken from a plane, date back to about the 1930s, mid-1930s, across the entire state of
Wisconsin. So working as a team with some other groups on campus here, Digital Collections and the
Robinson Map Library, we created this application. You can go on there and search for these photos and actually
view them online, download them. And it's a really neat application. We've gotten a lot of usage out
of it. I'll show some pictures in a little bit here, but it's a really nice way to see the way
things were 80 years ago, essentially. So that's an example of one of the things that we do.
The title of my talk, geospatial revolution, I want to define what this word geospatial means. Quite honestly it's a term that
people like me have invented to describe the industry and how it's changed. To say mapping and cartography
just really isn't enough anymore. So this geospatial term, I want to talk about this a little bit.
Geo, geography, people places and things. Fairly simple. Spatial, relationships with
objects in space. That could be the relationship of this desk to those chairs, that's a spatial relationship.
The Earth to the moon, that's a spatial relationship, right? So you talk about geospatial, this is a very long textbook
definition. Broadly refers to the tools, techniques, data, and skills used to inventory and analyze
the relationship of people, places, and things in our world. Say that five times fast, right? So that's, you might say, the
textbook definition. But it's all about geography. It's about maps. It's about relationships.
So this is really the definition I somewhat prefer. Geospatial technologies let us use digital maps to make better
informed decisions. It's not just about paper maps anymore. It's about data and using that
geographic data to make decisions and hopefully more informed decisions. Well, admittedly that's still a
little bit fuzzy, I'll have to admit fully. So what I'd actually like to do, and I'm going to give a
shout-out to the people at Penn State, they actually produced this four-part video series, I'm going to show you a really short
clip here in a second, that talks about geospatial technology, and it's really aimed at the general public.
And they've done a really nice job which is why I want to show this tonight. I'm just going to show a couple
minutes of it. I would encourage you to go out there, again, if you're a computer user, go out there and
I've got a link on the sheet as well. Check it out. I'm going to just show you the
first, if all the technology works here, the first couple minutes and just sit back and take a listen here.
No really, take a listen here. We may not be showing the video tonight. There we go.
Welcome to the geospatial revolution. >> In a world where everybody's texting, geospatial technology
is critical to understanding what's happening at a particular location. >> It's the speed of the
Internet. It's the capability of remote sensing satellites. It's software like Google Earth.
Taken all together you have an explosion in the way we view the Earth. >> Everything is somewhere,
everything is some place, and a map is a way of organizing all of that information. >> It's information from
aircraft, from satellites. It can be collection of information from a tower that you've set up.
We've been using maps for hundreds and hundreds of years to know where we are. Now that nice lady tells me
which way to turn. [LAUGHTER] >> Virtually all of the information that you're sharing
with anybody these days has some kind of geospatial tag on it. >> There's basically this entire information ecosystem that we
have access to now. >> I can receive information. I can transmit information. I can broadcast my location and
that is revolutionary. >> It's amazing. It's cutting-edge. It's, well, changing the world.
Quick switch to part two here. >> A map is worth a million words.
Maps communicate with everybody. That's powerful. You can make a difference and look at relationships and
patterns and processes and models and help save the world. >> I don't think we can project 50 years out, but given what
we're seeing today it's just a fantastic explosion of location technology and location-based data, and now we have the
devices to read it and capture it and visualize and that's something that's really helping the geospatial revolution truly
explode. >> Revolutions rarely end up the way they started. That's almost the definition of
a revolution. >> Neat stuff but I'm biased. I guess, a couple things to take away from that little video.
You didn't hear them use the term map a lot. They talked a lot about data, geography, all these different
tools. What I'd like to do next is just talk a little bit more specifically about something,
when I say geospatial I'm actually referring to broadly to many different types of tools and technologies out there.
I brought my props with me today. I suspect a good number of you have a GPS receiver, not a GPS
but a GPS receiver, in your car. It tells you where you need to be. Many of you have used these.
It's interesting because say, six, eight, nine years ago you wouldn't see many of these around.
Maybe in very high-end cars. You might see them in a Mercedes or a Lexus, but you wouldn't see them in my car certainly.
In the last five years, a couple years, you've seen these in, I don't want to guess, but maybe half the cars out there.
Maybe less. A lot of folks have these devices. They're relatively inexpensive.
They get you to where you need to be. So this global positioning system technology has really
been a major, a lot of major changes in the way we think about maps and mapping out there.
