Fesowola O. V. Akintoye mnis, RS, mSCgis, msc gis & Env.
fesowola@glogeomaticsnigeria.com.
Resources could be tangible like minerals, vegetation, marine etc. and intangible like market potentials for businesses; human capital, culture etc. or indicators of socio-economic phenomena across space. Every society has natural resources which nature has endowed the environment with and also intangible resources that emanates from impacts of population size, human activities and socio-economic potentials. Non tangible resources are deductive and are secondary data/information that are indicative of critical underlining events and activities that if understood can help provide knowledge for decision support for governments and businesses.
Geoinformation practices have evolved around mapping tangible resources which includes all land features; buildings, roads, utilities, vegetation etc. all that we used to present as mare features on maps are now socio-economic and environmental resources that requires collection of their attributes for resource managements and decision support. A roadside drain for example (considering its depth and width) is a resource that could be linked to household wastes, flooding, security etc. Also a road could be a resource for accessing buildings, facilities, hospitals or transporting goods and services from one location to another etc. So, modern day maps are not location coordinates visually represented by a graphic legend.
The major challenges lie with mapping intangible resources. These resources are not commonly visible even though they exist around us, but can be revealed through either field enumeration excercises (socio-economic) and generation of resource information from acquired data; and or collection of environmental data that can be synthesized to deduce facts that could be given geospatial dimensions and entities.
Intangible resources provide insights to environmental and socio-economic problems, provide opportunities for geo statistical modeling, used for building models that inform distribution and patterns of human activities, problems and needs.
Mapping intangible resources have been done in the past using spreadsheets and traditional statistics models; but today every acquired data is being strengthened by geolocation attributes. Adding geographic coordinates to resource attributes allows for revisiting every resource and to assess the impacts of government inputs in solving the identified problems. For example, communities or households identified as poor or very poor during a socio-economic survey can be revisited and assessed years later for accountability towards eradicating poverty.
Cost of mapping intangible resources are quite lower than the tangible resources especially with open source tools available for data collection using smartphones ( using Google's ODK, Magpie etc.); data editing and processing (libre Office, Appache Open Office, Abiword etc. ;data manipulation using (QGIS, Grass, gvSIS, Mapwindow GIS etc.), database and server tools( PostgreSQL, MySQL Etc.); and Geoweb tools(Geoserver, Mapwindow, GeoWebCashe-Boundless etc.).
Most resources published by National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) and the National Population Commission (NPC) were generated from intangible (attributes) data collection without geolocation attributes. Mapping of accurate and appropriate intangible resources contributes tremendously to the big data business and governance.
The GI community stands to gain from focusing on the potentials available for providing knowledge for decision support in both business and governance leading to more jobs for young GI professionals and business potentials for all of us.
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