Our intention and aspiration is to continue building out thematic information about every subject - basemaps, imagery, demographics, landscape data, etc. - so anyone can use it to access thousands of authoritative maps.

Once you digitize data, you can actually analyze patterns and relationships in geographic space - relationships between certain health patterns and air or water pollution, between plants and climate, soils, landscape.

I have high hopes that GIS will become increasingly relevant for landscape architects as we make the tools easier to use for the design process of just inventory and mapping.

A location-aware tablet will let us use what's called geodesign to compose participatory, what-if scenarios onsite, using maps that several people can share - something we could always do with paper but that's been a challenge with digital maps in the field.

We tell stories with maps about global warming, biodiversity; we can design more livable cities, track the spread of epidemics. That makes a difference.

We started with things like locating ski runs or locating a transmission line corridor or locating a new town or doing a coastal zone plan. We ourselves weren't doing the planning work, but we were doing all the mapping work for the landscape architects and planners who would subsequently incorporate the maps into their actual designs.