Interactive images vs. webGIS

I came across an interesting interactive image depicting wildfire occurrences across the U.S. -- this one is hosted by the AP news service. I have seen a lot of images like this over the past year or so; maps turned interactive images depicting a wide variety of information, particularly in the climate change arena. I find it interesting because, using the above referenced image as an example, it basically covers the same information that is available via a wildfire webGIS (which, unfortunately, seems to be down right now - maybe that answers my question!) developed by a consortium of federal agencies (GeoMAC). Because the information is so redundant (and comes from the same data sources), it seems, to me, to raise questions about the accessibility of web-based mapping sites -- are they seemingly too complicated, or do they contain too much information that doesn't relate directly to a story? Certainly the image format is easier to deal with from a development standpoint, and can be made pretty a little more easily, and it may just be the news media focus on graphics for particular issues/stories, but I still think it is interesting to see, and to think about how web maps can be made more useful as information resources.

Comments

[Ken-ichi]

I think choosing the degree of interactivity you want a map to have is based largely on context of use. Someone reading an AP news article probably wants a quick overview of fire activity in the country, and maybe ways to compare this year with previous years, and to locate places they care about relative to threatened areas. For that, a small "interactive image" can provide a limited set of tools targeted at those specific needs, without providing the full set of tools a GIS user might expect from a webGIS.

People who want to ask more detailed questions about the data that involve overlaying an arbitrary number of layers and querying across those datasets probably want something more akin to what we would consider a webGIS. I assume in the case of fire, these people are public advocacy groups, land managers, researchers, perhaps journalists, and other people who have a specific interest in fire, as opposed to the general news reader, who is probably only interested while they are reading the article or headline.

Also, people are posting! Adding to rss reader...

[Faith]

I agree Ken-ichi -- it is largely context, but I also wonder if there then are things that "we" (as practitioners) could/should do to make webGIS more user-friendly and/or customizable, depending on our purpose/audience.

I also just found a link to a Google My Maps site (long url below) that it looks like was created by the LA Times -- the site shows the locations of the southern California fires and whether or not they are contained. One really interesting thing about that is that you can actually turn on the "traffic" map and see how clogged the roads are -- could be useful from an evacuation planning perspective. It's also cool to see people making quick use of spatial information.

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=117631292961056724014.00043d21dedd02f5ae1f7&ll=33.651208,-118.146973&spn=2.199313,4.405518&z=8&om=0