Dangermond on Active Mashup, GIS and Terrorism

FutureGov has the latest interview with ESRI’s Jack Dangermond. Along with a history of GIS from the 1970s today and the move from mainframe to Web, Dangermond speaks of “active mashup,” a term new to me.

This [a federated system where departments develop and maintain their own data] clears the path for an “active mashup” – a collection of mapping applications and web services that are combined into a single mapping application. Taking advantage of a variety of pre-developed services and functions, agencies can dramatically decrease development costs and data costs for their applications. In addition, performance is greatly improved.

“Active mashup is part of the vision for server based enterprise system,” says Dangermond. “However, the mashup is not the cause; server architecture is the real enabling technology.”

Another great quote from Dangermond, this time on censoring map data to prevent terrorism:

Terrorists don’t need GIS to figure out how to bomb a building.