Category: Data Policy

Categories
Data Policy neogeography Thoughts

Mash-up hero !!

This is a great story from the mySociety blog, Michael Houlsby from East Hampshire council has built an API to the councils database to allow users of the fix my street application to post issues directly into the councils own operational database.

I can only imagine how hard this was to achieve not from a technical point of view, but from this bottom up approach to delivering a IT system, which goes completely against the usual philosophy of delivering IT systems in government.

Many people view mash-ups only as a way of publishing information, but really mash-ups are just about providing open interfaces to your online services, so it brilliant to see such an approach used in the UK to contribute information, which in turn potentially improves the quality of life for the lucky residents of East Hants !

Kudos to Michael, an example of the value to web 2.0 I will be using from now on..

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

Categories
Data Policy Thoughts

Show Us a Better Way, The results show

The finalists in the innovative, Show Us a Better Way: competition have been announced and its great so see how many of them make sure of geospatial information, again evidence I’m sure of the pent-up demand for access to geospatial data in the UK.

The finalists are receiving funding to either build working prototypes of continue development of existing systems such as the excellent wheres the path site and ave wrigley’s UK schools map which I first came across at the UK Mash-Up event over two years ago.

The actual winner will be announced in BBC Radio 4’s iPM programme at 5:45am on Saturday morning, for those of us who are already suffering from sleep deficit from Tuesday Night’s US election excitement, of course you can catch up with the results on the shows podcast.

Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.

Categories
Data Policy Thoughts

The Elephant in the conference room


Last week ESRI held its annual European User group meeting in London, which as usual was a masterpiece in professional conference production. Jack gave an inspirational conference keynote on the first day followed by some great product demos by the team from ESRI UK who were the hosts of the conference this year. This was followed by team from Redlands with some pointers as to future features to be expected in the next major release of ArcGIS 9.4 towards the end of next year.

It’s often refreshing to see how much a privately held company like ESRI can talk about future products  compared to publicly listed companies who need to be more careful, I was very much taken, for example, by the new Microsoft style ribbon interface in the upcoming revision of ArcGIS Explorer.

Despite all the great technology demonstrations and great examples of the use of GIS in Schools and for humanitarian relief, I could not help feeling that a key aspect of GIS usage in Europe was missing : Data Policy and the difficulties in sharing geospatial data produced by European public sector agencies.

Until INSPIRE really begins to have a impact early in the next decade, many of the demonstrations presented here and at similar conference will remain only demonstrations…

One scenario presented by the team from ESRI UK showed various UK agencies sharing information to manage a flood event, and communicating up to date and relevant information to the population potentially impacted via a website. Those with even a little knowledge of the GI industry in the UK know of course that the various licensing regimes adopted by different Government agencies in the UK would make such a scenario impossible.

We are at a stage now in the development of the GIS industry that key vendors such as ESRI are now concentrating on improving the quality and robustness of the software rather than adding even more specialised functionality, a key sign of maturity and something that both Microsoft and Apple are now focusing on for their next releases of their operating systems, at the same time how information is discovered and shared to ultimately power these GIS tools is still caught up with the IP and publishing models of the 19th century.

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

Categories
Data Policy

The economic half life Geodata

At the ESRI UC Executive submit this weekend, Dirk Kempthorne the US Secretary of the Interior announced that the 35 year old archive of Landsat Imagery held by the USGS would be made available for free public access via the web. Of course how federal data is made available in the US has always been something we Europeans looked upon with some envy despite it’s sometimes poor quality, but it’s important to remember that Remotely Sensed Imagery has always been slightly different, and a less permissive licensing regime has existed around what was seen as a more commercial data set.

So this is great news, but it illustrates an interesting question ? What is the economic half life of geodata, over what period of time does the value of geodata decay ? The Landsat archive is in many ways different to “mapping” data in that the empirical value of data in the form of raw pixel values is still of considerable interest to the scientific community, but from the perspective of visual interpretation how much less valuable is a view of Las Vegas from the late 1980’s compared to one of today.

From a mass-market perspective there is a clear difference in usefulness, for providing a synoptic view of the world today to provide context for other types of information clearly geodata needs to be as current as possible, 10 year old imagery particularly for urban areas is much less useful. But financially how much less valuable.

For most types of commercial geodata this value decay curve is impossible to establish, because of the combination of software like licenses and copyright, so for example Ordnance Survey data in the UK has the same commercial value when it is one day old, one year old and 49 years old, but it then drops to zero as it drops out of copyright.

Alongside the broad argument around making public sector information more open, perhaps it would also be useful to think about the data that will always be commercial, but has a value which decays over time.

Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.

Categories
Data Policy Google Maps

Show us a better way on a map

As many of us have always suspected, geospatial data is a great foundation to finding and publishing all types of government information, so it should not be unexpected that many of the entries for the Show us a better way competition to develop applications using public sector information make use of geospatial technology.

These move beyond the simple map mash-ups including for example some mobile LBS applications.

It’s wonderful to see organisations like the Dept. for Transport, Post Office and the OS 🙂 opening up their databases via API’s and simple click through licenses. These are of course temporary arrangements in many cases, but this is a great opportunity to prove the potential of publishing this information in this way.

For many years the supporters of both sides of the argument around the release of public sector information  based their argument not on real evidence, but on dogmatic positions.. hopefully we will soon have some real world examples to develop evidence to conclude the arguments one way or the other.

Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.

Categories
Data Policy

Show Us a Better Way

Show us a better way

I am impressed by the work that the Power of Information Task Force are doing, to drive forward the recommendations of last years highly influential report. Their latest initiative is Show Us a Better Way a £20,000 competition over the summer to identify the most useful new service which could be developed if public sector information was made more accessible.

So if your are thinking of developing a new mash-up, this is a great opportunity..

Written and submitted from the Google Office, Zurich.

Categories
Data Policy

Crime mapping gets political

Over the past few months Crime Mapping has floated up the political agenda, reaching the mainstream with Boris Johnson’s recent call for crime mapping, echoed by the Guardian’s Free our Data campaign, and this morning followed up by the reporting of Louise Casey’s Cabinet Office report.

You would think from the media, that this is something new in the UK, but in fact Crime Mapping has been taking place for many years, and the UK has world renowned expertise as demonstrated by the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science at UCL who next month are running the 6th, yes that’s the 6th National Crime Mapping Conference in Manchester.

What is new, and what should be applauded, is at last a focus on making much of this information available to the public- until now the efforts have concentrated on producing crime maps for internal consumption by police forces themselves.

As a matter of principal, making information public is always a good thing, when the information allows citizens to make decisions, and to independently monitor the services provided to them by Government.

We should not have to rely on maps like the one below created by Keir Clarke, who scraped local authority websites to build this mash-up.

London Crime map

If I can use this website to monitor the performance of British Airways, should I not be able to monitor the effectiveness of my local police force.

There is often a disconnect between peoples perception of crime and its actual occurrence, a map with a few push-pins representing successful neighbourhood policing will be much more valuable than the next crime survey report finding.

Of course there must be mechanisms to protect the identity of individual victims of crime, but is the situation really much different from the crime reporting in Local Newspapers ?

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

Categories
Data Policy Thoughts

Your starter for ten, Define public task…

As someone points out in the comments of this Free Our Data post, the definition of the Ordnance Survey’s public task was clearly written by the OS, I would suggest maybe even Vanessa Lawrence herself.

But if you were the CEO of a large commercial organisation would you not want to write your own mission statement ? Of course you would, but in most public companies this would be done with reference to your shareholders and discussed by your executive board with the input of your industry experienced chairman, well at least in theory anyway.

The problem here is the lack of knowledgeable oversight of the activities of the OS, the public task of the OS was defined by the OS because nobody else within government was either qualified or interested to do so, things are certainly beginning to change post the Power of Information report, but still the underlying value of geospatial information; and it’s huge potential if made more accessible, remains hidden behind bureaucratic processes.

Perhaps the mythical UK Location Strategy might suggest a way forward, I wonder who wrote that…

Written and submitted from the Iberia Lounge, Madrid Airport, using its 802.11 network.

Categories
Data Policy

David Rhind to head APPSI

Excellent news from the Free our Data campaign blog, David Rhind well respected in the UK GI industry, and ex-DG of the Ordnance Survey is to be the new Chair of the Advisory Panel on Public Sector Information. His insider knowledge will be very valuable in moving the debate of making public sector information more accessible forward.

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

Categories
Data Policy Ordnance Survey

Does this equation mean the end of the commercial OS ?

delta w

It has taken me a while to get round to commenting on the Trading Funds Report as I have been travelling, and it’s 150 pages long !!

It is a very important document in many ways, for the first time there is a well researched analysis from economists on the impact of different funding models for trading funds on the wider economy. This is something the GI industry and even some in the OS have been crying out for, for many years.

The conclusions are clear ,even through the internal pricing mechanisms within trading funds are very complex, the UK economy would be better off if the OS was to make is key data products (Landline and Mastermap) available at marginal (zero) cost.

The logic of this argument is actually simple if you think about it, on one hand the ludicrous merry-go-round of government departments paying another government department to license data would disappear, reducing costs and increasing the use of geographic information within government, particularly those departments who can’t currently afford it.

On the other hand the still relatively small GI Industry in the UK would flourish, being able to produce value added products based on the unrefined OS data, much as has happened in the US. And remember the companies that form the UK GI industry pay corporation tax unlike the OS.

So the Free our Data campaign is vindicated, we can just sit back and wait for our MasterMap DVD’s in the post… unfortunately no.

The reports authors calculate that the welfare (value of the benefits to the UK economy) would be around £168m for which there would need to be a subsidy paid to the OS of something between £12m and £85m! Not a bad return you might think, even the higher figure, but even if we take the lower amount, who is going to pay the £12m ?

This is a £12m subsidy not paid by any government department today, and it is much more than any one government department pays to license OS data today…

And even if you can find that £12m from within government, you then place the OS in the position where it’s continued operation and the quality of its data is reliant on a subsidy from government, a disastrous position which could result in a USGS like reduction in funding if political priorities change.

Now we have a much better handle of the economics of funding the OS why not look at different ways of funding its operation which still allow increased access to the data.

Fro example, rather than licensing data to create revenue, why not fund the activities through as registration process. It just so happens that the biggest user of OS large scale data is the Land Registry, for producing your title plans, it would be simple to add a fee to each property transaction to fund the OS…

I hope the publication of this long awaited report moves the debate into the circles who can actually make some decisions, for the sake of the UK GI Industry somebody needs to make a decision on this issue once and for all.

Written and submitted from the Crowne Plaza Hotel, Sydney, using its broadband network