More on "is geospatial special"?

Hello again, sorry for being quiet the past couple of weeks, have been pretty busy between some vacation and some time looking into new business opportunities. Anyway, hopefully I will be posting more regularly again for the next few weeks.

I thought I would just do a short follow up on my earlier post on GeoWeb, which generated a few comments and emails. "Mentaer" made the following comment:

I see almost once a month why geo-data are special and deserve some special treatment - even if I talk to IT people. I am thinking for instance on geographic projections, geo-ontologies (i.e. fuzzy terms and objects), and spatial indices for databases... ending up with spatial web searches such as "lakes near Zurich". So... "geo" is special from my point of view, at least as much as medical databases and images? ;) (otherwise a whole bunch of GIScientists makes unnecessary research?)

I thought I would pick up on this one. Of course there are specialized areas of work with regard to geospatial data, just as there are with numbers, but the point is that 99% of people who can do useful work with geospatial data don't need to worry about these things. I thought that the statement that geospatial data was at least as special as images was a good parallel actually. You can do extremely complex work with images, of course. But you also find images on almost every web page you access, everyone reading this blog has devices for creating image data (aka cameras), many people have a phone which can create image data, many of you will share this image data that you create with your friends using online services. So I see a lot of parallels here with geospatial data - images are a little further ahead in terms of being completely pervasive, but not by much.