From Information and Knowledge Comes Wisdom

Jack Dangermond is founder and president of the Environmental Systems Research Institute (Esri), which develops geographic information systems and is based in Redlands, California.

I am going to talk this morning about my experience with GIS,¹ how you are using it and how I think it will create our future. Your work is a foundation for a lot of what the future will bring. You come from so many disciplines and so many different backgrounds, this meeting is important. I know it is important to you. It is important to me and many others because it will weave together what I think will be our future. Your work is actually the evidence of why I think GIS and geospatial information systems and environmental information systems have a great future.

All of the issues that we have talked about here at the Eye on Earth Summit are challenging us. We’re a little nervous about it. Perhaps they are the fundamental things that motivated you in the first place to get involved in the work that you actually do: challenges on the global scale and challenges on the local scale. If you simply read the newspapers you might be overwhelmed.

Collaborative Understanding

Fundamentally, we need better understanding. We need a kind of collaborative information environment that helps us understand and collaborate together. I know that this will change the world. Creating such an environment has been my own profession and also that of many of you, my friends, who have been working on this in different ways for many years around the world.

Geospatial technology takes raw data and turns it into information through mapping. Maps, when integrated in a GIS, turn that information into knowledge, and that kind of knowledge can be enormously grown if we simply share it. I can understand you, you can understand me, and as a foundation we can collaborate more effectively in doing that. Whether it’s you and me, or whether it’s you with citizens or villagers or decision-makers, this framework clearly is a foundation for the future. And your work shows it.

Some of you are understanding the world about global climate change and looking at biodiversity and all of those various things. Your work shows better than anything I could say the meaning of this information technology and where it’s going. Some of you are monitoring our environment, monitoring environmental change. Others are managing natural resources—forests, water, energy and the like. And others are labouring to create the future through planning, design, the integration of science and measurement with creative work in the future. Others of you are working on responding to natural disasters, a broader interpretation of our environment: responding to earthquakes and floods and famines and droughts. And others are looking to where we should actually collaborate with citizens.

Our new technologies are allowing us to integrate citizen input into geospatial information, taking things like tweets and social-media information and making them part of the same authoritative systems that drive governments and drive action. It’s very exciting.

Some of you are actually designing and developing infrastructure that will support things like conservation, infrastructure that will support things like better education, making our kids more environmentally aware, geographically aware, so that they can measure, and not only see things, but interpret things and do geodesign or creation of the future themselves.

All of this work is interesting, and some of you in particular countries are trying to tie it together in national infrastructures as in India, or in Japan, or in Russia, or in the European Union, or in the United States, or perhaps right here in Abu Dhabi.

Integration and Sharing

But these sorts of efforts are not really enough, I would say, yet. All of our individual efforts in this geography or that geography, while important, and giving us the evidence that we have something, are not enough. We need to take the next step; we need to bring things together at a macro scale. We need to bring together our measurements, our data, our maps, our models, how we understand the world, and share it. We need to learn how to share it. We need a technology platform that enables us to be able to share it.

Fortunately, things are evolving rapidly—technology and a lot of co-evolving information. We’re measuring virtually everything that changes and moves. We’re able to handle big data sets as we’ve never been able to before. We’re able to have a computing platform with a cloud and distributed processing that enables us to process information much faster than we’ve been able to in the past. And these computers are becoming connected. We’re connecting measurements through these big data systems so that we can computationally model our planet. And social networks, another dimension of connectivity, are likewise stepping in. We’re connecting our people. This is leading to collaborative science, more quantitative science, visual science, modelling, being able to predict more effectively.

I’m not saying all of these things are perfect; I’m talking about the trends. And at the same time, we’re seeing in our field—geospatial and environmental information systems—the emergence of technology that is much easier to use. Technology that’s accessible and through Web and cloud computing will be available to everyone in the world. This is all resulting in a new pattern, a pattern that opens up and connects all of our individual efforts, a pattern that lets professionals talk to citizens and to decision-makers in a new kind of community. “Integration” is the word that I want to talk about.

Organisations are rapidly grasping, grabbing and using this new pattern. For example, the United Nations Environment Programme with UNEPLive, organisations like Data Basin which have struggled to bring together all the non-governmental organisations that want to share information. Organisations like the governments of Indonesia, Kuwait, and Abu Dhabi. And one new, very exciting one for me is the Eye on Earth network led by the EEA, the European Environment Agency. These are about building a global network. How do they work? Well, first they bring together information from many sources and allow us to integrate. They also facilitate communication through the power of mapping and visualisation, and they also break down the stovepipes between and among different agencies that have plagued us and plagued the ability to have holistic or synoptic understanding at one time. This platform, this evolution that we’re in, is just in time. That would be my assertion.

