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>> 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
here at the Department of Geography at the UW Madison. that's a statewide office housed
a masters degree from UW He holds a bachelors in science degree from the UW Green Bay and
Madison. His professional interests
systems, aerial photography, and include web enabled mapping
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.
means. I'm not exactly sure what that
You can ask him. He's a pilot wannabe and the
pre-teenage daughters. official chauffeur of his two
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
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.
thinking I didn't know that was possible. So those are really my goals for My hope would be you walk away
Does that sound okay? Great. tonight.
the mapping sciences at UW In many ways I feel like I'm an ambassador here tonight because
Madison have actually been a very strong area of excellence
1930s, dating all the way back on this campus since really the
to the Department of Civil Engineering and their land
up to the 1940s, post-World War II, lot of excellence in surveying program, all the way
cartography since that time. And yet today there's a lot of,
I'll define the term in a little
history dating back very many bit hyears on this campus.ology usSo again, I feel like an. So there's a very long and rich
tonight. ambassador talking to you all
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
little bit about how I fell into cartographer was. I had no idea, quite frankly. So I thought I'd talk just a
our discussion tonight. tSo going back to high school I fall into this field, because I think it's really relevant to
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
I thought, well, computer programmer that seems like a in technology and computers, so
So I thought I'll be an computer lucrative field to get into these days.
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
forth. back, again the drafting and so
And as it turns out when I was a freshman, my very first semester
introductory mapping class. And I thought this was in college I actually took an
interesting. And I went to the professor and
I said can you tell me about
for a career? And a light bulb went off and he some kind of a combination of the two that I could look into
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
tonight. SCO for short a couple times
campus in the Department of We're notGeology. agency, despite the name. We're actually based here on
A small staff. There's five of us that make up
the staff and right now three students. So a fairly small group.
what we do is we really focus on In terms of what we do, largely
the mapping professionals in the state.
support for them in terms of When I say focus on, we provide
of what we do. training, technical publications, helping them be effective in their jobs is a lot
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
helping them be effective, but that in just a little bit here. So we focus a lot on that group
another very important part of what we do as well is actually
I typically will answer our main working with the general public.
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
I'm sure have heard about the tWisconsin Idea, the boundaries just maps, if you will. So that's, really a lot of you
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
If you go to our website, you've what we do.
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.
that we've put out there, this An example of an application
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,
Robinson Map Library, we created Digital Collections and the
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.
of it. We've gotten a lot of usage out
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.
people like me have invented to describe the industry and how it's changed. QTo 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.
objects in space. That could be the relationship Spatial, relationships with
The Earth to the moon, that's a spatial relationship, right? of this desk to those chairs, that's a spatial relationship.
definition. Broadly refers to the tools, So you talk about geospatial, this is a very long textbook
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
informed decisions. It's not just about paper maps use digital maps to make better
anymore. It's about data and using that
geographic data to make decisions and hopefully more
little bit fuzzy, I'll have to informed decisions. Well, admittedly that's still a
admit fully. So what I'd actually like to do,
shout-out to the people at Penn State, they actually produced this four-part video series, I'm and I'm going to give a
clip here in a second, that talks about geospatial going to show you a really short
And they've done a really nice technology, and it's really aimed at the general public.
minutes of it. job which is why I want to show this tonight. I'm just going to show a couple
I've got a link on the sheet as I would encouwell.you to go out there,Check it out.u're a cI'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 some place, and a map is a way of organizing all >> Everything is somewhere,
of that information. >> It's information from
aircraft, from satellites.
We've been using maps for hundreds and hundreds of years information from a tower that you've set up.
which way to turn. to know where we are. Now that nice lady tells me
[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.
Quick switch to part two It's, well, changing the world.
Maps communicate with everybody. here. >> A map is worth a million words.
