The Digital New World Order: A View from the Private Sector

Cartography and Geographic Information Science, July, 1999 by Stuart Allan

The digital revolution in cartography, like nearly everything else in the world, changes in appearance as it is viewed from different angles. All of us, as cartographers, are dealing with the same technical changes. But cartographers in business see the current situation from a different perspective than our academic or government colleagues. The basis for this difference can be summarized in a single word: profit. That is a charged term, and calls for an exploratory digression. Please bear with me; this is pertinent to the discussion at hand.

Most people in government and academia have a deep-seated aversion to profit. They regard it as a necessary evil, or at least an ineradicable one, something like prostitution. (The problem is not with "money"--everyone is in favor of money; it is the terms under which it is obtained that give rise to contention). People in government and academia live on salaries, and work in facilities and with equipment, that are funded directly or indirectly by tax revenue. The salaries, facilities, and equipment are never what they might be, so the people who rely on them tend to favor increasing tax support. They tend to see high levels of tax support as a measure of "community virtue." They tend to look to profits, not income, as the obvious source for the needed tax revenue. "Business can well afford it, with all their profits!"

Most people in business see profit, not high levels of tax support, as the measure of "personal or institutional virtue." Many would disclaim working for that end alone, of course. But, in the end, a business person who ignores it, goes out of business. Most businesses in fact do fail, often because they lack the capital to survive a lean period or to exploit a momentary opportunity. Businesses must profit to survive. How much profit is reasonable? That is easy--more than the current rate! How about salaries? They are a cost, to be held in check. How about facilities? Austere will do. How about equipment? You bet, if it will cut down on salaries! But only in exchange for greater productivity as measured in profits. How about taxation? It is a necessary evil, or at any rate an ineradicable one.

So we come full circle to a kind of international dateline separating two hemispheric world views. We practice cartography in both hemispheres, but those of us in the private sector do so while wearing a set of profit lenses. Here is how the digital revolution looks, as seen through those lenses.

Internet Communication

The private sector is schizophrenic about Internet communication. We all use the Net to collect data sets which were previously hard to find and harder to do anything with. Therefore, we all rely on it, more and more, as map builders. But as map publishers we are wary, even paranoid. How do we collect revenue from something on the Internet? How do we protect copyright? What about security? (Note 30 provides one view of profit from Internet mapping). I'll take these three issues in order.

The Internet certainly is a fine way to advertise your wares. Raven's Web site is a great way to gather catalogue requests and a promising way to sell. But, as this medium grows into a serious and very large market place, it seems likely that someone in a position to do so will manage to organize it to their own advantage. How else will all the money spent on it be recouped? How such an evolving arrangement will affect a given private vendor is unclear. But it is reasonable to speculate that Raven Maps will not pop right up at the top of a list someone else has paid for. This may sound like an effort to find a cloud in a silver lining; that is the profit motive lens. As I start putting eggs in this basket, how secure is the handle?

As for copyright protection, low-resolution images offer some protection, but do you want bad representations of your wares out there? No. Besides, low-resolution images may well offer a user enough for a particular application for which that user had previously paid. For Raven Maps, re-sale to advertisers and other publishers has been a minor, but not insignificant, sideline. That seems to be declining, similar imagery) on the Internet has something to do with that.

Of course, we had copyright violators in the bad old days of photomechanical reproduction. But they necessarily had to work through the printing trade, and printers are well aware of copyright laws and the civil and criminal penalties that attach to violators. Violations were easily traceable, and the violators had assets, which encouraged them to settle promptly once detected. (Raven did better with copyright violators than with legitimate re-users, because we charged the violators at twice the normal rate). It's going to be much harder to stay on top of this in the future.

And, for the truly paranoid: How do we maintain proprietary information securely? It costs a fortune to build really good data: accurate road classes, well edited place names, updated water features. (But, aren't these all available over the Web, in the public domain? Not in really finished form, they're not--not in a form good enough to take to the market, especially to an upscale market that will pay). The Benchmark road atlases, for example, allocate many months of field editing--salaries, cars, meals, rooms, the whole thing--just to verify and correct the more important roads in a single western state (Note 31 describes balancing editing time and quality). The in-car navigation companies such as ETAK spend literally millions of dollars every month trying to turn public domain digital road files into accurate, usable, commercial-grade files. Having invested those resources, private cartographers are naturally jealous of the resulting product (Note 32 envisions modern base-compilation methods).