This article I just came across yesterday in US Today. No driver needed, firm in Iowa develops an autonomous tractor.
Well, guess what? This is based on GPS and the tractor knowing exactly where it is within a very precise
distance and navigating around the field based on where it knows where the field boundaries are, where it wants the rows to
be planted and so forth. Now, I'm not going to talk about the societal issues of getting farmer out of tractors, that's a
whole other presentation. But just in terms of the technology that's facilitated by things like the global
positioning satellites, it's really interesting to think about that. For example, this is another
type of GPS which I've used in the past. This is my little device here, more so for field mapping versus
in your car. This is a little bit more accurate down to typically a few meters versus not a few meters.
I'm not exactly sure what those are. Down to most cell phones. In fact, probably almost all
newer cell phones these days have a GPS chip in them. GPS, you should know, does not work indoors.
The signals are weak so if I turn this on in here, I wouldn't get a GPS signal. It would locate me through cell
towers, essentially. So the technology is really amazing. GPS is everywhere these days.
So it's a really important part of, when I talk about geospatial, what's happening out there.
I'm learning this computer is kind of slowly catching up to me here as well. Land surveying.
If you live in a subdivision, that was certainly laid out by a land surveyor out there laying out the roads and so forth.
If you have rural property, you've I'm sure dealt with a land surveyor at some point in the past where they're defining
the boundaries of properties. These folks, a lot has changed for them. Again, it kind of comes back to
GPS as well. They have very expensive GPS units, much more expensive than a unit like this.
We're talking tens of thousands of dollars. They can literally get down to centimeter, sub-centimeter
accuracy on these things. Which for you and I driving down the road, so what, it doesn't really matter.
But it's important if you are laying out property boundaries and so forth. So things like GPS and other
technologies, laser range finders, for example, has dramatically improved, or changed I should say, and
improved the way land surveyors do their business. So again, GPS, land surveying, all part of this geospatial
thing. Aerial photography has changed a lot over the years. I mentioned this web application
we've got in the State Cartographer's Office website. You can go out and download 1930s era photography.
Here is an example of this. You can all guess west side of Madison, right? Just to orient you a little bit
to give you a sense, it's a little bit difficult to see here, but I believe this is West High School, Speedway, what is
now Mineral Point Road, I don't know what it was back then of course, old University Avenue, obviously the start of Picnic
Point up here. Campus is over this direction. You look at this and, wow, this was long before I was around,
quite frankly, and to see this is really neat, isn't it? To see what things looked like 80 years ago and get a sense for
the lay of the land. It's really amazing to look at this stuff. And like I said, we've got this
out on the web due to a project, actually it was a Wisconsin Idea project to get this stuff out on the web.
The world of aerial photography has changed significantly. These aren't people hanging out airplanes with little digital
cameras from Best Buy. These are multimillion dollar camera systems they're using to collect this stuff.
It's all digital now for the most part, versus back in the day it was all film. So even this has gone through a
lot of changes as well. It's much quicker to acquire this information, much quicker to get it to the person that
needs to use it. So that's changed quite a bit. My colleague Tanya Buckingham talked, I think it was back in
June, about the changes in production cartography. I imagine at least a few of you probably saw her talk.
So I'm not really going to get into that a lot tonight, but just in the terms of what mapmaking has gone through in
the last we'll call it 20 years or so. Of course, everything is done on a computer now.
There really isn't anybody out there doing pen and ink like what I learned when I was in college, believe it or not.
So everything is digital now. The product may very well be paper and it oftentimes is, but it also might be something you
find on the web. And this is an example of a campus map which Tanya's group, the cartography lab, here on
campus did. It's an interactive map. You can click on the buildings and see the names of the
different buildings, who are the residents of that building, the different departments and so forth.
So interactive mapping has been a real change over the last number of years. Another one of my colleagues,
Mutlu Ozdogan, talked, I think it was just a few weeks back, on satellite imagery and forestry applications.
He's a forester by trade. And this is an example of a satellite image taken. The Stoughton tornado was 2005,
I believe. This was a post-event image, satellite image taken, and you can see here in the red this
image was processed in a certain way to actually highlight the path of the tornado. So if you look here in the west
and you can kind of follow it towards the east, you can see how it skipped along the ground and some major damage along by
the golf course there. So this is one way in which a satellite image can be used after an event, in this case a
tornado, to understand the impact and actually map it. Now, obviously you're out there on the ground you can see the
extent of the damage, but to see if from the air and actually identify it is a pretty powerful thing.