That's powerful. You can make a difference and look at relationships and
patterns and processes and
we're seeing today it's just a models and help save the world. >> I don't think we can project 50 years out, but given what
devices to read it and capture fantastic explosion of location technology and location-based data, and now we have the
explode. it and visualize and that's something that's really helping the geospatial revolution truly
>> 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
You didn't hear them use the away from that little video.
tools. term map a lot. They talked a lot about data, geography, all these different
What I'd like to do next is just talk a little bit more
when I say geospatial I'm actually referring to broadly to specifically about something,
I brought my props with me many different types of tools and technologies out there.
today. I suspect a good number of you
but a GPS receiver, in your car. have a GPS receiver, not a GPS
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
In the last five years, a couple them in my car certainly.
years, you've seen these in, I don't want to guess, but maybe
Maybe less. A lot of folks have these devices. half the cars out there.
They get you to where you need They're relatively inexpensive.
to be. So this global positioning
been a major, a lot of major system technology has really
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
whole other presentation. But just in terms of the farmer out of tractors, that's a
technology that's facilitated by things like the global
positioning satellites, it's
type of GPS which I've used in really interesting to think about that. For example, this is another
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.
newer cell phones these days Down to most cell phones. In fact, probably almost all
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
I'm learning this computer is kind of slowly catching up to me there.
If you live in a subdivision, that was certainly laid out by a here as well. Land surveying.
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
GPS as well. for them. Again, it kind of comes back to
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
accuracy on these things. Which for you and I driving down centimeter, sub-centimeter
But it's important if you are laying out property boundaries the road, so what, it doesn't really matter.
technologies, laser range finders, for example, has dramatically improved, or Schanged I should say, ander
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
to give you a sense, it's a little bit difficult to see here, but I believe this is West Just to orient you a little bit
now Mineral Point Road, I don't know what it was back then of course, old University Avenue, High School, Speedway, what is
Point up here. obviously the start of Picnic
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 world of aerial photography has changed significantly. the web.
cameras from Best Buy. These aren't people hanging out airplanes with little digital
It's all digital now for the These are multimillion dollar camera systems they're using to collect this stuff.
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
So I'm not really going to get production cartography. I imagine at least a few of you probably saw her talk.
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
So everything is digital now. The product may very well be college, believe it or not.
find on the web. paper and it oftentimes is, but it also might be something you
campus did. AnIt's an interactive map.a campus map which Tanya's group, the cartography lab, here on
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.
Mutlu Ozdogan, talked, I think Another one of my colleagues,
it was just a few weeks back, on satellite imagery and forestry
He's a forester by trade. And this is an example of a satellite image taken. applications.
I believe. The Stoughton tornado was 2005,
This was a post-event image, satellite image taken, and you
image was processed in a certain can see here in the red this
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.
tornado, to understand the So this is one way in which a satellite image can be used after an event, in this case a
extent of the damage, but to see impact and actually map it. Now, obviously you're out there on the ground you can see the
if from the air and actually identify it is a pretty powerful
So something I want to talk in a thing.
Now, understand students here on little bit of detail on is this thing called a geographic information system.
campus take multiple semesters of all of these things we're
So in a couple minutes I can't talking about.
different things. quiI've talked about aeriale. But think of it this way. I've talked about a lot of
with GPS, for example. photography, satellite imagery, GPS and maybe collecting points
map like this, which many of you Think of these essentially as all layers. When you have something like a
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
talking about. Middleton, you know what I'm
So this is a big deal. And as we went through the
You can't outright outlaw different types of businesses. process I learned a lot.
But what you can do is define where different types of It's illegal. You can't do it.
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.
define what is acceptable criteria for something like It seems a lthis. bit strange 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.
I'm the map guy here, I can do And I thought, wait a minute,
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
residential areas in McFarland. So if you're familiar with boundary around all the
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
gray is within 500-foot of a sliver right in here, so this basically means everything in
So that's one important resicriteria.rea. 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
want an adult entertainment establishment in downtown Well, thaMcFarland.ly okay. From my perspective I wouldn't
that's a good idea. But what this objective analysis I just don't personally think
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
it, quite honestly. So a tool like this GIS can be to be the best place to allow
case, shape a public policy decision. We could have gone further but objectively trying to, in this
to go. we decided this was far enough
We could have done things like what's the available land area
that area and so forth to actually analyze results. You can't really do that, not in easily, with a paper map.s in
So that's the power of this thing called GIS. Another example: GIS is used
management situations. extensively in emergency
What you're seeing here is a Here's an example, I pulled this, actually a colleague sent this to me.
