Because of this, most of the GIScience development occurs outside of Geography departments. Other departments, like Geology and Economics, find ESRI’s products lacking and they don’t mind writing a little code. Unfortunately, this code doesn’t get rolled into open systems either.

There are a few GIScientists in Geography departments who are open systems supporters. Unfortunately, they are too few and far between.

The GUADEC conference was a good example, where almost all the attendees were European – and look at INSPIRE.

However, the open* efforts benefit everyone, which is excellent. So even though the US AAG members don’t currently embrace open solutions, hopefully they’ll end up learning the benefits (or fall behind as they are locked into closed systems and expensive data).

There is a pretty significant rift between the US and Europe when it comes to GIS and cartography. Part of the reason is we’ve got ESRI and everyone uses it – despite the costs. The other reason is that the US is pretty darned big. Because of the size of the raw data, there are many things that just aren’t done in the US, like multi-resolution databases (my area of research). Further, our NMA, the USGS, has been hurting for funding because of the other “extra-curricular” activities of our President.

At the recent Association of American Geographer’s Conference (the premier academic conference for Geographers in the US and, to a degree, elsewhere) there saw many presentations by Europeans discussing new methods of data collection and applications of open source software. But these were largely ignored by the US constituents.