Prof.Arup Dasgupta
Honorary Managing Editor
arup.dasgupta@gisdevelopment.net


As I read through the articles submitted to this month's issue I was struck by the common thread flowing through all of them. How to get information to an individual when and where the person wants it. This issue of 'where' is not new but the focus on the 'individual' is noteworthy. It presents a democratisation of a technology and is one of the signs that the technology has arrived. I call this the 'Model T' effect after the ubiquitous Ford Model T car that enabled the man in the street to own a car. Henry Ford realised that the automobile can come of age only when it meets the needs of a huge number of people thereby enhancing sales. If you ignore this basic fact then your technology, no matter how clever it is, will fail. Nothing illustrates this better than the failure of the famous Edsel motor car, also made by Ford in the late '50s. Cut to 1973 when the first mobile phone came into the market. These were based on analogue communications technology, costly and heavy but they provided that element of 'where' and 'when' to communications connectivity that was always present as a latent need. This breakthrough fuelled several technological developments across continents from Japan to Finland until we now have in our hand the ubiquitous cell phone, affordable, easy to use and therefore indispensable. We see here another example of the democratisation of technology.

The development of GPS also follows a similar trend beginning as a scientific method for determining satellite orbits, growing into a military system for position location and navigation, making the transition to civilian use as a result of the tragedy of the loss of a civilian aircraft due to its navigation error and finally achieving ubiquity as a hand held device either in stand alone mode or as a part of another ubiquitous device like a cell phone. The final piece is the democratisation of maps and imagery as personified by Google. In an article on the philosophy of Google Earth in IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (July/August 2007), Michael Jones writes "All too often, the notion of ‘where’ is the least usefully answered of the five W's even when its the most important; not because the location is necessarily withheld, but because the answer - when provided - is given without sufficient context or tools for interpretation." For long the satisfactory answer to 'where' was treated as rocket science involving satellites and huge number crunching computers. It still is, but it is now accessible freely to anyone anywhere on any device from a desktop computer to a hand held cell phone.

It is however, a sobering thought that when we come to a crunch situation like the Myanmar cyclone, technology by itself does not bring succour. To paraphrase Surin Pitsuwan, Secretary-General of ASEAN, technology without will to use it fails every time. Thus we see tremendous efforts by various organisations to create location information about Myanmar but almost no usage of this by the government while people continue to suffer. As I write this China is coming to terms with the aftermaths of the mega quake. The Chinese are power users of geospatial technology (see Map Asia 2003 for an excellent article on the use of geospatial technologies for earthquake relief in China) and most certainly they will be using these technologies to good effect.

This is my first editorial as the new Managing Editor (Honorary). Maneesh Prasad who has ably steered this publication for many years, to many successes, has relinquished these reins to follow his dreams but he will be with us as a guiding hand. Thank you, Maneesh for all that you have contributed and wishing you all the best in your endeavours.

And finally, for a contrary view of LBS I would recommend to readers the article "Road Trip - A GPS takes a technological ignoramus for a ride" by Andy Simmons in the Reader's Digest (India edition) May 2008.