NoGIS: Round Two of Neo vs. Paleo Geography?

Can't we all just get along?

I started, apparently, a few days ago with the posting of NoGIS Meetup, and the subsequent blog post, "What Does NoGIS Mean?" by Sean Gorman on the GeoIQ blog. Among other things, Sean said

"For decades, location and geography have been their own special niche, served by GIS technology from a fairly small number of vendors.  As many have pointed out “spatial is no longer special” and as a result location is quickly becoming a feature of many technologies.  As location base apps become ubiquitous the characteristics of geographic data are changing as well.  The data of this new paradigm does not look like the static parcel data, which is stereotypical of much traditional GIS work.  As we saw in the NoSQL characteristics data is now high volume, dynamic and users/developers want to see/query it in real time."


And the usual statement by neogeographers (in one of the comments)


"I’m not inferring that GIS and NoGIS are mutually exclusive..."


James Fee, traditional defender of the Paleo...OK, that's a bit much but let's say a frequent defender of all things Paleo responded in his blog post:



As with anything, everyone is quick to say we’ve all been doing this since the 1960′s so ignore it and move on unless you’ve got one of the following to accomplish:

And then goes on to list the geography industry's equivalent of hipster evils.

And I thought that the Neogeography vs. Paleogeography wars were largely over and we were all getting along. But perhaps it was just a Christmas ceasefire.

That said, I'll be at the NoGIS workshop, should be interesting. No one ever said geographers were boring. Oh, wait, many people have. But they are, of course, wrong.