Having previously, albeitly very shortly, worked at my country’s federal geoscientific research organisation (Geoscience Australia which was formerly the Australian Surveying and Land Information Group) I developed an appreciation for the tireless and continual work to translate, digitise and store a representation of our physical world into the bits and bytes we commonly use to reinterpret some breadth of reality.
It can be sad when the world is misinterpreted, and great that an attempt to understand is ever made in the first place given the technical complexity involved in establishing any kind of formal record or collection. I just wanted to take a brief moment to express my personal gratitude for the work they (Geoscience Australia) and their partner organisations across the world go through in this journey both in heartbreak and success.
I also wanted to express my desire that I hope it can continue, that I hope a geospatial/geoscientific model of our world will not just continue but expand. Seeing these technocrats execute gave me an even greater appreciation (I hope) for the work conducted by the countless volunteers and contributors to projects to ensure a knowledge graph is available and open such as that guided by the OpenStreetMap Foundation which I also hope continues such that the world isn’t left to proprietary solutions such as Google Maps which have proven themselves at best mixed stewards of commons data. I understand expertise isn’t and shouldn’t be cheap but hopefully open access projects will continue both whilst I breathe and afterwards to enable future platforms and ease suffering.
Hopefully I’ll find sufficient treatment in my current health battles to contribute to projects like these in the future and in either case they prove themselves sufficiently useful to continue!
— LostLetterbox