The two assigned topics for Friday’s class are relevant to one another. It can be so frustrating when trying to search for a place, store or location on a smart phone. Depending where you are, how zoomed in you are and especially the spelling, the results can have huge amount of variance.
The other day I was searching for The Bell Sports Complex in Brossard, but my phone was incapable of finding my query. I had successfully performed the search before, but for some unknown reason, it no longer existed. Perhaps the disappearance of the Habs’ practice facility could explain their recent woes…
Jiang’s article on LBS provokes a question: Does a feature in a landscape possess different coordinates if it is a point, or does it have different extents (if a polygon) depending on the scale? For example, at a global scale, Montreal might appear as a point feature, but at a larger scale it may instead be a polygon. Does each map of a certain scale possess the address and location for different features? This seems redundant; but perhaps necessary right now. I can imagine that one feature could potentially hold different types of representations. When a certain type of representation is required, it could simply be called upon instead of having repetitions within the database.
I am sometimes concerned about privacy with regards to LBS, but more impressed with how internet searches have become more efficient with the integration of LBS. There are positives and negatives, and at this point, I’m not so concerned with people knowing my exact location. I really enjoy how in GEOG 201, it was mentioned that Google’s goal was to integrate all searches into a map-like interface. Four years later, I can definitely see this as a possibility. It was a little foreign to me at the time, but I am able to see that almost everything has a spatial component to it.
Andrew