Michael Frank Goodchild is a British-American geographer. He is currently a professor of geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He moved to Santa Barbara in 1988, as part of the establishment of the National Center for Georgraphic Information and Analysis, which he has directed for nearly 20 years. Goodchild became a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2002, and received the Royal Geographical Society’s Founder’s Medal in 2003.
InfoGEO: In your article entitled Geographic Information Science, from 1992, for the first time came up the term GIScience. Do you consider yourself the “father of GIScience”?
Mike Goodchild: It’s a phrase I hear often, but I wouldn’t use it myself. I wrote that paper based on two European conference keynotes, one in 1990 and one in 1991, in which I was trying to capture a theme that had become very important within the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, namely how to respond to people who thought of GIS as mere button-pushing and who questioned whether it belonged in the university. I wanted to show that there was more to GIS, that it involved some fairly fundamental concepts, and that serious basic research was needed to improve it and assure its future. So I’d want to give others major credit also: David Simonett, who had spent decades asking similar questions about remote sensing; Andrew Frank, Terry Smith, and Ross MacKinnon, the associate directors of NCGIA; and David Mark and Max Egenhofer.
InfoGEO: In that same article, you talk about using the potential of the computer screen for visualizing the globe instead using projections. In that time, did you already foresee the emerge of virtual globes, as Google Earth, Nasa World Wind and Virtual Earth?
Mike Goodchild: Yes, we were working then with the GL library and IBM AIX machines with what at the time were heavy-duty graphics, and were able to develop discrete global grids that allowed for rapid zoom and pan. But we didn’t foresee that the Internet would be capable of feeding data at a sufficient rate, or think through all of the clever level-of-detail management and caching that virtual globes use, or anticipate that by 2005 those graphics capabilities would be standard on vanilla PCs. Then in 1997 I helped write the Al Gore Digital Earth speech, and gave a presentation on Capitol Hill in which I suggested that the community work towards implementing a digital earth by 2005.
InfoGEO: Google Earth popularized the geo-information and the way the people relate themselves with geographic information. Do you foresee the emerge of any technology that could be in the future as revolutionary as Google Earth?
Mike Goodchild: I think Microsoft’s Virtual Earth goes a significant step further by allowing fully 3D exploration of cities, with textured exteriors of buildings. There are still things in the Gore speech that none of the virtual globes can do, including simulation of alternative futures, and that’s a research direction I’d like very much to pursue. Eventually I think we will have internal building structure also, and virtual globes that drill down to the interiors of malls and underground complexes.
InfoGEO: The term GIScience é almost unknown for the general public, but the term GIS is already popular for the masses. With the neogeography, the GIScience researchers and GIS users would coming apart?
Mike Goodchild: Must be a mistype. How about "Is neogeography tearing apart the world of GIS and GIScience?" No, I’m very excited by neogeography because it represents the recruitment of a whole new population of enthusiasts who are rediscovering geography and geographic science, and producing lots of innovative ideas.
InfoGEO: Which are the emerging fields in Geographic Information Science nowadays? Neogeography is one of them?
Mike Goodchild: I don’t think neogeography is well enough defined yet. I think there are some fundamental questions emerging out of the ability of citizens to create geographic information, such as the ones we identified at the Volunteered Geographic Information workshop in December (www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/projects/vgi). I also think that neogeography is one reason for reopening the whole question of metadata, and creating an approach that is much more user-centric.
InfoGEO: In your most recent article about the Spatial Data Infrastructure in the Web 2.0 world, the join of collective intelligence with neogeography and Web 2.0 is considered as an alternative for mapping the planet. How this effort could be organized?
Mike Goodchild: Very similarly to Wikipedia (and Wikimapia is already in operation), that is, by a loosely structured organization of volunteers who monitor new additions. The difference is that geographic information is inherently local, so the monitors can also have local responsibilities, e.g. I get to review all new entries for Santa Barbara County. There could also be a hierarchy in terms of the size of features – the entry for the Mississippi gets reviewed at the national level. Wikimapia is only about place descriptions, but I can imagine parallel efforts for other types of geographic information.
InfoGEO: Efforts as Wikimapia and OpenStreetMap will have long life? The neogeographers will be willing to improve constantly the model and inform the metadata? What is your motivation and what kind of people would do that?
Mike Goodchild: I think the whole issue of preservation is critically important. All geographic information is subject to change, so there is a constant need for update, but update is never as compelling to volunteers as the original contribution. There’s also the novelty factor, I’m sure that a large part of the enthusiasm for these projects derives from their novelty and may not last. Finally there’s the question of the future of the supporting technologies, including Google Earth.
InfoGEO: Regarding to the efforts of volunteer mapping, the companies will have motivation to lead this project? Nowadays, what institution would be more indicated to coordinate those efforts?
Mike Goodchild: We’re seeing the emergence of some interesting collaborations, between volunteers and traditional authoritative mapping agencies on the one hand (www.geograph.org.uk is sponsored by the Ordnance Survey), and between volunteers and major corporations on the other (use of citizens to update Teleatlas, Google’s sponsorship of mapping in Indian cities). I think the mapping agencies will have no alternative but to do this, for their own survival.
InfoGEO: Some people say that Web 3.0 will be Geographic Web. How do you imagine this Internet with strong geographic components?
Mike Goodchild: The early prognostications were that the Web would destroy geography, would be the death of distance. But the past 15 years have seen a steady increase in the importance of geography on the Web, and the latest Microsoft OS automatically attempts to locate the user from his or her IP address. My PC has always known what time it is – now finally it knows where it is. The search engines are already using IP address to prioritize hits. I think eventually we will move to a world in which all of the information about a place is available at once, moving finally beyond the layer concept. Google Earth is moving us in this direction, but we’ve still a long way to go.