How to Prevent the Geospatial Oops

There is room for improvement in how we in the geospatial world present ourselves online. Here are some unfortunate errors I saw during Geography Awareness Week. I want to share how they might have come to be, and perhaps more importantly, how we might prevent such errors in the future.

Press Release

This is part of a call for papers for a 2016 conference.

... the annual meeting ... covers Lidar, Remote Sensing, Professional Practice, Photogrammetry, Unmanned-Autonomous Systems (UAS), Graphical Information Systems (GIS), geospatial analytics, and emerging themes, e.g. pervasive sensors, geospatial big data, and the internet of things, among others.

My guess is the organization had a copyeditor look over the release. I'm gong to suggest the copyeditor is not too familiar with the industry and Googled GIS to find its meaning. Graphical Information System was likely a top result and sounded like it fit with the other topics. I know it's a rarity and a privilege to have a copyeditor who specializes in the geospatial industry. If you don't have one consider sharing this list of common errors with whoever serves in that role.

The Eight Most Misspelled and Misused Geospatial Words

Below are the geospatial terms that I find misspelled, mis-expanded and misused most on the Web. For the record, I commit these and other errors far more than I'd like.

The best way to combat these errors is with a a good copyeditor who's familiar with our industry reading over all of your writing.

• Global Information System - It's a thing, just not usually the GIS in the articles I read and write.
• Digital Globe - The company name is one word, with two capital letters: DigitalGlobe.
• ESRI or esri - The company has been known as Esri since 2010.
• Global Positioning Satellite - There is just ONE Global Positioning System. The generic term for these constellations of satellites is Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS).
• Chloropleth - Choropleth makes sense when you think of the root words (Greek): choro - place, pleth = many (like plethora!)
• Topology - While this term (the study of geometric properties and spatial relations) does appear in technical discussions of mapping, it's commonly used in place of topography (the study of surface shape and features of the Earth and other bodies).
• Open Street Map(s) - The well known crowdsourced map of the world is one word, singular: OpenStreetMap. (And, it's .org if you are using the URL.)
• Earth - Earth is capitalized when referred to with the other planets or used without "the": "Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars are the innermost planets." The rest of the time, it's not capitalized: "The earth is where we all live."