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SE Radio 607: John Frandsen on Geospatial Technologies
John Frandsen, Chief Product officer for Elebase, joins host Jeff Doolittle for an exploration of geospatial technologies. The conversation begins with a discussion of the history of mapping and global information systems (GIS) technologies. John describes the underlying technologies used in location-aware applications and the ways that developers can incorporate maps in their own applications. The conversation also highlights recent changes and innovations in the space, as well as the challenges and opportunities of incorporating your own data into existing base map providers. This episode is sponsored by WorkOS.
John Frandsen, Chief Product officer for Elebase, joins host Jeff Doolittle for an exploration of geospatial technologies. They begin with a discussion of the history of mapping and global information systems (GIS) technologies. John describes the underlying technologies used in location-aware applications and the ways that developers can incorporate maps in their own applications. The conversation also highlights recent changes and innovations in the space, as well as the challenges and opportunities of incorporating your own data into existing base map providers.
This episode is sponsored by WorkOS.
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Transcript
Transcript brought to you by IEEE Software magazine and IEEE Computer Society. This transcript was automatically generated. To suggest improvements in the text, please contact [email protected] and include the episode number.
Jeff Doolittle 00:01:02 Welcome to Software Engineering Radio. I’m your host, Jeff Doolittle. I’m excited to invite John Frandsen as a guest on the show today for a conversation about geospatial technologies. John Frandsen is the Chief Product Officer for Elebase, a content and data management solution for digital maps. He worked on ESRI Technologies and licensing with early .com companies such as E-Nature, ESPN Outdoors and Reserve America. This became the initial footprint for a product he started in 2007 called Geoconsensus — accidentally one of the first headless content management systems — which helped power National Geographic maps. In 2020, Geoconsensus was relaunched as Elebase, an API-first data management platform for digital maps. John, welcome to the show.
John Frandsen 00:01:46 Hey, thanks Jeff.
Jeff Doolittle 00:01:48 Glad you’re here. Let’s start with sharing a little bit about how you got into mapping.
John Frandsen 00:01:52 Certainly. I’ve always been interested in maps and even as a kid I had maps on the wall back before there were such things as digital maps and I’d look at them in the evenings and especially was interested in places that kind of just seemed out of the way and kind of distant and remote and always kind of wondered what it was like at those places. Digital maps did something kind of interesting and new where it suddenly made the world accessible, especially with the advent of satellite imagery and such. And so maybe on one side it took away the mystery of the world, but on the other side is it opened it up to us. And then at a certain point there was a project that I was kind of working on in the late 1990s where there was this intersection between what we needed to accomplish and maps.
Jeff Doolittle 00:02:48 Okay. Tell us a little bit more about that. What was the project and how did maps become a part of what problems you were solving? So
John Frandsen 00:02:54 We were building something for the Coleman company. Maybe some people are familiar with that. That’s the guys who make lanterns and stoves and outdoor stuff. Back at that time, Coleman wanted to expand their brand a bit beyond just kind of selling coolers and sleeping bags and backpacks and stuff like that. They wanted to help people and facilitate people to find places to go and things to do outside. And we discovered that, at least in the US for people who are familiar with the US, there are these really popular places called national forests and they have campgrounds in them that are people go and stay at. And the US Forest Service at that time didn’t really even know how many campgrounds they actually had. And so what we were going to do is build a database of every national forest campground and there were about 4,500 or so of them across the US and we had about six months to pull that off.
John Frandsen 00:03:51 And this was pretty early. It wasn’t like you could just go online like you can now to find this information. So we had to build a data set of about 45 to 5,000 different places. And to do that we needed to enlist people we’d call field experts, which were kind of like the forest rangers and such. So they could log in and tell us about these different campgrounds. And then we wanted also to know where they’re at. And so we started to log kind of like the, the coordinates, the geo coordinates for this, the latitude longitude of this and that tool that allowed people to interact kind of remotely to facilitate geospatial information we called it consensus at that time. It was kind of the very first iterations. People thought it was kind of cool back then to kind of be able to log in and collaborate on places. I think the coolness is worn off nowadays.
Jeff Doolittle 00:04:44 We kind of take it for granted now. I think.
John Frandsen 00:04:45 Yeah, we’re pretty kind of burned out on maybe filling in fields online but
Jeff Doolittle 00:04:50 .
John Frandsen 00:04:51 And so we did that and listed literally hundreds if not maybe even thousands of people to all collaborate on building this data set. And then it became something where we wanted that Coleman called the Outernet. So the internet was cool back then, but then they said let’s go, let’s make something called the outer net. And it was an online travel planning site where you could literally say, I want to start here and go there and it’s going to show you the campgrounds along the way with descriptions of it and such like that. Now it might seem pretty pedestrian right now, but this was before Google Maps existed.
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