Close Read: What You Need To Know About Location Intelligence In 2020

Another GIS Article on Forbes

A free generic map image from Pixabay.
The article uses one from Getty.

A post on LinkedIn liked by a college at Esri feted a contribution on Forbes titled What You Need To Know About Location Intelligence In 2020 by Louis Columbus. Another LinkedIn post called it "One of the best articles I have seen on the adoption of Location Intelligence."

I know many people are impressed when they see that something is hosted on Forbes.com since at one time, it was considered a top level business publication. Today it's a mishmash of earned content, contributions by paid bloggers (contributors) and paid content as I noted last year. For that reason, I suggest you look at content on Forbes.com with care.

GIS Education Weekly: Authoritative Story Maps, GIS in Ecology, Michael Jordan

Authoritative Story Map?

Early this week I read about a story map via a tweet.

http://gmattis.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=f14a2db655df43d7b213e61d09e91818 … Climates of Africa as an @EsriStoryMaps Incredible teaching resource! #maps #esri

Part of map and legend from the story map

It looks great and I'm sure educators will think of interesting ways to use it both in and out of class. Still,  I'm uncomfortable with the story map because I do not know who created it and why. There is no "About" tab or metadata. I try to teach my students to evaluate websites and data and to use those considered "authoritative." I try to do so, too.

I'm Web savvy, so I did some digging on the story map. I know the prefix in the URL (in this case "gmattis") in ArcGIS Online is typically the owner's name. Some searches led me to a bio for a Greg Mattis, an Academic Sales Representative at Esri. I guess he made it. But why? And when it was first published?

Later in the week I saw another tweet pointing to an educational story map.

Students can learn all about Iran with this @EsriStoryMaps Story Map : http://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapTour/index.html?appid=bfab514df6b3441ebb93d673aa647323 … #geography

That one, I'm pleased to report included not only the author's name, but also his e-mail address. He's an MGIS student at Chicago State University. Cool!

I really hope vanilla ArcGIS Online and the story map templates provide easy to populate fields to publish this sort of information. And, I hope anyone teaching Web map creation emphasizes putting one's name on one's work!

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Six Keys to Identifying Authoritative Geospatial Web Content

Disclosure: I’m not an expert in identifying authoritative Web content, nor do I have any specific training on the topic. I've compiled what I’ve learned over the years editing online magazines and teaching online courses. 

Authoritative Content

There's lots of content on the Web about geography, GIS and geospatial technology. Some of it is valuable and accurate and some is not. Every time you read a new article or blog post, watch a video or listen to a podcast, you have to determine if the content is authoritative.

Below are some factors to consider in your evaluation. If your content, or its hosting site, raises more than one or two of these red flags, it might be best to look for another source.