Page 13 - GIS for Science: GIS Response to COVID-19

ANEWERAOFGIS
Esri Director of Products Clint Brown
In 2020, a new era of GIS exploded onto the global scene. Organizations everywhere banded together to form GIS communities aligned to focus on the world’s great challenges. Just six months earlier, it would have been hard to imagine the power and reach of these ArcGIS communities; today their good work is everywhere to be seen.
By January, 2020, ArcGIS Online had already grown into a massive, shared-cloud GIS for the planet, containing more than 30 million spatially referenced information items covering literally every nation and corner of the world. What is most surprising—and what gives ArcGIS Online such a huge impact—is that more than 50% of that content is shared with other system users, forming an interconnecting web of content, projects, and efforts addressing every aspect of human activity. Public and private organizations have increasingly adopted and applied GIS as an integrating tool for understanding and action. This acceleration has long been a vision of leaders in the GIS world.
Historically, builders of GIS systems never felt like they had enough data, computing capacity, or bandwidth to fully realize the vision. Each GIS organization historically relied on data from other GIS users and organizations. Over time, computing and data-sharing networks continued to expand. Today, we see an environment where GIS organizations have created formal and informal alliances among themselves (based on shared geographies, shared topics, or both) to deliver their analyses and applications. As the cloud computing phenomenon exploded onto the information scene, more and more GIS organizations began to share their information and make it publicly accessible, so that more organizations could discover and link to this shared information and put it to work.
Everything happens somewhere. GIS is built on this premise; its organizing and interconnecting principle is location. GIS application builders use the rich location data that is a core part of every GIS as a foundation to integrate their own independent information layers. These sharing efforts have transformed GIS into a kind of magic tool for integrating content from multiple organizations. For decades now, many GIS organizations have collected and compiled these critical information layers, which now can be easily combined and brought together. The result is a 180-degree shift: whereas the normal behavior was to silo data, today’s progressive GIS organizations openly share, and the result is a quantum boost in the impact of their efforts.
A case in point emerged this year after the COVID-19 outbreak. A small engineering team at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) began to assemble their now widely recognized global COVID-19 dashboard. Early on, Dr. Lauren Gardner and the team made their dashboard (and the underlying data) public to support other scientists and medical professionals—adhering to the same ethics and open data principles that most GIS practioners would follow.
As the JHU team shared this dashboard, the news media picked up the web address, and the site began to immediately promote the JHU work. Gardner and her team followed some common data-sharing practices and ethics from the global geospatial community.
As of midsummer, 2020, the JHU COVID-19 dashboard had hundreds of billions of visits, the equivalent of dozens of views from every citizen on the planet. Just six months ago, it would have been hard to imagine the power and reach of the GIS tools and the good work provided by the JHU teams. The map became so ubiquitous that it is hard to imagine where the world would have been collectively if this application had not been built to access some sort of truth about the COVID-19 status worldwide. So why was this particular GIS application destined to become so
accepted as the universally trusted tool used worldwide? A few thoughts come to mind. First, the small engineering team at Johns Hopkins that created the dashboard had the right philosophy:
• Make the site about sharing open information to provide the best available and up-to-date statistics.
• Respond intelligently. Pay attention to ongoing feedback about the information, and make verified corrections and updates as soon as possible. Build a cadence to maintain these updates and corrections.
• Instead of being defensive, acknowledge information errors and issues, and follow up.
• Learn how to be responsive. Continue to grow and evolve the solution strategically over time.
• Regardless of criticism and cyber-attacks, stay focused and remain open to feedback. Don’t give up or give in.
• Continue to evolve and expand your offerings (e.g., the incredible work on US state and county maps and the dashboard’s collection of county- based infographics [https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/us-map].
• Share your work and practice as a pattern so that others can emulate your results and set clear principles to follow.
• Maintain your commitment to support and sustain your information offerings.
At Esri, we see how this modern GIS experience ties back to all the efforts and investments that GIS organizations have made for many years. It’s useful to realize that your solution incorporates a synthesis of content delivered as high-level information items from multiple sources—the whole is significantly greater than the sum of the parts. If you are a GIS practitioner, this spirit and ethos is in your blood.
GIS used to be almost entirely a back-office phenomenon, with highly trained professionals quietly laboring away using software and techniques only vaguely understood by the rest of us. The insights gained from their work benefited decision- makers within organizations but only occasionally reached larger audiences, and even then only as abstruse, static reports and posters. Suddenly, GIS is as much about communication as it is analysis. ArcGIS StoryMaps, ArcGIS Online, ArcGIS Dashboard, and Survey123 have turned GIS workers into communicators. GIS has burst out of the back office and has become accessible and actively used throughout organizations—and beyond.
Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic has elevated the awareness regarding the role of GIS as a global tool for effective and sustainable community engagement. All this progress was made possible because of the best practices and ethics laid down by the earliest users of Esri’s ArcInfo and ArcView (now ArcGIS and ArcGIS Online) communities.
GIS holds the promise of being a central component of a global network that can sense threats, map their extent, and help implement solutions. Climate change, environmental sustainability, and reduced biodiversity are three such global, existential threats. The great silver lining of the COVID-19 crisis is the possibility that we can apply the lessons we’re learning even more broadly, with the ultimate and essential goal of achieving a sustainable and peaceful future.
GIS Science Response to the COVID-19 Outbreak
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