I think very positively about what this will mean. It will mean that very easily we can log into something like the Eye on Earth portal here in Abu Dhabi and bring up a map—for example, a map showing marine protection areas. I might bring up the map of coral. I might then overlay or mash up with it areas where there are turtle nesting areas and habitats and overlay on top of that seagrass and overlay on top of that pearl-diving areas, all simply from browser accessible, free technology. I might then look at areas that are unprotected, things that might threaten the protected areas, things like shipping lanes, ports, oil extractions, and so on, and see which areas are within what jurisdiction for protection—the offshore limits, so to speak. On top of these intelligent Web maps that are going to be accessible to everyone on the planet, we can sketch different alternatives. For example, I might sketch in a certain area for additional protection, and having done so, we can quickly understand the impact on the rest of society.

A New Nervous System for the Planet

This will be a new kind of language. This pattern will not only speak through these maps but it will also help coordinate our work. Some of you focus on measurement; some of you focus on data management; others are scientists and analysts linking these together with visualisation environments, so that decision-makers, planners, designers can be better informed in a more collaborative environment. I think this will lead to a kind of new nervous system for our planet.

This new nervous system is intriguing, but technology is only a small piece. It’s certainly not enough. Why we’re here is to talk about much more. We need vision and leadership from people at the top, all around the world, who need to understand what this will be, this new language of geo-communication. Will it be e-mail in the twenty-first century that changes the world? No, I think it will be “geo-mail”, mapping things. Will it be a better financial accounting system? No, I think it will “geo-accounting”, accounting for all the things that people really care about. We need open-sharing policies to make this work. We need a global plan. It needs to be technically in the stream with all these other trends—mobile computing, cloud computing, etc. We need standards to make this all work out, to make all of our separate systems interoperable as a system of systems. We need governance, to show how we can actually collaborate.

Reading the newspapers today, in my country and Europe, around the world, this is hard. We need to work hard at how we govern collaboration to deal with the big challenges and the big problems. And then, of course, we need implementation that will work. For this we need good people like yourselves who have a spirit of collaboration, who don’t want to sit around and argue about it, who want get on with it, because frankly, we don’t have time. Your work this week, I think, has been anticipated by many, for many years. I think it will provide us with a powerful network if we do this together. And we need to do this together—effectively integrate our knowledge, share our knowledge, build common understanding.

My good friend the information-architecture pioneer Richard Saul Wurman said, “Understanding precedes action.” If we can build an information system like this that helps us understand, it can be the foundation for creating the future.

Geodesign

I’m going to talk now about two of my favourite subjects: geodesign and geo-information products. Sometimes we call these maps. Geodesign is the first subject I want to cover.

How many of you know what this concept means? It’s a very interesting idea. Many years ago, centuries ago, Japanese masters would go to landscapes and craft a sensitive solution for putting buildings into them. They created a kind of harmonious thing that we’ve all come to idealise as a beautiful man-and-nature relationship.

About fifty years ago, maybe sixty years ago, there was a landscape architect, quite famous, in the United States, called Ian McHarg, and he wrote a book called Design with Nature, which was published in 1969. McHarg invented a set of plastic overlays as a methodology for designing with nature. He inspired me as a young man. I was a young landscape architect as a student. I was studying computers and I also loved Ian McHarg’s work, of trying to link the science side of geography with design, using maps that could integrate nature and overlaying these maps and interpreting them with suitability interpretations and then doing geographic sketch-designs on them. And this is what designers actually do, linking the science side of what they are trained in with the design side, which is what artists do. They create something out of nothing, like this room: it was conceived of and designed, and then built.

President Clinton in his speech this morning said he doesn’t just want to talk about the outcome of meetings; he wants to see projects done that are meaningful projects. And this is what Ian was talking about: about how you can bring scientific information into the world of the designers so that people would create considering tsunamis or considering flood plains or considering hot-spot biological areas.

When I got out of school I started this organisation, Esri—the Environmental Systems Research Institute. We said we’d really like to build the tools that other people could do geodesign with. Unfortunately, I got sidetracked; I didn’t do geodesign. We built geographic information systems and people made maps and they did all kinds of interesting projects with this. GIS has become a standard platform all around the world for conservation work, or for economic development, or for forest management, or planning. And many of you are users of these tools, from the small scale all the way up to looking at global climate change.

This has become a framework for understanding our world, and now actually at the very time of this conference, we’re seeing emerging a new kind of GIS. This new platform is open. It allows all the individuals who have been doing GIS in the past to share their information in the cloud and mix it up. Professionals can share and policymakers and citizens can get connected and realise a better understanding of the world. Now, right at this very moment, people are taking this platform and extending it out with various portals so that one country, or the World Bank, or the European Union, or US government, or here in Abu Dhabi, we can share information into this network. And they’re all doing it with different portals, mini-faces, but with one fundamental sharing environment in the background.

