The Geospatial Special Interest Group is hosting a talk on the Guardian Free our Data campaign next month, by Michael Cross.
Should be an interesting meeting, the campaign has done a great job in highlighting the issue of accessibility to geospatial information in the UK in particular, but political progress has been slow, and it is still a struggle to obtain government held information.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
For the last 15 years the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Association (GSDI) have been working hard to co-ordinate national and local governments, NGO’s, international institutions and other organisations to develop local, national, regional and then hopefully one day a global GIS database along with the polices to access it. Last week I attended and made a presentation to the GSDI’s 10th Conference in Trinidad.
With our planet finally becoming recognised as a life giving infrastructure itself to mankind, such attempts to develop better management tools cannot really be argued against, however despite the best intentions of all those involved success so far has been limited.
Although I presented on the potential of Geoweb search as new technological development that is relevant to the creation of SDI’s, almost everybody agrees the technical challenges remain the most solvable, it is the organisational issues which restrict the sharing of geodata, and the complexity and therefore cost of developing national and regional SDI’s which are limiting progress.
Perhaps part of the issue is that SDI’s often appear to be “Grand Designs”, the results of many years planning to produce truly comprehensive infrastructures ready to support any potential national or international need, perhaps a better model would be to take a more evolutionary approach developing systems built around the existing open standards (the OGC’s role has very important here) to solve particular domain or thematic problems, which could be consolidated to form an SDI at a later date. For example you could imagine an international systems designed to monitor sea level change as a result of Global Warming.
Although it would be fair to argue that this is the preferred route to developing SDI’s there are few practical examples in operation today.
The Grand Design approach does introduce an additional issue which is technology related, many of the current SDI projects are planned to deliver over decades, with technological developments continuing to move rapidly, it is difficult to plan to implement using a technology which will be obsolete years before the infrastructure goes live.., as it is today the best available standards as drafted by OGC are moving from basic http interfaces to the more web services friendly SOAP based interfaces, while the leading edge is looking to REST based interfaces.
For technical architects this is an almost impossible design choice.
So we need to move away from the “Grand Design” approach and build SDI’s organically and simply, perhaps making use of the new Global infrastructures that companies like Google and Microsoft have made available to bootstrap the technology, and deliver faster benefits and to make the case for more in depth infrastructures at a later date.
After all have not all GSM networks grown out to provide national coverage from initially covering the urban centres where the need was greatest ?
The delegates I spoke to at the conference remain committed to the importance of the task, and I think are open to taking different approaches, I was very impressed to see Chris and Justin from the Open Planning Project run an afternoon workshop on GeoServer which provided an interesting contrast to the ESRI workshop held in the morning, ESRI incidentally have done a great job supporting the GSDI Association since its early days.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
A little from left field as most people have been thinking about the upcoming Location Strategy publication, The Communities and Local Government Select Committee published their report on the Ordnance Survey on Saturday.
Despite the dry nature of a select committee report, it is worth reading because there are some key findings nobody other than the members of Southampton’s littoral head burying club (joke for geomorphologists there..) could disagree with..
“We are concerned that organisations charged with carrying out vital public services sometimes find OS’s licensing conditions too complex and inflexible” – Amen !!
btw the report can be downloaded from here
Written and submitted from the BA Lounge, using the BT Openzone 802.11 network.
An interesting news story from silicon.com, noting that government staff are to be banned from removing laptops containing personal information from their offices.
Is it just me, but should we not be asking why they have such data on their laptops in the first place ? Surely all such information should be held only in databases on the government secure network, where they use can be monitored and protected.. if this needs to be accessed from home or on the road then VPN into the network ?
For too long this has been reported as Government being careless losing laptops, the real story is a complete lack of information management. If this type of debate gets your interest, take a look a Cory Doctorow’s article in the Guardian last week.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
Last weeks announcement on the Zillow blog that is was releasing its neighbourhood boundary data to the community in Shapefile format is the story of the year so far… (ok so we are only a few weeks in… but this is important)
Zillow is the US Real Estate web site that uses much web 2.0 goodness to actually carry out simple analysis of the housing market, a largely geographical phenomena of course, and allows the user to produce simple hotspot maps of the relative activities in house prices in different neighbourhoods, amongst other things.
This is where the Open Source boundary data comes in… the best people to help define and keep the neighbour boundary data “up to date” are the people themselves, and as the OpenStreetMap guys have found there is a growing community of people willing to do so.
I would be really interested to see how peoples perception of their neighbourhood compares with the “official” data, there is of course much folk-law as to the practices of Estates Agents in London calling Battersea an a rough area when I grew up “South Chelsea”, of course it is gentrified now…
We are only just developing the tools which allow users to express their own sense of place, this is an exciting first step in many ways, and will no doubt point the way to more collaborative mapping applications.
Again ,of course, this raises the question as to other data sets which could be maintained by the community in such a manner, the completeness of OpenStreetMap in the UK (shields up) could be improved overnight if data could be open sourced in this way as it has in the Netherlands for example.
