In the March 11 issue of her GIS Monitor, editor Adena Schutzberg covers her visit to last week’s Wisconsin Land Information Association Conference. She was the featured speaker at lunch on the first day of the meeting (Wednesday) and stayed through Thursday evening.
In extensive observations, Schutzberg provides her impressions of the sessions she attended and makes some overall comments on conferences of this type. One thread that runs through her commentary is that drawing a line between useful information on one hand, and a vendor’s promition of products or services on the other, is one aspect of a conference that its organizers need to monitor closely.
In her Wednesday luncheon talk, Schutzberg advanced the argument that too often our GIS tools provide us with too much data that is not documented well enough. She sees a trend toward services that deliver just what we need, just in time, with much of that functionality dependent on metadata.
More information: March 11, 2004 GIS Monitor.