From route optimization for a food delivery to estimating footfall at a cinema hall or shopping mart, the combination of location intelligence and digital maps is at play. Google Maps and other detailed maps have emerged at the core of the gig economy as well as the new platform-as-a-service business model. Digital maps and location intelligence is a thriving industry now that undergirds the sprawling network of connectivity unlocked by the internet and the smartphones. Today, digitalization has converted smartphones into everything from a chaotic bulletin board to a barometer of civic agitation and rumblings. Often called the Microsoft of GIS, Esri’s ArcGIS is of great utility for everyone from city planners, business enterprises, environmentalists, community health professionals, to first responders in emergency outbreaks. Forbes called him ‘Godfather of Digital Maps’ in 2016 and he’s also widely referred to as the ‘Godfather of GIS’.Īs an entrepreneur, Dangermond was the trailblazer in recognizing the enormous potential of geospatial and digital maps, and Esri was the lone shining star in GIS for many years. The other person in the story is Esri Founder Jack Dangermond. He was also inducted as an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and served as Chairman of the International Geographical Union GIS Commission for 12 years, and also served as the president of the Canadian Association of Geographers. He developed the first GIS in 1967 for the Canada Land Inventory and mentored the GIS fraternity for long. Hailed as the Father of GIS, Roger Tomlinson’s vision was to use computers to collate and merge all the natural resources data of Canada’s provinces.
Here, there were no competing visions, but complementary efforts and aligned mission. Similarly, the saga of GIS is also incomplete without two remarkable individuals who played a seminal role from its genesis to its mass adoption. It was about a pioneering agronomist and a leading ecologist and how their clashing visions shaped the future of the modern world. Mann wrote a book, intriguingly titled The Wizard and the Prophet. A year later he founded the Harvard laboratory which followed a truly interdisciplinary ethos and included scientists, planners, geographers as its members. In 1964, Fischer created a computer mapping program known as Synmap. Roger Tomlinson, a Canadian Geographer, is both the pioneer of GIS and the man who coined the term while working on the Canadian government project.ĭuring the same time, a man named Howard Fischer at the Harvard Laboratory for Computer Graphics was also playing a groundbreaking role in the evolution of the fledgling GIS. What started as a Canadian government commissioned project to manage natural resource inventory in 1963 is today worth billions of dollars, powering sectors from last-mile delivery to infrastructure maintenance and defense and intelligence, and pivoting the dawn of Industry 4.0 and the era of interoperability. Great things often have nondescript beginnings and a forgettable trajectory, until their value skyrockets and they become household names. Let’s look at the roller-coaster ride of cartography
Maps are a palimpsest of humanity, with multiple layers of knowledge, history and experience adding on forever. ‘An Ode to Maps’ sounds too mawkish a tribute to something that changes forms and constantly reinvents itself. And today we have reached a stage where mapping is everywhere and is connecting, powering, and advancing almost everything, from the humdrum to the spectacular, the banal to the ground breaking. The utility increased and extended to all human avenues.
STANDARD THROUGH THE AGES SOFTWARE
With the digital age and software maps received a new boost through GIS and geospatial data.
From rudimentary forms of maps made on caves, to the age of Herodotus, to Papal Bull and Magna Carta, to the dawn of colonialism, and the final unravelling of empires and the beginning of national liberation movements, maps narrated it all. Maps capture the zeitgeist of an era like very few artefacts do. History of cartography can be likewise divided into different eras. More than anything else, cartography defines the ambiguous past and delineates the chaotic present.Įric Hobsbawm divided modern history into four ages. They have been central to the human story in its sublime beauty as well as dismaying horror. Maps have accompanied the rise and fall of empires, the discovery of new lands, and the drawing of boundaries, along with vanishing of the old and forging of the new. The spirit of human ingenuity, unquenchable zeal, and the desire to make sense of the broader world and connect with it led to this. If a man’s face is his autobiography and a woman’s face her work of fiction, as Oscar Wilde wrote, then a country’s face is nothing but its map.Ĭartography - or the science of map-making - is among the earliest human endeavors to chart out the world and understand it.
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