The OS spends relatively little keeping its small scale business geographics data products such as strategi maintained, and it returns similarly modest revenues… worth a small-scale experiment perhaps ?
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
In the past I have been very critical of the BBC approach to making their programmes available online, which until December required you to use Microsoft DRM, and hence was PC only. However in December the beeb released the streaming version of
iPlayer using the latest Adobe technology to allow users to watch selected programmes online for a week after they are broadcast, and this is a cross platform service.
I must say this is really well down, the interface is simple and well designed, the quality of the video is very good and the flexibility such as service offers the viewers of the BBC is massive, along with on-demand services offered by virginmedia my cable supplier, my household rarely watches live broadcast TV, other than the news, choosing what to watch, when we want to watch it.
We are not alone the BBC reports today that 3.5 million shows have been streamed or downloaded since Christmas Day. Interestingly the number of people streaming the programmes outnumber those downloading using the Microsoft DRM by a factor of eight.
This could be interesting in context to the expected announcement from Apple that they will now support movie rental from itunes, is it that the video market unlike music is one where we don’t feel it necessary to “own’ the media, or is it now the fact that access to the cloud is so pervasive we don’t mind accessing information when we need it and then throwing it away.
Either way again, you can’t help but draw comparisons with how geodata is licensed, and ask similar questions, for example as a developer building some new houses, would you not want to license the data for just the period of build ?
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
The Power of Information Report continues to have its impact around Whitehall, following the hell frezzing release of OS Openspace (alpha) just before the deadline of December last year, the Office of Public Sector Informtion (OPSI) has announced plans to run a barcamp a week on Saturday (12th January).
The BarCampPOIR8 will have as it’s subject the creation of web-based channel to support requests for the publication of specific public information datasets. This was recommendation 8 of the report hence POIR8 !
It’s rather short notice, but great to see Government bodies reaching out to the information policy and developement community in this way.
For those not familiar with the tradtion, this article explains what a barcamp is 🙂
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
As happens in this world of constant communications, I heard of the new OpenAerialMap site via an IM chat with Jeff Johnson of PictEarth on Sunday lunchtime !
The idea behind OAM is for it to become an online repository for community generated aerial photography, sourced from Kites, Low cost UAV’s , etc. I’m sure many still see the creation of Open Source imagery captured by amateurs as a Joke, but then people were not serious about OSM !
It’s true that OAM cannot really replace the global systematic cover offered by satellite imagery or the professional aerial photography producers, but for applications where discrete imagery is required of a particular location at high resolution, or to cover a specific event or activity (high temporal resolution) there is a niche which can be filled by this imagery, and the services like OAM which distribute it.
As with OSM, OAM can work because the tools to both capture and distribute this type of Geodata have become democratised to the extent where it is possible for the amateur to respond to events faster than the professional,and to make that data available without the restrictions of conventional licensing. Although the distribution of large amounts of imagery represents all sorts of new challenges in developing a robust operational system.
As with traditional mapping, we are not looking at a replacement to the traditional top-down centralist approach to the creation of Geodata, however there is now at least an alternative, that may become more significant over time.
I wonder if there are plans to use include Geobase SPOT data set of Canada ?
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
Has anybody seen this data ?
If so, please return it in the envelope provided, as the owner would quite like it back.
Lisa, I think was a little shocked this evening when I jumped of the sofa and started swearing at the TV news.
Dear readers outside of the UK, I must explain.. the Government department responsible for taxation in the UK sent a dump of a database containing detailed personal and financial details of 25 million people (nearly half the UK population) on a couple of CD’s in the mail and it has gone missing !!
As an IT professional this is wrong on so many levels it really defies belief, why store personal information including address, national insurance details, Date of Birth etc in the same database as peoples bank details?, why dump them to a CD and not use the government secure intranet which has costs tens if not hundreds of millions to develop and operate, why not encrypt the data ?
The list just goes on and on.
The government say – don’t worry we don’t think the database has fallen into the wrong hands – well I don’t feel very reassured.
Now I’m just trying to convince Lisa to change her bank account, as she along with every mother/carer in the country has their bank accounts security compromised by these idiots !!
UPDATE
Looks like the data has been found.. don’t you just love the British sense of humour ?
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
I got myself in trouble on a number of occasions with my old boss when I drew the obvious comparisons between the Geodata industry and the Music Industry, and how Geodata providers needed to move with the times..
It is therefore interesting to see that a least one music industry boss is recognising the mistakes of the past/present… to quote Edgar Bronfman of Warner Music..
“We used to fool ourselves…We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was. We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding. And of course we were wrong. How were we wrong? By standing still or moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find and as a result of course, consumers won.”
Remember this is not always about making information free, it is about making it accessible..
There is a lesson there for leadership of a number of .gov.uk organisations don’t you think ?
Written and submitted from Starbucks, Horseferry Road, using my three 3G modem.