So something I want to talk in a little bit of detail on is this thing called a geographic information system.
Now, understand students here on campus take multiple semesters of all of these things we're talking about.
So in a couple minutes I can't quite possibly do it justice. But think of it this way. I've talked about a lot of
different things. I've talked about aerial photography, satellite imagery, GPS and maybe collecting points
with GPS, for example. Think of these essentially as all layers. When you have something like a
map like this, which many of you probably have in your car like I do, you look at a map and you see what?
You see roads, you see rivers, city boundaries, boat landings and things like that. Think of each one of these
things as a map layer all stacked together. Okay? So a GIS what it does,
conceptually that is, just like this graphic illustrates, is taking all these different layers and manipulating them in
ways and using them for analysis to make decisions. Again, that's a bit abstract so I want to talk to you a little
bit about a little project I did as a volunteer about a year or so ago. As Tom mentioned, I live in
McFarland so about two years ago I was on the plan commission at that time, and we had an issue come up where people were
wondering what happens if an adult entertainment business wants to locate in McFarland? [LAUGHTER]
I'm serious. This is a big issue. If you live in the town of Middleton, you know what I'm
talking about. So this is a big deal. And as we went through the process I learned a lot.
You can't outright outlaw different types of businesses. It's illegal. You can't do it.
But what you can do is define where different types of business are able to locate. So it's a geographic problem.
So as we did our research and started to learn about this issue, and it is a very complicated issue, think about
things like we don't want to type of business to be within, let's say, 500-feet of a school or 500-feet of a church or
500-feet of a daycare, things like that. It seems a little bit strange but it's an objective way to
define what is acceptable criteria for something like this. And we actually had a lawyer
that was involved at the time, and the lawyer said we'll get out some maps, we'll get out a compass, draw circles, and we'll
start going to all these different sensitive properties and draw circles on the map. And I thought, wait a minute,
I'm the map guy here, I can do better than that. So I did. I did.
So what I did, how this works and all the technology behind the scenes, that doesn't matter tonight, but what we're seeing
here is essentially what we would call a buffer, if you will, a boundary, a 500-foot boundary around all the
residential areas in McFarland. So if you're familiar with McFarland at all, the red dashed line would be the municipal
boundary, and you can see almost the entire map with the exception up in the northwest is white.
So basically what this means, and there's another little sliver right in here, so this basically means everything in
gray is within 500-foot of a residential area. Means no adult entertainment. Okay?
So that's one important criteria. We can do things like look at school properties, the purplish
color, at least on my screen, and the yellow 500-foot buffer around this. Schools.
We can look at parks. We can look at, I believe this would be churches. Daycares.
And all of these things. We can take all these, again, layers together, stack them on one another, in this case draw
our buffers all the way around each one of these so-called sensitive properties, then combine that, again using this
thing called GIS, with this residential layer and guess what? As it turns out in the village
of McFarland that's all that's left. Well, that's actually okay. From my perspective I wouldn't
want an adult entertainment establishment in downtown McFarland. I just don't personally think
that's a good idea. But what this objective analysis showed using all these criteria, objectively we determined, well,
if you're at all familiar with McFarland this is the Terminal Drive area, a lot of the tank farms, some of our
semi-industrial area, if you have to allow that type of business, this is probably going to be the best place to allow
it, quite honestly. So a tool like this GIS can be used for analysis and objectively trying to, in this
case, shape a public policy decision. We could have gone further but we decided this was far enough
to go. We could have done things like what's the available land area in here, who owns the parcels in
that area and so forth to actually analyze results. You can't really do that, not easily, with a paper map.
So that's the power of this thing called GIS. Another example: GIS is used extensively in emergency
management situations. Here's an example, I pulled this, actually a colleague sent this to me.
What you're seeing here is a prediction of if hurricane Irene hit New York City straight on, what would happen in terms of
flooding. So it's a little bit difficult to see on your screen here, but what we're seeing essentially is
this first zone along the coast, like let's say this would be Staten Island here, if there's any kind of hurricane near New
York, you're going to have expected flooding this far inland. If it's a category two
hurricane, you're going to see a little bit more flooding in this kind of orangish yellow color out here.
And if it's a really bad hurricane and hits just south of New York City, you're going to expect this kind of flooding.
