[iDC] Net (dot) Geo. The emergence of the geospatial web

[John Hopkins]

>Not to belabor your point (which is generally right), but even if one 
>can dismiss the military origins of GPS on an international scale as 
>history, its conceptual development well predates the satellites 
>operated by the US Airforce. GPS is only one component of a larger 
>conceptual and technological infrastructure.
>
>Geographer John Cloud has a nice history of GIS here:

Excellent summary -- thanks for pointing that one out...

absolutely, location has always been a necessary component of warfare (at all levels) (as integral to command, control and communications, for example)...  Prior to GPS satellites there was (is) the LORAN and SHORAN systems coming out of WWII (& MIT's Lincoln Laboratory) -- Cloud's history covers some of these

for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LORAN

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Mapping_Agency

And one should not miss the linkage between all aspects of mapping/GIS with issues like environmental degradation (for example, oil exploration is intimately connected and reliant on GIS and has been since the advent of geophysical techniques for extractive minerals exploration --  the primary tools that have brought us to this point of our hydrocarbon-saturated consumer capitalist society.)

An earlier history of this concept of mapping/control would be the Hayden Surveys of the US West, where topographic lines of control were established to "know" the territory and thus control it for the colonial expansion west -- driven by the railroads ...

Thanks, Ryan!

John