Thank you – yes, you!  

By Brian Civin, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at AfriGIS

(Pretoria, South Africa – 31 May 2022)  

I remember, when I had just learned to read, being fascinated by anything depicted on a map – I found the visualisation helped me to imagine and question.  

  

Seeing the world laid out before me revealed the same single Earth. But there were colours depicting boundaries and borders, where mineral deposits lay, which nations were aligned and which not, where populations thrived, where borders were placed and some moved, and so much more.   

  

I was mesmerised. Without even reading the captions a mere glance demonstrated the power of maps to tell stories visually. Maps are a powerful tool. At school I discovered the advantages of relating everything to the visual power of maps because it made things easy to understand.   

  

I am a visual person, as so many people are, and the visualisation of such vast troves of information never ceased to capture my imagination. My early discovery that maps are potent tools has strengthened with time. They powerfully share concepts, information, and understanding how the world is changing around us.  

  

The journey from old school printed atlases to interactive digital displays is more than an evolution of how we view geographical data. It is an evolution of what questions we can ask, and how much better we can understand people, places and things.   

  

In the past 25 years, in our lifetime as AfriGIS, GIS has gone from being a barely pubescent theory that emerged in the ‘60s, through basic map-based functionality, to a full-blown spatial analysis science. Far beyond being able to pinpoint an exact and very precise address that speeds profitable businesses on their way to fulfilling the needs of happy customers, we help people in those companies realise things and discover opportunities they never knew mattered to them so much.   

  

Our recipe is only a little more complex than those maps that first impressed me when I was a child, but the questions we can ask and the insights we can derive are so much more advanced and powerful than ever before. The best verified and validated good quality data, visualised, overlaid, and presented (and this is where we are different from the atlas) in context to provide meaningful insights – that’s the game changer that’s created a whole new proposition for the many South African and International businesses that use our data and our services.   

  

Thank you, to each and every one of you, for taking this mesmerising journey with us either in full or in part over the past 25 years. It has been an epic. We cannot wait to release the sequel.  

  

Remember: if you can review the past and analyse the present you can predict the future. 

Brian Civin - AfriGIS CSMO
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