We spent the first part of the week with mapping sherpa James Fee, who filled our brains with much to ponder. One a-ha that emerged for me out of our discussions was that the days of the web-based “Mapping Portal” are numbered.

Why have a portal for data that just happens to have a geospatial component? Some data belongs on a map, some in a table, some in a paragraph as part of an analysis. The format the data is in is less relevant than what the data is about. I don’t call my bookshelf a “paper portal” and the fact that some content happens to be in a book doesn’t matter — what matters is the content in the books.

There are two perverse side-effects of a GIS portal: it ends up mapping things that shouldn’t be mapped, and missing things that are important.

  1. Mapping things that shouldn’t be mapped: A GIS Portal rapidly descends into being a repository for data that doesn’t really have a geographic relevance. For example, let’s say you want to map social services. Some might be geographically relevant (where the food pantries are located and clients pick up their food baskets) but some are not (like the locations of the Meals on Wheels kitchen, which is not relevant because the meals are delivered to clients’ homes).
  2. Missing things that are important: When you’re trying to understand the resources available to the community, if you’re only looking at resources that are mappable (like the location of walk-in mental health crisis centers), then you’re missing a huge piece of the solution (phone-based mental health crisis counseling).

Irrational Exuberance

GIS Portals emerged when the technology itself was novel and merely having a GIS Portal was considered a sign of success. (This reminds me of the early nineties when web sites just had to exist and be cool, not necessarily fulfill a real function.) I think we’re moving on… the next evolutionary step is GIS that serves a purpose, with the focus on information products, with well-defined users and tasks they will accomplish with the data. This is a lot harder to design, though, than a GIS Portal where you throw in all the data you’ve got and the kitchen sink and satisfy yourself with the use case of letting users “explore the data.”