You look at Manhattan, wow, that's really powerful. Scientists do similar things with, let's say, monitoring sea
level rise. Modeling if global warming happens this fast over this number of years, they can start
to predict using GIS tools how the sea level will rise and do exactly this and start to predict areas in Florida, let's
say, Louisiana, here's how the sea level is going to rise and here's the areas that are affected.
Again, the details of how this works are not important for tonight. >> Was that the radio station,
WFIC? >> I believe so. Yep. Helping government be more
efficient. So a lot of local governments in Wisconsin, many governments, that is, in Wisconsin, use GIS
tools to be more efficient. And one example I like to show here in Dane County is this thing called Dane County or DCI
map, Dane County Internet Map. And you look at this, what we're looking at are parcels, land ownership parcels, and you look
at that, and it looks like any other kind of map you might see out there, but what's unique about this is a person using
this application can go ahead and click on the map and actually see data that's behind the map.
And that's a very important part of what GIS is all about. It's not just a map that you can look at, it's a map that has
data behind it. In this particular case, you're seeing things like land value, improvement value, and so forth.
This is just one relatively simple example of what GIS is all about. Maps with data behind it.
If you go home tonight remembering one thing, I hope you go home with that. Likewise, this DCI map tool
allows you to do things like turn on an air photo in the background, a very high resolution air photo.
It doesn't show up so great on the screen tonight, but you can also see contours in the back. You can get a lay of the land,
the elevations of the surface. Things like that are useful for storm water modeling or flood plain modeling, things like that
that the county and others will use for doing different types of analyses with these GIS tools. So I could go on for the rest of
our time tonight talking about these scientific and business applications of GIS, but what I thought I would really do is
talk more about some of the fun stuff. And when Tom asked me to give this presentation back, I think
it was May, I thought what am I going to talk about with these folks. I don't want to make it to
academic, too scientific. So I started to keep track of ways in which in my, frankly, daily life am I touched by
geospatial technologies. So I started just making a list, literally made a list, kept it by my desk, and as I started to
put these slides together thought this makes some sense to talk about this. So what does it mean to me?
Well, so I've been having an interest for, well, some time now of buying some land, maybe Iowa County, Sauk County for
example, so I visit this site realtor.com, which many of you maybe visit for time to time.
It's been out there for years, but what they've improved on in the last couple years, let's say, is their use of maps to
help folks identify properties for sale. So you can do this search on map, and I'm not showing this
live. These are just screen grabs. You can, in this case I'm searching on a map for
properties that are in McFarland just by way of example, and again thinking about this GIS concept you get a bunch of dots
on the map. I'm going to zoom in here a little bit. As you start to zoom in you can
see specifically where these houses are, these properties for sale. You can actually click on one of
those properties and see more information. So again it's just like this GIS concept I talked about.
Something kind of neat they put up there recently which I wasn't aware of until just the last week or so are these so-called
heat maps. So what you're seeing here are essentially the listing prices for houses, in this case, in
McFarland. So the darker reds are more expensive, the lighter blues are less expensive.
So guess what? Over by the lake, bright red. Not a surprise, right? Over kind of other areas by the
lake, more of these expensive homes. Makes sense. Likewise, by the river.
Little pocket of more expensive homes over here so it gives a person a sense for, okay, here's my price range, where might I
aim myself. Probably not by the lake. Maybe over in this area as well. One thing that's really changed
a lot in the industry is the mobile devices. This happens to be an iPhone, a smartphone as you've heard them
referred to. I actually took a business trip down to Charleston, South Carolina.
I was just walking through the older part of town, and I was walking by a lot of these really nice older homes that were for
sale. And I thought I wonder what some of these houses are selling for, just curious.
And I pulled out my iPhone, and this realtor.com application as you're walking around shows you the
houses that are for sale. $8 million, I'm not making this up, $10 million, $13 million. It was fun, obviously an
exercise. I'm not going to be buying any real estate down there anytime soon.
But this is a really important area to understand that mobile applications have really had a drastic change, a drastic effect
on the geospatial industry. So, for example, in this type of application you can actually pull it up on your phone if
you're driving around, I should say have your spouse if they're in the car with you, they pull up the phone because you're
driving. They can actually draw a boundary on the map and say okay show me all the houses in this
area. Or, if you will, just show me the houses in the area where we are.
And again, the whole GIS concept. You can click on a dot, click on the place marker there.
This looks like a nice house, see a picture of it. You think about how was it done before.
You either have to just go driving around looking for signs or you contact a realtor, or both probably.