The other thing that’s occurring today is that we’re beginning to measure everything that changes on the planet through online measurement systems, sensor networks, social networks that are geo-referenced, tweets, and this information is being synthesised into layers of knowledge that people can actually use. But I have tell you, geodesign doesn’t fit exactly into this—at least it hasn’t in the past. It isn’t enough simply to measure and fly like Superman around the globe and see things. It doesn’t connect with the way that projects get built. We need to learn how to take geographic knowledge, these measurement sets, and connect it with a design process so that people can interactively sketch or design and understand the consequences of these designs and then bring it into action—realise plans.

It isn’t enough just to measure. We need projects that make a difference, sustainable projects that integrate all the science but play right into the actions of individuals. Geodesign is a kind of systematic process. It starts with three steps that are all about science: (1) measuring the overlays, as in measuring the environment; (2) then modelling the environment through process-models like climate forecasts, or soil erosion, or land-use change; (3) and then actually interpreting the environment with things that we call “suitability maps”—where is it best to locate, and where is it not?

The next steps deal with design. They look at designing alternatives for urbanisation, locating stores, or alternatives for conservation planning, or alternatives for economic development; then quickly, almost interactively, measuring the environmental impacts or consequences of those designs as a foundation for decision-makers that can make decisions. This is a process which is iterative and rapid, which results in a kind of adaptive way of seeing the world and working with the world.

Geodesign is not just for big organisations. It starts with individuals. The world is changing. How is it changing? It’s changing through little actions such as placing a building here, or cutting a forest there, or preserving a place. These are projects: individuals are doing that, companies are doing that, and indeed, as a group, our whole society is doing that.

Geodesign, I think, will be an evolutionary step. It will link the science side, as Ian McHarg discussed, with exactly what we do, so that the footprints we lay down consider the implications of what we do. And doing geo-accounting, environmental accounting, of the consequences is I think the missing link. Once we understand this, I have a lot of confidence that the world will change. It means we need to share this data—what this conference is all about—but that isn’t enough.

Geo-information Products

The second thing I want to talk about is geographic information products. This is the medium within which we communicate. Some people like to call them maps. Good information products require good design. They require thinking. We’re not just talking about measurements. We’re talking about understanding the fundamental issue to which the measurement is designed to respond, such as where I locate something, or nuclear radiation is occurring, or climate change is being realised. And then must be included the appropriate data, and then the analytics that sometimes manipulate the data, and then finally compelling graphic design that tells a story that communicates to the user of the product.

Many of you make maps. How many of them are really good maps, allowing people to make a decision or really to acquire understanding from them? Good products help us understand and then support action. That’s the bottom line.

Good information products are timely. For example, a map of the tsunami right after the Japanese earthquake enabled hour-by-hour forecasts of when the tsunami would hit other countries. It saved lives in Hawaii because executives there realised that in five or six hours the tsunami would hit. They evacuated the areas and it really made a huge difference. Another product unfortunately didn’t have the impact it needed to. A map showed the radiation coming out of the nuclear plant at Fukishima. Many of you probably read that four kilometres around Fukishima were evacuated because that was thought to be the most dangerous area. But the GIS people there showed with diffusion models that the big plumes were going to drop far beyond ten kilometres. Those areas were not evacuated, and stuff dropped on the food supply. Well, this map was not disseminated; that’s the point. Good information products not only graphically communicate, but they get out there.

A third dimension of good information products is that they communicate importance. For example, suitability maps for conservation in South Africa show hot spots in the areas that are ranked most important for conservation. They lead to action. These information products support decision-making, such as on where to locate wind farms or where to drill for oil. They leverage not only the data but analytics that interpret the data and deliver them for the decision-maker. So it isn’t just measurement. Good information products step beyond that.

Good information products sometimes deal with time, for example, maps that show land-use change in Louisiana, New Orleans, over the last forty years, or global climate-change forecasts that are occurring in time and space. These maps show situational awareness. Another map shows Haiti aid-funding—where the money went, project by project. The bigger the circle the more aid is being disseminated. Many money maps were made, tracking situations. These maps—often crucial to maintaining lives—weren’t made simply by throwing some measurements together.

Finally, good information products can show designs for the future, and this gets back to geodesign. Good information products are the key. It isn’t just measurement. It’s that link between the decision-maker and all of these data that are coming in, and that means timely knowledge that’s communicated effectively. It means communicating what’s important. It means talking to the issue of what a decision-maker has to deal with, and illustrating it though time, because we’re becoming more able to measure and communicate time. And then showing results. Everybody in government says, “I want performance measurement.” What does that mean? It means, “Show me where the money is going and how effective it is.”

And then, finally, my favourite topic, geodesign, the active stepping into the game of creating the future. Not just being at the mercy of all the bad news. We’ve got too much bad news. We have to start creating the good news, and that means, I think, geodesign. 

endnotes

1. GIS—a geographic information system—integrates hardware, software, and data for capturing, processing, and displaying all forms of geographically referenced information. Ed.