New State, New Faces

So, there has been a little change of scenery since I last posted. I got a job in Washington and didn't have to be in too much of a rush to move (unlike when we moved down to Arizona). It went something like this:

Northern Arizona

Hoover Dam Some part of California Some other part of California (you'll never guess). We traveled up the Oregon coast. I would heartily recommend this. Nearly as pretty as that girl. Now we are living in Port Orchard. It is rather nice.

Still settling in, so I will leave more details for another post. The summary: doing GIS work for Peninsula Light Co, a nonprofit coop power utility, enjoying the temperate climate, and taking the ferry to west Seattle on the weekends to see friends. I've been rather terrible about updating this blog recently due to the effort required in the move, but I intend to talk more about the area and the new job in more frequent posts.

Future roles of a GIS analyst: The problems of cartography

The company I work for is both a water and power utility. Both sides have their own geographic information systems, with parts of IT trying to integrate both systems into one big GIS database. While there are complications on the technical end, let me try to describe some of the issues on such an integration from a cartographic perspective:

• Clients, usually from one group or the other, are accustom to very specific symbols for specific map features.
• All of the historic maps from either side have had consistent symbology that match said clients preferences.
• The two groups symbology clashes - what is the red line; a 70kv line, water main, or a user annotation from someone in the field?
• The extents of the features clash.
• A lot of features are not loosely coupled: there are groups where if something is not present it makes no sense, or applications that may require it fail.
• The labeling becomes very problematic for the same reasons symbols do.
• Definitions! What does "deactivated" mean exactly across very different features in different groups?
• There are a truly massive number of features. So many that a given client is not necessarily going to know what they really need.
• How do you project it? The scales of the datasets vary immensely.
• What coordinate system - clients have different preferences in this matter, and one has a custom one of their own creation.

This is all without mentioning that there are plenty of subgroups like environmental, telecom, or legal, which have their own customs and requirements. At least for us, I think the role of cartographer will still have a place here for a long time, trying to organize all this stuff for human consumption. I don't think these issues are unique. Nor do I think that they wouldn't exist if there was tighter integration between the two groups that generate the bulk of the geographic data. I think we are on the cusp of a revolution of both location-aware and location gathering technology - and more data requires better means of organizing and displaying it. Some of this can be automated, but not much I think. I have yet to see software that can easily determine if a given map - or web map application - contains the necessary data for its audience and that data is organized in such a way to be legible, queryable to the client's satisfaction, and aesthetically pleasing. ESRI has put a lot of effort into simply automating the placement of labels, but it is by no means perfect and often requires extensive customization. Perhaps Dave Bouwman is right and "GIS analyst" - already a nebulous term - is not a career that will exist in the future. But I fail to see a way to do all of the above without someone dedicated to cartography.

RE: Arizona's new Immigration Law

The Phoenix area at least gets a lot of its powerhouse economy from ruthlessly exploiting probably innocent prisoners in chain gangs and illegal immigrants. So the natural response to the housing crisis, which is probably going to bankrupt the state government by itself, is to toss one of these groups under a bus with an employee sanctioning law. I suppose if you were attempting to change one group into the other, this would be your plan. At the moment you can frequently find a free six month apartment lease as a prize in your cereal box...which you would get for free as part of the current sweetheart lease you signed rewarding you free food for a year and full use of the renter's daughter for your meth-fueled pornography business. Okay, admittedly such places are utter ratholes. But they drive the prices down for all other apartments nicely. They will all probably go away and the sudden absence of their residents will drive any number of other businesses to ruin. And all that is ignoring the substantial amount of taxes that immigrants paid (sales and even parole taxes with faked Social Security numbers). Now they will move home/to other states - with the businesses likely following them - and the ones that can't move will be forced to crime for survival. Addendum: This law wouldn't be nearly so stupid and shortsighted if there was an extremely easy mechanism to turn currently "illegal" workers into a guest worker/working-on-citizenship status and letting them stick around but with all of the advantages of them being on the books while still maintaining the necessary labor force. Of course the whole immigration system with its astoundingly racist quota system should be overhauled, but if you are going to pass a law to ruin a bunch of people's lives, you should attempt to provide a way in people guilty of what amounts to a rather minor crime (if 50+ million of the people in your country are guilty of something - alcohol consumption during prohibition, nonviolent drug use, minor [even accidental] personal copyright infringement - you really can't consider it a major crime).