prediction of if hurricane Irene hit New York City straight on,
flooding. So it's a little bit difficult what would happen in terms of
this first zone along the coast, to see on your screen here, but what we're seeing essentially is
like let's say this would be Staten Island here, if there's
York, you're going to have any kind of hurricane near New
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
You look at Manhattan, wow, that's really powerful. Scientists do similar things expect this kind of flooding.
level rise. Modeling if global warming with, let's say, monitoring sea
to predict using GIS tools how happens this fast over this number of years, they can start
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,
tools to be more efficient. And one example I like to show that is, in Wisconsin, use GIS
map, Dane County Internet Map. here in Dane County is this thing called Dane County or DCI
And you look at this, what we're looking at are parcels, land
at that, and it looks like any ownership parcels, and you look
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
And that's a very important part actually see data that's behind the map.
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,
This is just one relatively simple example of what GIS is all about. improvement value, and so forth.
If you go home tonight Maps with data behind it.
remembering one thing, I hope you go home with that. Likewise, this DCI map tool
allows you to do things like
It doesn't show up so great on turn on an air photo in the background, a very high resolution air photo.
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.
that the county and others will use for doing different types of storm water modeling or flood plain modeling, things like that
analyses with these GIS tools. So I could go on for the rest of
our time tonight talking about
talk more about some of the fun these scientstuff.nd business applications of GIS, but what I thought I would really do is
it was May, I thought what am I going to talk about with these And when Tom asked me to give this presentation back, I think
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
put these slides together thought this makes some sense to by my desk, and as I started 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,
It's been out there for years, which many of you maybe visit for time to time.
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.
properties that are in McFarland You can, in this case I'm searching on a map for
on the map. I'm going to zoom in here a again thilittle bit. this GIS 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
McFarland. for houses, in this case, in
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
aim myself. Probably not by the lake. Maybe over in this area as well. my price range, where might I
a lot in the industry is the One thing that's really changed
referred to. mobile devices. This happens to be an iPhone, a smartphone as you've heard them
I was just walking through the I actually took a business trip down to Charleston, South Carolina.
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
houses that are for sale. $8 million, I'm not making this up, $10 million, $13 million. waIt was fun, obviously anhe
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
on the geospatial industry. So, for example, in this type of drastic change, a drastic effect
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
driving. up the phone because you're
They can actually draw a boundary on the map and say okay
area. Or, if you will, just show me the houses in the area where we show me all tare.ouses in this
And again, the whole GIS
concept. You can click on a dot, click on
This looks like a nice house, see a picture of it. the place marker there.
You either have to just go You think about how was it done before.
driving around looking for signs or you contact a realtor, or
And I wonder, my sister-in-law both probably.
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.
estate agent is going to be involved in the process. Because eventually your real
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?
things, these Redbox things, not So some of you have seen these
You pop in a buck and you get a an advertimovie out. like the local Pick 'n Save or Walgreens and so forth.
So I was out and about one day You can return these things anywhere.
Well, Redbox actually has an and I got this movie. Where am I going to take this movie back.
applications on iPhones, in this case, where you can say here's
that, shows me all the different my current location, click on
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
get there or take the bus or Redbox and how you can walk to
drive or so forth. I think that's a really neat
geospatial technologies can affect what you're doing out way, a very simple way, in which
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.
parking. Not a lot of green dots, by the way, here on campus for public
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
Hall, and here's all the bus certain radius. Here I was sitting in Science
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
But if they can integrate this if you're not in front of a computer that does you no good.
for students here on campus, just think about how important
Knowing where the bus is, plus that is.
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
I suspect many of you have done this, but I'm taking a business highlighttripe to St.route to get there.
to know how far is it? Cloud next week so I just want
What route might I take? Do I want to take, as my dad
along the river? would say, the scenic route
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.
