Its been another busy week here at FortiusOne, specifically focusing on adding a growing number of retail store locations to the data repository. If you’ve ever tried to find a list of store locations in the US or the World, then you’ll know how difficult it is to find. Website store locator’s can show you whats in your zipcode, or city but its tough to get the whole picture. Hopefully the Retail Data we provide will be useful, and interesting, here are some examples of the recently added data:

WalMart Store Locations
Cabelas Store Locations
Chipotle Mexican Grill Locations
Restoration Hardware Stores
Dunkin Donut Locations
Barnes and Nobel Stores
Target Retail Stores
Patagonia Stores
Apple Store Locations
Best Buy Store Locations

These datasets and many more are available at GeoCommons.
If you’d like us to find something for you just leave a comment and we’ll do our best to help you out. Cheers.

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Wanted to take this opportunity to let folks know that Chris Marentis has joined up with FortiusOne (check the new website) as our President and Chief Operations Officer. Chris was most recently CEO at Clearspring Technologies - the leading provider of cross-platform widget services. We are very excited and flattered that Chris has decided to come on board and he will be a great accelerator for the launch of the next generation GeoCommons. He has already had a huge impact helping us run things in a more smooth and targeted manner. We really look forward to the many good things he’ll have in store for the company as he helps us drive the next generation of GeoCommons.

We’ve gotten some great feedback on the GeoCommons beta and learned some valuable lessons on what works and what does not in fusing the GeoWeb and GIS. On the GeoWeb side we’ve been working hard on building the right work flow and user experience to make GIS data useful and exciting for non-technical users. On the GIS side of things we’ve putting lots of effort into providing tools to make GeoCommons an acceptable part of the GIS workflow - ranging from metadata to OGC standards support. Then using web services to bridge the two together with some semantic fun to intelligently serve and syndicate the best content, data and analysis.

For the current GeoCommons we’ll be in steady state mode till the next generation is ready to push out. In the mean time please keep all the great feedback and suggestions coming. We are working hard to make them a reality in the next release.

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There has been a flurry of blogging the last couple of days over a post on the “All Point Blog” that “Neogeography is not GIS“. The most interesting part has been seeing the response from friends like, Peter Batty, Andrew Turner, and Daniel Flatla, who’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the topic in general. All three, and many others, had excellent points and I’ve been thinking on what would be valuable to add to the conversation.

I ended up with two relevant points 1) GIS and the GeoWeb are converging and will not be two distinct worlds for long and 2) it is all about the democratization of the technology. Several folks have blogged about the difference between GIS and the GeoWeb/Neogeography. I think it is like trying to draw lines in a river - as soon as you make them things change and they wash away. Why? Because geospatial technology in general is being democratized to allow non-professionals to utilize it. As the mass market demands increased functionality any division we artificially construct between GIS and the GeoWeb/Neogeography will be knocked down. The market does not care about definitions and boundaries they simply want solutions for their problems.

If this is true why all the dissonance? In short the answer is the market is being disintermediated. Which is a fancy b-school term meaning the middle man is being cut out. In order to make a map we used to need a GIS professional or back in the day a full blown cartographer. Now, in order to make a simple map we no longer need a GIS professional. We can go directly to a software application and make our own without any professional training. The middle man - the GIS professional - has been disintermediated. Removing the middle man never leaves the established industry very happy. In most drug cartel movies this is where lots of people get shot (Scarface, American Gangster, Blow etc.). Under the circumstances we should feel fortunate it is just a blog flame war

Does this mean the GIS professional will disappear? No, not at all, if anything it will make them more valuable. The democratization of the technology will make many more people aware of the benefits of geospatial technology and the many problems it can help solve. The skill sets of GIS professionals will likely change and be less centered around only operating a desktop application and incorporate more and more development skills, but the handwriting is not on the wall as to exactly where everything will go. As Andrew Turner wrote this is nothing new and lots of technologies and professions (journalism/blogging, office admin/word processing, television/YouTube, accounting/spreadsheets) have gone through very similar evolutions. The question is who will prosper from the evolution and who will fail.

Darwin never fails in this context - the species who best adapt survive. The “All Points Blog” post and Pitney Bowes lands squarely in the “not adapting” category. Nick Black of Open Street Maps / ZXV put it best when describing this type of traditional GIS behavior as “building complexity to ensure exclusivity”. The concept that those outside of the profession cannot understand the complexity of the science and it is no place for amateurs. In this case Pitney Bowes Software president, Mike Hickey boldly stating “there is no data creation and no spatial analysis” in neogeography. As many of the bloggers pointed out previously this is flatly false, but more importantly we will see more analysis and data creation tools coming out of neogeography. After spending two plus years working or making GIS data and tools more consumable - the challenge is not the complexity of geographic science, the challenge is how to simplify it for the general public. We’ll be putting our money where our mouth is, and next year showing what we’ve learned from the first try and how far the boundaries can be pushed.

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