Jason: So let’s start at the beginning: Where did the idea for the Mapping Center web site come from?

Charlie: It was something Aileen Buckley and I thought of, mostly Aileen. Initially, she was looking at the Project Center and realized its purpose was to cover the entire scope of a GIS project and how to use all the tools in a GIS to get the project done. We saw a pretty straightforward parallel in mapping: you often need to use a variety of software, techniques and processes together to produce a map. We saw how the Project Center was laid out, centered around the life cycle of a GIS project, and it gave us some starting ideas. It’s definitely evolved since then, but that was the initial idea.

Jason: That’s interesting – so the idea for the Mapping Center came from the Project Center. Not very many people know what the Project Center is, and that's something we’d like to change, maybe revitalize the Project Center, maybe see how the Mapping Center works out and apply some of those ideas back to the Project Center. But back to the Mapping Center, when was it that you and Aileen had this initial idea?

Charlie: That was almost two years ago, and it took us about a year to sort out what the concept would be. We talked with Clint B., our director and our main stakeholder, and he thought it was a good idea. We talked a good bit about, okay, what kinds of content do we have? How would we organize that content on the site? How would people interact with the content? What kinds of needs would the people who would use the site have? We wrote up a document a little over a year ago that detailed all of that and then the rest of it was, you know, working with people here at ESRI to make it happen.

Jason: And you and Aileen were at the center of that effort. You two have worked together for some time, right?

Charlie: A little over four years now.

Jason: Besides the Mapping Center, what have you worked on here at ESRI?

Charlie: Let's see, I started here almost fourteen years ago. I was in an ArcView GIS team before it was ArcView GIS, and I was originally a “quality assurance analyst”, one of the first people to have that title. I tested a lot of Avenue code and I wrote a lot of sample scripts early on. I soon became a cartography product specialist for ArcView, starting way back at version 2.1 and up through 3.1, and eventually became part of the ArcMap team and was the product specialist there. Oh, and there was a fifteen month space where we worked on the ArcView IMS extension, and I was sort of the unofficial product specialist lead for that by the time we finished. And then about five years ago I started working on this side project, Base map and Cartographic Data Modeling.

Jason: Are these the same data models that we see on the Support Center website?

Charlie: Yeah. It was around that time when we hired Aileen. The whole “best practices” thing was in some ways what got me wanting to work at ESRI in the first place. I found it really difficult for geographers to get their heads around GIS, which is pretty ironic in some ways, but at the same time, you know, geography curriculum doesn't teach information modeling or understanding how to use the database. The fact is that all these things are tools with their own abstract applications, and geographers just use them in a specific context.

Jason: Right.

Charlie: And so, something I wanted to do for a long time was to explain how to think about GIS, from a practitioner's standpoint, to explain how you actually get from one state of information to another.

Jason: And you’ve finally got an outlet for that explanation, in the shape of the Mapping Center.

Charlie: That’s right. When I learned GIS, I learned that there's a database, there's analysis, and then there's communication of the results… but we don't talk a whole lot about that last part. We need to pay more attention to communications theory, or from a broader perspective, we need to be thinking about modeling information to support the data management story, the analysis story and the communication story. If you look at it holistically, the Mapping Center shows techniques for handling the communications story, which is important.

Jason: Is the Mapping Center meant to tell a comprehensive story? It sort of seems like a collection of snapshots, where each snapshot describes a specific place within a specific scenario.

Charlie: That’s probably the way it's going to seem for quite some time. Trying to explain in kind of an abstract or theoretical fashion, how to think about GIS doesn't actually help you think about actually doing it effectively. But by us actually using ArcGIS to figure out examples about how someone might do a particular task in GIS or a map-making task, we start to see how to think about that task. Aileen and I have thought about these tasks from a couple of angles. Aileen looks at it primarily from a cartographic theory and principles standpoint -- Aileen's has a Ph.D. in cartography, and she teaches as a professor at the University of Redlands, and she'd been in academia for a number of years before that.

Jason: Wow. That's great experience she's bringing to the table.

Charlie: Absolutely. For my part, I look at it from the standpoint of, well, how do you get this task done in the software? What route does the data have to take in order to become useful in whatever map somebody needs to make? And so between the two of us we can explain what the tasks are, how to do them, and why you’d want to do them that way. That’s what most of the Mapping Center content is, and we’ve come up with a pretty straightforward formula for presenting the content in a way that feels almost like a tutorial.

Jason: I see. So your visitors get it all: the how, the why, the best practices, it’s all in there.

Charlie: That’s our aim.

Jason: Neat. I see you’re looking at a web site page indicating the number of people who subscribe to the Mapping Center RSS feeds. How's that going?

Charlie: It's actually kind of surprising, I hadn't gotten to see this until yesterday, but it looks like Mapping Center is already one of the more heavily-used ESRI blogs. We're definitely getting a lot of traffic on it, anywhere from two hundred to four hundred hits a day. So that's actually telling us that people are interested in what the site and the blog. I’ve talked to a number of people who said they like it. Aileen and I have enough content, we could publish random content out there for years, probably. But our intention really is to have the users drive the choice of topics, and that's actually starting to happen now. We have an Ask a Cartographer section that's getting between two and five requests every day now.

