This week, AGS released its 2021A datasets. Just two decades ago, most demographics users did so by using a Windows based application which usually used a GIS platform and often proprietary data formats and stored everything on the small local hard drive. The end user was locked into the application as designed, whether it worked for them or not, since the mathematical and programming skills necessary to work with spatial data were not widely available.
The announcement of an AGS data release meant very little to the end user. Lots of stuff had to happen before the end user got to see the new data, with lots of ways it could go terribly amiss.
The data needed to be burned on physical media and then labelled and shipped to the application provider. Hopefully only once, as the failure rate for these devices was shockingly high. Assuming all went well, the application provider had to export the data from the AGS application and import it into their own, link it to cartography, and do all sorts of weird and wonderful things (well, sometimes frustrating things) to the data to get it up and running. Once quality control had ensured that the baling wire, gorilla glue and duct tape were holding the works together, the application developer would in turn set all available resources on creating the media to ship to clients, with the same media failure rates.
Just before the AGS announcement of the next data release, the end user would actually have gone through the install process…please insert CD-ROM #283 in the drive and press ‘OK’…and just be starting to use the old data. You can understand why they seemed unexcited by the AGS news release.
While this was considered avant-garde technology in the days when, for want of a single byte of storage, we thought that the world would end when 99 rolled into 00, we all have to admit it is expensive, error-prone, and time consuming.
In the past few years, we have had the happy convergence of several key items.
First, as the awareness of spatial data has broadened, the skill sets required to work with them have become more readily available. This means that many companies can reasonably consider building functionality into their core business applications rather than relying on platforms which may not meet their needs.
Second, as the internet has matured from a business perspective, the ability to effectively use the “software as a service” model has come of age. For many application developers, the SDK has been replaced by the API. The only difference between calling a function in a DLL and calling a web API is that the developer can safely declare managing the data as an SEP (someone else’s problem) and they can focus on what their user sees rather than on the intricate details of managing all the pieces that have to work under the hood.
Third, and getting to the point of this, is the growing number and popularity of the data marketplace or data exchange. Data as a service is a natural outgrowth of software as a service and offers the great benefit of bringing together a wide range of data and software applications under one umbrella.
The end user is freed from the chains of the pre-built application world without needing the requisite skills to build, maintain, and use complex geospatial data and algorithms. After all, there are not a lot of system programmers who are well versed in computational geometry. Theoretically, this should free developers to work on user needs and interface design rather than the underlying nuts and bolts.
AGS data is now available on three very different data marketplaces –
- Altadata, which has a definite focus on statistical modeling
- Snowflake, via the CARTO engine, which brings both geospatial data and functionality to one of the largest data markets
- HERE, which brings demographic and crime risk data to the world of routing and logistics
While this will never replace the partner program, these data marketplaces offer end users that need basic data, and simple maps and reports, the flexibility to purchase just the data that they need. Over the coming months, we look forward to partnering with additional data marketplaces that provide complementary software and data services. With “geospatial” now becoming common in the business world, and the promise of rapid and cost-effective development of data intensive geospatial applications is finally becoming a reality.
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