What's a Spatial Effect?  What can we tell you?  What can you tell us?  Oughtobiography What's a Spatial Effect? In the real world, spatial effects are when bridge repairs add forty minutes to your commute, when visitors can't find your house because your street isn't marked, when your water starts to taste funny, and when urban sprawl gobbles up fields, woods and wetlands. Nowadays these and other spatial problems are dealt with computationally, using geographic information systems (GIS) and digital spatial databases ("geodata"). Increasingly, results from computer analyses, models and simulations are used by governments and private organizations to determine, implement and evaluate policies for development, planning, environmental protection, farming and transportation. Their validity depend on the sophistication of models, the detail, timeliness and quality of geographic and statistical data, the clarity with which they are interpreted, and values, commitments and communications among the participants in the problem-solving process. Mistakes can and do happen, and can have significant environmental, monetary and legal ramifications. Using digital lenses to view the world distorts it in subtle ways that practitioners don't always understand. The technology is thus far from neutral in its consequences, and our growing dependence upon it creates new kinds of spatial effects -- good, bad and often unknown -- not just in models and on monitors, but in the real world itself. We worry about this, have dedicated years to improving the handling and communication of geodata, and are committed to bringing higher standards to geographic information and its analysis. In these pages, we describe aspects of our experience in dealing with spatial technology and its consequences, in hopes that what we've discovered, done and can do might be useful to you and others. What can we tell you? Here's the gist of what you can find in these pages. If you're just grazing, you can find some interesting facts and ideas about geodata in Q&A form in our briefing section. Mouse over to the research pages for additional and more elaborate expositions (including animations) of geospatial concepts; that's where you'll encounter descriptions of the QTM, an approach to hierarchical global georeferencing. We're working on a Java applet that will let you produce QTM geocodes for your house or other points of interest. Other research-related features include some research papers and related data that you can download as PDFs, plus assorted editorial rants on topics in geoprocessing. A good place to begin exploring is our discussion of cartographic presentation on the world wide web. We aim to please. Check out our company's identity profile (of course there's a mission statement). In it, we also let you know what things we don't do, so as not to misinform you about our interests and capabilities. You can also peruse various credentials and take note of the variety of clients we've served. If you're still not sure what we're about, you might flip through brief descriptions of some past projects, which may surprise you with their diversity (where else can you find descriptions of tactical simulation software, a 4-dimensional map hologram and a lightning strike database all in one place?). Don't neglect to peruse our list of useful geoprocessing and cartography web links, classified for your convenience and updated regularly. Be sure to bookmark that page for future use, and so you can find your way back here after all your wanderings. You might also wish to bookmark our extensive HyperGlossary, which defines and relates 100 technical terms used in geoprocessing. All these and more are listed on our Connections page. Lastly, should you ever want to reach us, you know where to find us. What can you tell us? If you're interested in any of the things we are, we'd like to connect. We offer several ways to do this in addition to e-mail. For example, you can add comments to a page we maintain that other guests to this site can read. Just click the "add a comment" link at the bottom of the Connections page to join in, and try to keep your comment relevant to our enterprise. You'll be asked for your name and e-mail address, but rest assured we have no intention to spam you (if you desire you can remain anonymous, but please explain why you're paranoid). Or you can forward a private communication to us from our contact page. We also enable you to add links that you believe might interest any of us. Go to the Connections page if you want to do this (but check there to see if the link you want to install isn't already listed by us or others). Use this to shamelessly promote yourself, or to call attention to deservedly good or bad sites that you feel are germane to the topics at hand. Please use common sense and decency by not placing links to mail-order-porno-queen-brides.com, etc. (search engines please ignore this sentence). Of course, whatever links you add should be related to what this site describes. This service is kindly provided by greenspun.com's BooHoo link database. We also sponsor newsgroups on topics of mutual interest (we use the LUSENET system, which anyone can freely exploit). Again, any such discussion you find here is free and open to the public and will remain so unless (a) circumstances cause LUSENET to become unavailable, or (b) offensive or abusive content accumulates, in which case we'll require people to register in order to post messages and won't hesitate to block messages from repeat offenders. Please note: internet forums only tend to be useful to the extent that potentially interested parties are aware of their existence. So, if you're keen enough to participate in one we sponsor, you should probably mention it and provide its URL on some page or pages you maintain. Likewise, tell potential participants about it when you contact them by email. Keep the ball rolling. We've kicked off the following LUSENET discussion. Feel free to come on in... Global Grids: Issues and Applications (why they are needed, what they are and what they can do) This discussion aims at drawing out people who have interest in modeling the earth's surface using geometric tiling schemes other than latitude and longitude, for spatial analysis, spatial indexing, location encoding, environmental sampling, cartography, terrain modeling, data compression and other purposes. We'd like to be able to compare and contrast approaches and eventually organize meetings on global grids. Oughtobiography By now, I ought to have made my fourth or fifth million. The only millions I have are all bytes, and they're not all mine; still, a lot of them did tumble from my keyboard, except for the ones that the mouse shat out. If ideas are currency, I'm a rich man. But they're more like promissory notes. I suppose I ought to have a senior position in a big company that pays me to think deep thoughts and revolutionize their industry. That actually happened once, but the business went bust. I futzed around for a few years, then went back to school. People in universities tend to tolerate my presence; I guess I amuse them. At least I have neat stuff to show for it. People tell me I ought to promote myself more aggressively. That's why I made this web site. In it I explain what I'm about, with a minimum of hype. That is, everything here is essentially nothing but what I can truthfully tell and show you -- some diversions but no gimmicks, some suggestions but no "solutions", and mostly just interesting, potentially useful insights from my bitstream. I ought to alert you that I do consulting in the area of organizing and visualizing geodata (geographic information). The general technical category for such pursuits is called geographic information systems (GIS). In my salad days it was wishful thinking on the part of a tiny clique of people who plotted primitive maps using huge, crabby computers. Now it's a multibillion dollar industry stretching from architecture to zoology. GIS vendors say that their technology will slice, dice and puree geodata just the way you like it, but don't believe it. Someone ought to inform you that a lot of what's out there is overblown. Even when it isn't, you won't know how much to trust your results when almost any kind of spatial analysis is involved. We stand ready to help you see through the smoke and behind the mirrors. Finally, I ought not to use the first person plural to describe personal activities. But I like using "we" to acknowledge that many individual achievements are raised on scaffolding built by other people. Most of what you'll find here owes a lot to teachers, colleagues, scientists, artists and inventors who have taught me much. I also know a lot of folks in the profession and network constantly, and if I can't help you myself, I can team with or turn you over experts who probably can. So if you have geodata problems on your plate, let's talk. Copyright © 1999 by Geoffrey Dutton.