Jason: People are writing in with questions about how to make maps?

Charlie: Exactly. People can read the documentation and find out what a function does, but how do you know how to use it for particular application? How do you think about it in a given scenario? That's the type of questions we’re seeing. Some of them are straightforward answers and some of them are pretty complex. I'm working on one right now where the user asks how to choose a cell size when interpolating points in a raster. It's a complex topic because it depends on their purpose.

Jason: Right.

Charlie: We've never written a help topic about it, and it's a common enough task, and so it's just a matter of sorting out the issues, like: How do you evaluate your point data to make sure it can support the cell size you're asking for? How do you determine the cell size that's going to make sense for the product you're going to make?

Jason: Sounds like coming up with a good answer could require knowing some theory, some of the science.

Charlie: That’s true for some of the questions, yes. When it's appropriate, we should offer more information about the theory. At the same time, we don't expect to be the ultimate authority. There are experts out there in the user community who live and breathe this stuff.

Jason: Very true.

Charlie: And we also kind of hope that these experts find the Mapping Center blog and leave comments based on their own experience. Those comments would be more than my two cents worth, you know, more like twenty dollars worth!

Jason: It sounds like one of the things that you're really hoping for is for the user community to get involved. I’ve heard that there’s a way for users to submit an entire post for the blog?

Charlie: Yes, and that actually happened for the first time yesterday.

Jason: Really? What was the post?

Charlie: A user in southern Illinois has created a layout using the default ESRI palette. She’s set it up with CMYK colors, because that's how her organization specifies color values for their maps. There are several different plotters used to make final maps, and they each produce slightly different colors. So she just runs the layout through each plotter and hangs them up as posters on her wall as a reference, so she can be sure of getting the right colors. I think it’s good post in that it reminds people of a good practice, and secondly, here's a real-world example of somebody using the approach successfully. This post was less than 150 words, and she thoughtfully included the MXD to share with other users.

Jason: That's really great. It sounds like the blog is really starting to take off and the community is getting involved. Have you had thoughts about the future of the Mapping Center?

Charlie: As we prepared for this initial release, there were a lot of ideas that we lumped into a "Whatever's Next" phase, and now we're starting to sort those out in terms of, "What's Realistically Next" and "What's Still On The Horizon". The thing we most want to see show up in the Mapping Center is a search for the general site. There's a search in the blog, but we feel a little handicapped at the moment. Beyond that, we’re thinking of turning the Ask a Cartographer section into a forum—we’ve had dozens of good questions that, for now, only the person asking has seen the answer. We have another section in the works that we’re calling the Cartographer's Eye, where we would take a map that we’re working to improve, show “before” and “after” pictures, and then talk about the processes used to make the improvements. These are often the same processes that we use to produce our User Conference presentations, or when we're helping one of our colleagues make a better demo or map.

Jason: “Before” and “after” pictures -- sort of sounds like you’re putting a map on a diet.

Charlie: (laughs) In a lot of cases that's actually a good way to think about it. There's lot people who think that the more information and detail you can stuff into your map, the better. I think it was Frank Lloyd Wright who said something to the effect of, “the design is done when you can't take anything else out of it”.

Jason: Indeed. (laughs). I'm sure he'd be proud of your effort to apply his idea to the world of cartography. Before we wrap this up, is there anything you'd like to say to or ask of the people who read the Support Center news blog?

Charlie: I'd love to see more people commenting on the blog entries. I mean, this kind of blogging is sort of a new phenomenon at ESRI in some ways, and our users are still kind of warming up to it. And I’d like to point out that the blogs that have come up lately, like the ArcGIS Explorer blog, the Mapping Center blog, and the ArcGIS Server Development blog – these blogs have real people behind them who are working on them every day, who get the feedback and respond so that in a very real sense there's someone at ESRI who’s listening if you've got something you want to add to the discussion.

Jason: That’s right. So you’d like to see more people taking advantage of that fact.

Charlie: Right. These blogs are moderated, but it's pretty loose. Blogs are for the user community, for people who are trying to get work done I'm kind of curious to see how an online community of this nature forms and participates. I think we're starting to see the beginnings of this and I'd like to see it grow so the community is contributing maybe twenty five and fifty percent of the content, so it's not all just Aileen and I talking. We want our users to ground this blog in reality by taking part in it. If you want to see something discussed, you don't have to write a post yourself -- you can just ask us, “can we get a blog entry on this topic?” We're usually able to respond to that kind of thing in a couple of weeks. On the other hand, if you do want to post something, we’ve got a way to do that, too – we figured out a way to accept submissions from the user community, both inside and outside ESRI. Just go to the Mapping Center web site and find the Submit a Blog Entry link on the far right.

Jason: Excellent. ESRI is really starting to turn towards increased User Community participation, and the Mapping Center is a good, early example of that turning. Thanks very much for taking the time to talk with me today, this has been enlightening.

Charlie: It’s been a pleasure.