Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/99375
S ince Ptolemy drafted his ancient discourse on cartography, Charles Picquet placed a rudimentary heat map across the 48 districts of Paris showing cholera severity or Fred Armisen taught the world a few things about political maps on Saturday Night Live, GIS and derivative capabilities have been about something other than pleasing maps, pretty pictures or the cool(www. est technology. Alright, perhaps Armisen���s skit ( imdb.com/video/hulu/vi845873177) imdb.com/video/hulu/vi845873177 was about cool technology, but after watching and laughing a bit, the frustration GIS technophiles cause industry and government executives crystallizes in the mind. GIS has always been a means to an end: timely and accurate decisions and proactive modifications of human and system behavior. When was the last time you heard a C-level decision maker say, ���Hey, I really have to get some of that GIS and location-based services stuff today, and I���ll need more tomorrow, so let���s spend some money on a pile of technology?��� Instead, the following typically are heard: data ��� It���s called intelligence, because it���s supposed to drive a decision to prevent something bad or cause something good five minutes, five days or five weeks from now.��� That single comment stuck in my mind since 2001 and has influenced personal time allocation and financial investment choices ever since, including the decision to build TransVoyant���s GeoVigilance geospatial awareness platform for real-time decision support and pattern detection. I realized it was about future system and human behavior. In other words, ���It���s future behavior, Stupid.��� Not behavior in the sense of ���big brother��� digging through electronic breadcrumbs to track behavior and risk with an eye toward individual monitoring and jackbooted interdiction, but complex systems���such as global supply chains���demonstrating behaviors that must be optimized based on context and preference. Context can be things such as weather, traffic, seismic, labor strife or political unrest. Preference real-time changes in customer demand, supply chain disruptions, severe weather, seismic events and global piracy events. This is costing me sales, cash and adding risk to my trading and transportation partners. cash from advertising efforts. They���re way too generic and don���t touch the right customers at the right time. sis cycles and risk to my forces caused by dumping tons of data off of sensor platforms and spending days or weeks in ���analysis paralysis.��� I need to dynamically set smart tasking and collection rules based on realtime events and real-time analytics to save lives, time and money. Called ���Intelligence��� for a Reason I had the honor to serve the United States in the aftermath of 9/11. Quite often, I was the only industry leader in a series of senior-government threat, capability and risk decision meetings. During a meeting in spring 2002, for example, a senior administration official turned to me and said, ���I���m sick of industry equating intelligence with technology and mounds of ���Built as a location-based awareness platform designed to aid users with real-time geospatial, temporal, context and preference support, GeoVigilance features a flexible visualization interface that gives users the ability to perform tracking and analysis of location and time-based events. 2 O 1 2 / W W W . G E O P L A C E 27