And I wonder, my sister-in-law happens to be a realtor, my thought is this gives more information to the consumer, the
consumer shows up more informed about what's out there. So I have to believe this doesn't take away business from
realtors, my thought, it actually helps the process along. Because eventually your real
estate agent is going to be involved in the process. So it allows all of us to be more informed and know our
options that are out there, not just hopping in the car and driving around. So relatively simple but it has
a really big, I think, a really big impact on things. Where am I know? So some of you have seen these
things, these Redbox things, not an advertisement, at like the local Pick 'n Save or Walgreens and so forth.
You pop in a buck and you get a movie out. You can return these things anywhere.
So I was out and about one day and I got this movie. Where am I going to take this movie back.
Well, Redbox actually has an applications on iPhones, in this case, where you can say here's my current location, click on
that, shows me all the different Redbox sites within a certain radius and you can actually have it show you, in this case I
picked a walking distance, I did this when I was at work, actually shows you the nearest Redbox and how you can walk to
get there or take the bus or drive or so forth. I think that's a really neat way, a very simple way, in which
geospatial technologies can affect what you're doing out there. Here on campus there's a mobile
UW application for iPhone and Android devices that you can actually see the campus map. So here you go campus map, you
can click on show me. Here's public parking. Not a lot of green dots, by the way, here on campus for public
parking. I can see art venues, for example. The green dots there again.
Something that's kind of neat you can see bus stops within a certain radius. Here I was sitting in Science
Hall, and here's all the bus stops that are around my building sitting at work. I've heard that they're actually
looking at integrating realtime bus information in this so you can pull up your phone and see where the buses are.
The city of Madison is doing this right now, and you can go to a website and actually see where the buses are in relation
to your stop. That works if you've got a phone if you're not in front of a computer that does you no good.
But if they can integrate this for students here on campus, just think about how important that is.
Knowing where the bus is, plus or minus a little bit of leeway I'm sure, but, boy, that's important.
How do I get there? Back in the day when I was growing up, mom and dad would go to AAA and they get the Trip
Tiks. A nice person, they outline in a highlighter the best route to get there.
I suspect many of you have done this, but I'm taking a business tripe to St. Cloud next week so I just want
to know how far is it? What route might I take? Do I want to take, as my dad would say, the scenic route
along the river? I can actually drag this and decide which path I want to take.
So some just simple neat tools out there. In about a month or so, a month and a half, we're actually
taking a family trip to Florida. So we're going to stay in Clearwater. I've never been to Clearwater.
I don't know anything about it, but I want to find a place to stay. Again, think about how you've
often done this in the passed. You pull out may be a AAA guidebook, start paging through looking for the diamonds, let's
say. Then you find a place that seems like a decent place. Then you get out your map and
you figure out where it is. That's one way to do it. Another way to do it is to reverse the process.
Pull up a map, type in hotels, and it shows you all the different hotels in a given area, in this case around
Clearwater. So I can actually zoom in a little bit more. I can see more details about
that including, in this case, some reviews about that hotel, which is kind of neat I think. And you can zoom in further,
I've actually switched to a different website now, this is called Bing Maps, the other one is called Google Maps, where you
can actually see what's called a bird's eye view. So if you look, a little bit hard to see on the screen here,
but if you focus on this building right there just above the 2, zoom in a little bit more, for me this is useful
because I get a sense for what's the land like around the hotel. I want to stay at a decent place, what does it look like
around there? Focus, again, just about this little 2 here there's a little hut of some sort.
Focus on that. I'm going to click here. Here's that house. Here's the pool so we've
actually rotated around to the back of the building with this so-called bird's eye view. Rotate again to the other side.
Rotate once more. You can actually flip all the way around 360 degrees on this website so see, not just hotels,
but anything you want to see. This is most commonly found in urban areas. You may not find it in rural
Wisconsin necessarily, but for a situation like this, this is really useful. Something else useful, although
not without controversy, is this thing called Google Street View. You can actually go in and literally drive down the street
using a mapping interface or just clicking around and actually see what you would see. In this case, here's a street
view of that particular hotel. So the way this works is Google, this company Google, has these cars.
They go out and they drive thousands and thousands of miles every year to help people do exactly what I just described,
see what's out there. They've got this little camera system out there and this is relevant because it's all
oriented with GPS. So the car knows exactly what it is. All these different cameras that
are pointing out there and it knows where these pictures were aimed at. When they get back to the office
they can assemble this virtual view of what's happening out there. Again, not without controversy.
