Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
2.2 Geographic relevance
PV is a geographically distributed organisation. Its total park network
comprises about 17% of the state of Victoria or close to 3000 national
parks and other parks and reserves (Parks Victoria 2009). It has a centrally
located head office and various regional management offices. Geography
also plays a role within parks. Not only do park rangers move around parks
as part of their everyday duties, so do visitors. The spatial location of park
assets is similarly important - where are the locations of Aboriginal
heritage sites? Where was that rare bird last spotted? What was the spatial
extent of the 2009 bushfire? These are mere examples of questions that
require an answer in a spatial context.
Location generally has become a widely used attribute (Unwin 2008), and
location technologies are a core element of the new Web (Gordon 2007).
With mapping tools, technologies and geospatial platforms like
Google
Earth
,
Google Maps
and Microsoft's
Bing Maps
freely available via the
Web and via mobile devices, georeferenced data can readily be visualised
in different ways and using a variety of tools. Mobile devices like phones
and cameras are also increasingly enhanced so as to be location aware and
the information they generate often has geographic metadata attached.
O'Reilly (cited in Turner and Forrest 2008) is using the term
Where 2.0
, so
defining the geographic aspect inherent in many Web 2.0 applications and
UCI.
2.3 Knowledge systems
For centuries people have attempted to manage or organise information or
knowledge, developing what can be called knowledge systems that assist
in finding or accessing information more effectively. Tracing a path from
Melville Dewey's Decimal System to organise topics (OCLC 2009),
Vannevar Bush's hypothetical
Memex
for linking scientific data (Bush 1945),
and the hypertext of Nelson (1992) that combined with hyperlinks drives
the Internet and World Wide Web (Zimmer 2009), leads to Al Gore's
Digital Earth - “…a multi-resolution, three-dimensional representation of
the planet, into which we can embed vast quantities of geo-referenced
data” (Gore 1998, para. 4). Gore's conceptual geographically oriented
knowledge system would organise the growing amount of georeferenced
data and provide data access based on the geographic links. Mapping