I don't know anything about it, but I want to find a place to Clestay.er. Again, think about how you've.
often done this in the passed.
say. You pull out may be a AAA guidebook, start paging through looking for the diamonds, let's
Then you find a place that seems like a decent place.
you figure out where it is. That's one way to do it. Then you get out your map and
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.
that including, in this case, some reviews about that hotel, I can see more details about
which is kind of neat I think. And you can zoom in further,
I've actually switched to a different website now, this is
can actually see what's called a called Bing Maps, the other one is called Google Maps, where you
bird's eye view. So if you look, a little bit
but if you focus on this hard to see on the screen here,
because I get a sense for what's building right there just above the 2, zoom in a little bit more, for me this is useful
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
Focus on that. hut of some sort.
I'm going to click here. Here's that house.
actually rotated around to the Here's the pool so we've
back of the building with this so-called bird's eye view.
Rotate once more. You can actually flip all the way around 360 degrees on this Rotate again to the other side.
but anything you want to see. This is most commonly found in website so see, not just hotels,
urban areas. You may not find it in rural
Wisconsin necessarily, but for a
situation like this, this is really useful.
not without controversy, is this Something else useful, although
thing called Google Street View. You can actually go in and
using a mapping interface or literally drive down the street
just clicking around and actually see what you would see.
view of that particular hotel. In this case, here's a street
So the way this works is Google, this company Google, has these
They go out and they drive cars.
thousands and thousands of miles every year to help people do
see what's out there. They've got this little camera exactly what I just described,
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.
A lot of people get upset in Again, not without controversy.
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
They're not immune from the hpolice either, nor should they in one of these Google Street View cars.
So I haven't done this recently because my daughters are getting be. Recreation.
and do this thing called a little bit older now, but a few years ago we would go out
sounds a little bit odd at first geocaching. Essentially, it's a high-tech treasure hunt where a person, it
some trinkets in it, and they bget a coordinate on it, a map, a perscoordinate of that.ide an You take your GPS, and that'sh
actually why I bought this guy, type in those coordinates, and
it sounds because it gets you in you navigate there. And it's not quite as simple as
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
hunt. There's hundreds of thousands of and find this object. So it's a high-tech treasure
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
outdoors. It was a really neat kind of it was a great way to get outside and really enjoy the
thing. I'm going to start to wrap up
here and talk a little bit about
these things I've been talking the future. Your head's probably swimming a little bit right now with all
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
devices like this. much anymore. I'm finding myself reading it on
My point being, are paper maps going to go away someday? I don't know.
I don't have a crystal ball.
the future holds. I couldn't tell you five years But as these technology changes happen we just don't know what
There's just so many changes from now what we're going to be looking at.
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
meaningful. You can go and get all kinds of geographic information there yet is actually making it
integration just isn't there. Solving problems that are meaningful to you. but, as we call it, the data
websites, but I think we have a lot more to gain in terms of I've showed you some fun
it's really usable for folks out maturity, speaking now as a mapping professional, before
there. Think about the analysis I did
I had the tools, I had the right for McFarland.
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
accessible to everyday folks. It's true now, believe it or that the tools become more
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
can go now and do that, which great. there's lots of places a person
future. The Internet, the web, has had a So I think we're going to start to see a lot more of that in the
You've heard me mention just huge impact over the last few years.
may not agree, has had a huge impact on our industry, the Gomapping geospatial industry.e of my colleagues I think may or
Well they're getting this stuff out to the masses in ways that Why?
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
mapping geeks, we're trying to are really pushing this along faster, and us mapping guys, us
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
way. a usable, informative kind of
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
The younger set, you see all knew we'd be limited on time.
these students coming in at this time, boy, the things these guys
I'm 40, 41, and just the stuff are using it just amazes me.
that they're using these days it amazes me.
text messages. My daughter communicates with
Believe it or not, I hate to admit it, but they're using these phones to communicate with
so many different things and
A lot of changes have happened. I'd be happy to entertain your So there's a lot of changes coming.
questions. We can talk more.
[APPLAUSE]