A lot of people get upset in terms of privacy because what happens if you're walking down the street and this thing snaps
your picture. There's ways, I'm told, you can get yourself blurred out. If you're one of those folks
you're concerned about the privacy this slide will hopefully make you chuckle just a little bit.
Here's a nice police officer have a discussion with a person in one of these Google Street View cars.
They're not immune from the police either, nor should they be. Recreation.
So I haven't done this recently because my daughters are getting a little bit older now, but a few years ago we would go out
and do this thing called geocaching. Essentially, it's a high-tech treasure hunt where a person, it
sounds a little bit odd at first but it's actually a lot of fun, a person goes out, they hide an object, hide a little box with
some trinkets in it, and they get a coordinate on it, a map coordinate of that. You take your GPS, and that's
actually why I bought this guy, type in those coordinates, and you navigate there. And it's not quite as simple as
it sounds because it gets you in a certain maybe 50-foot radius, 100-foot radius. Then you have to use your eyes.
As I tell my daughters, don't look at your feet, look around and find this object. So it's a high-tech treasure
hunt. There's hundreds of thousands of these things all over the world. This is a really big deal,
believe it or not. I don't know how many thousands of these things are in the state of Wisconsin, but they're all
over the place. When my daughters were younger it was a great way to get outside and really enjoy the
outdoors. It was a really neat kind of thing. I'm going to start to wrap up
here and talk a little bit about the future. Your head's probably swimming a little bit right now with all
these things I've been talking about, and that's to be understood because a lot has changed over the years.
Things like tablets. This happens to be a Nook device, as they're called. You've heard of iPads.
I think this has had and will continue to have a huge impact on my world in the coming years. I used to say I'll never see the
day in my lifetime where paper printed newspaper goes away. I don't know if that's the case anymore.
I don't find myself reading the actual paper newspapers that much anymore. I'm finding myself reading it on
devices like this. My point being, are paper maps going to go away someday? I don't know.
I don't have a crystal ball. Maybe, maybe not. But as these technology changes happen we just don't know what
the future holds. I couldn't tell you five years from now what we're going to be looking at.
There's just so many changes happening out there. As an industry, as an mapping industry, we've done a great job
getting lots of geographic information out there for folks. Where we haven't quite caught up yet is actually making it
meaningful. You can go and get all kinds of geographic information there but, as we call it, the data
integration just isn't there. Solving problems that are meaningful to you. I've showed you some fun
websites, but I think we have a lot more to gain in terms of maturity, speaking now as a mapping professional, before
it's really usable for folks out there. Think about the analysis I did for McFarland.
I had the tools, I had the right knowledge, I had the data, I knew what to do, for someone, like the lawyer who wanted to
get out his compass, how would he even approach this? My point is in the future I hope that the tools become more
accessible to everyday folks. It's true now, believe it or not, everyone can be a cartographer.
That's literally true. There's lots of site you can go out there and start to do your own mapping work.
Whether it's to show someone how to get to your niece's wedding or whatever the case may be, but there's lots of places a person
can go now and do that, which great. So I think we're going to start to see a lot more of that in the
future. The Internet, the web, has had a huge impact over the last few years.
You've heard me mention just tonight Google. Google has, I would argue, some of my colleagues I think may or
may not agree, has had a huge impact on our industry, the mapping geospatial industry. Why?
Well they're getting this stuff out to the masses in ways that we mapping professionals haven't been able to do over the course
of many years. Along comes this multi-billion dollar company with Street View and Google Maps and things like
that, and they're getting it out there for folks to actually use in very interesting ways, like we saw, looking for a hotel.
So Google, Microsoft, the big players in the computer industry are really pushing this along faster, and us mapping guys, us
mapping geeks, we're trying to catch up in some ways. That's a little bit of an exaggeration, but we're really
looking at ways in which we can work with these folks to really get the information out there in a usable, informative kind of
way. And like I said before, the mobile applications, the whole social media thing, I thought
about talking about things like foursquare and Facebook and stuff like that tonight, but I knew we'd be limited on time.
The younger set, you see all these students coming in at this time, boy, the things these guys are using it just amazes me.
I'm 40, 41, and just the stuff that they're using these days it amazes me. My daughter communicates with
text messages. Believe it or not, I hate to admit it, but they're using these phones to communicate with
so many different things and geospatial is no different. So there's a lot of changes coming.
A lot of changes have happened. I'd be happy to entertain your questions. We can talk more.
[APPLAUSE]