Missed Opportunities
December 23rd, 2024 | by GEONATIVES
(5 min read)
The end of the year is quite close and a lot of people are celebrating this with giving gifts to their beloved ones. Also companies adapted this practice and provide presents to their customers (but, for compliance regulations, you see it less and less). Often it is a challenge to come up with just the right thing… and we at GEONATIVES realized that there are some geodata-related gifts missing. Thus, this post should be understood as our wish list for the upcoming year to make the life of geodata evangelists easier!
Earth’s curvature-considering folding rule
We all know folding rules from our smaller or larger construction projects. Usually they cover a length of two meters, sometimes three, sometimes only one (even if they use imperial units). The first ones were already developed in the Roman Empire 30 BC. But none of them is considering Earth’s curvature whereas our constructions are getting larger and larger! A bridge with a total length of 1 km has to drop already 78 mm! This is way out of measurement uncertainty…
…and by the way, counterbalance weights for bubble levels would be helpful as well!
Full-size blueprint printer
To create Digital Twins, we have to digitalize a lot of data. Especially the automotive and railway domain is surveying a lot of the roads and railways. And often the discussion comes up if the data are precise and accurate enough. The best way would be to just print the data as full-size map and put it on top of the corresponding infrastructure. Christo and Jeanne-Claude conducted successful examples even if their first experiences with representing buildings were still kind of clumsy. But printing the digital twin in small scale already looked quite pretty.
Time and again
With almost everyone having a quite accurate watch available in their smartphones these days why do we still stick to something as old-fashioned as timezones? If you really want to live in the here and now, we propose to treat yourself something special: Free yourself from the constraints of artificial time zones and live in the locally “true time” instead. Noon will always be, as intended, when the sun reaches its highest point in the sky.
Alignment for meetings etc. is still easy: just allow Outlook to track you location, and have it adjust for “true time”. Your 9am meeting will become an 8:59:59am meeting for your colleague in the west wing office.
Another advantage of position-dependent time zones: For everyone at the same latitude, the times for sunset and sunrise will be identical on a given day. Just imagine how easy it will get for the ones of us who have to light the candles before sunset on Friday evenings: you only need to know the latitude-specific global time for sunset on that day. No more local fine-tuning required. Let’s go for it.
Updatable printed maps
Life is at constant change and surveyed data is more or less outdated after digitalization. There will be a constant need to update the geodata to represent reality, because locations of infrastructure change, usage of lanes vary and also Mother Nature is applying changes subversively with the help of the continental drift or with earthquakes. To consider these changes the paper maps should be provided on e-paper so that they can be updated if needed. With the help of foldable displays we can get updatable “Falkplans” with their patented folding technique. Doing the fancy carve-outs of the paper versions might still be tricky, though.
For the Germans
The value of the next present may only be fully understood by our German readers. Therefore, let’s have its description in German (with an English version created by DeepL below):
Wollten Sie Ihre Kollegen schon immer mal auf Spur bringen? Dann schenken Sie ihnen einen Kompass, um sie mal wieder so richtig einzunorden. Das klappt bestimmt.
(Now for the AI-English without editing: Have you always wanted to get your colleagues on track? Then give them a compass as a gift to really get them back on track. It’s sure to work.)
Map Excel
The spreadsheet editor MS-Excel and all its competitors are widely used in the engineering domain to solve more or less every problem. Calculating numbers seems to be kind of too simple; it is used for creating lists, making project plans, creating application forms but you can turn Excel also into a 3d graphics engine and start to build famous games with it! In seldom cases Excel was also used to map. It was quite good to map artificial structures such as floor plans or scenes of rectangular game environments. But to make it more realistic, the next generation Excel will use hexagon cells instead of rectangular ones. In the (analogue as well as digital) game industry hexagonal boards are used since decades and with additional support of geo-coordinates you can start to map your neighborhood more precisely.
Natural patterns
Want to surprise your geodata-loving neighbor with something extraordinary? How about a book on treegonometry? Just look at the regular arrangements of greenery in reforestation areas. There must be rules how to do it and, for sure, these rules have to be found in a book somewhere.
Projection generator
We already know that there are tons of projections for real-world data out there and all of them have their pros and cons. Sometimes the disadvantage is that everybody can read your data and you want to add a confidential or privacy layer on top. To support the strengthening aspiration to work on national level instead of using joint approaches that work everywhere, it would be good to have a projection generator that can be fine-tuned by user needs such as level of distortion to decrease the size of unpopular neighbors and take the current moon phase into account. With this help we will make local solutions that don’t work anywhere else great again…
…and if we are working on our own projection we should continue to create our own formats for road, rail and city representation, too so that nobody can operate in our backyards.
Ok, the last suggestion would not make the life of geodata evangelist easier but at least keep the geoinformatics engineers busy by building new converters and plugins. But not getting unemployed is also a good wish for next year (remember the saying of the IT guys: today’s bugs are tomorrow’s jobs).
GEONATIVES wishes all readers a relaxing end of this year and a good start into the next (challenging) one. Happy sliding!
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