Ian’s panel at the SXSW conference last month got him thinking on a post-modern GIS stream of consciousness sort-of-thing. The idea is this: everything whose location can be known will be known. Costs have fallen, technologies have evolved, and ubiquity is near. This mean the value and importance of attributes will continue to increase–tying location to metadata that is related to some asset–will broaden the appeal of spatial awareness. A simple example is the Empire State Building. We all know (or rather we can know) where it is. What we don’t know is hours of operation, handicap accessible entrances, admission fees to visit the observation deck. Tim O’Reilly riffs on this with the idea that Data is the Intel Inside.