serendipityoucity

There is a great article in the Globe and Mail today about the Papa of Geomatics, Roger Tomlinson!  Yup! GIS is Made in Canada!  Canada created the first geomatics system in 1962s when he and Lee Pratt developed the Canada Land Inventory and developed the Canada Geographic Information System. No small task considering the size of the country!

The Canada Land Inventory is a comprehensive multi-disciplinary land inventory of rural Canada, covering over 2.5 million square kilometers of land and water . Land capability for agriculture, forestry, wildlife, recreation, wildlife ( ungulates and waterfowl) was mapped. Over 1000 mapsheets at the 1:250,000 scale are available on this site for on-line map making and download of desktop publishing, or GIS formats (1).

The Government of Canada developed the Canada Land Inventory (CLI) under the auspices of the Department of Regional and Economic Expansion (1963-1971) and the Department of the Environment (renamed Environment Canada), (1971- 1994). The program was officially discontinued in 1994. The process to transfer the data and intellectual property to the National Archives of Canada started in 1995. Since 1995 several Canadian federal departments have been instrumental in extracting the data from the old tapes to modern formats and media, including: National Archives of Canada, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Statistics Canada, and Natural Resources Canada.

Wikipedia has a great historical section on the development of GIS as well.  I prefer the term geomatics rather than GIS.  Geomatics includes open source mapping, geodesy, remote sensing, radar, mashups and such while in my mind GIS does not.

The article groans about the lack of geomatics expertise in Canada and I agree.  However, until which time:

• that geomatics software gets cheaper, 
• high schools take GIS seriously and provide teachers with real training,
  
• school boards stop geographically abusing our children with memorization, photocopied paper maps, and killing the love of geography in the process
  
• that open source mapping technologies get easier and have more analytical capabilities,
  
• that Internet mapping is not just for geeks
• that mapping becomes part of all disciplines - sociology, anthropology, psychology, political science, etc.
  
• and data become freely - as in no cost - accessible,
  
• and that telling stories in maps becomes easier
  

then perhaps we will have created a culture of map/cartographic enthusiasts.  Until then we rely on popular culture, the odd flash map in newspapers and scientific analysis.  Google maps kick started a culture of map playing, but it remains a toy, the cartography is not great, the data proprietary. Imagine the day when decisions are made with real information in its best form, text, video, and of course cartography!  Then we will make sense of place and place will make sense!