Excuse my voice I had flown in the night before and I had a case of “airplace flu” and two hours sleep, nevertheless a reasonably coherent discussion of the future of Spatial Data Infrastructure development for the new Geobuiz channel.
Category: SDI
Yesterday I made a presentation at the 13th GSDI Conference in Quebec (thanks to Geoff for his commentary), it was only a flying visit but I left in a more positive frame of mind that I expected.
The high level message of my presentation was, we need to think more about the I in SDI e.g. infrastructure, that we already have a well adopted information infrastructure we can use called the World Wide Web, to use it Geo people just have to be better web citizens.
For too long the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure community has been dominated by the producers of geospatial data, the Mapping Agencies, Cadastres and the Technology companies that serve their perceived needs. As a result discussions of Spatial Data, quality, standards and policy dominated.
I was pleased to see this observation reflected in a number of the plenary presentations, and the obvious logical extension that more focus needs to be concentrated on the potential users of SDI’s and their needs. This point was made brilliantly clear by Gilberto Câmara director of Brazils National Space Research Institute, INPE.
He introduced four questions any SDI supporter should answer..
- How much is your SDI being used to build a modern state ?
- How much is your SDI being used to enforce the rule of law ?
- How much is your SDI being used to support public accountability ?
- Is data from your SDI reaching those that need it ?
Key to answering these questions positively is I think a recognition that the true beneficiaries of a successful SDI, are not other data producers, governments, or public sector bodies, but society as a whole.
Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)
I was invited to speak at the annual INSPIRE conference in Edinburgh last month. INSPIRE remember is the European Commission programme supported by national legislation to build a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) for European Environmental data. I was asked specifically to address how INSPIRE can foster innovation and “smart growth”.
These are excellent topics to discuss in relation to SDI development, SDI’s I’m afraid are still designed and where built operated almost solely from the perspective of data providers rather than users. INSPIRE is in some ways a victim of this mindset, although there is a clearly defined user in the form of European Commission organisations. Here the issue is one of scope to really maximise the innovative potential INSPIRE, organisations need to gone beyond the strict requirement to make their information available to the Commission and share as widely as possible by adopting the principles of Open Government Data.
Written and submitted from the Google Offices, New York, USA (40.741N, 74.004W)
The 11th Spatial Data Infrastructure Conference was held last week in Rotterdam, and like many SDI conference the focus of presentations and the profile of attendees was largely from the pubic sector, and in many cases public sector data producers.
Many of the sessions investigated in depth, progress to date across the many local, regional and global efforts to develop SDI’s, other focused on the building blocks of data standards and interoperability, metadata, portal design and legal/policy decisions.
I sensed, as I’m sure many others did, the missing perspective of the actual intended users of these SDI’s; who represented the users and consumers of these complex systems? who was providing the use cases, as to what sort of information was actually needed? and how would people like to access SDI’s and what might they want to do with the information.
The citizen as a potential user of SDI’s was almost completely ignored.
In my presentation I made the point that there is also a lack of emphasis on the development of the very necessary network and storage infrastructure needed to allow distributed users to find, access and use spatial data across the web, and made the offer than Google and I’m sure the other geoweb companies would be happy to host data on behalf of public sector bodies.
SDI people like the SD but ignore the I !
This was developed into a useful metaphor by someone in the audience, when I likened this type of infrastructure to domestic plumbing, vital but often invisible until it breaks.
It seems that at the moment much of the industries emphasis is on producing the best quality water that is possible ,while at the same time developing and agreeing on a method to illustrate how pure and clear the water is. To be fair we may also now be discussing the size and shape of bottles we might use to store our water and the colour and design of the labels we will put on the bottles.
As to how we might distribute the water efficiently, there is still little discussion beyond the vague idea that it will obviously need some pipes, valves and taps of a standardised size..
This is all good stuff, but if you ask my plumber Jez, to put in a plumbing system into your house, he will ask you some very pertinent questions first..
He will ask, how many bathrooms will the house have and where are their situated, do you need radiators or under floor heating, are you sure you want a power shower on the top floor of your house, do you need to run a garden hose.
These are, if your are following the metaphor, the applications that will use the SDI..
What Jez would not do is just go ahead and lay 150m of Hep2o 22mm water pipes around your house, install a Taco circulating pump, and connect all to a tanker full of Evian water outside your house, and then leave you without fitting any fixtures!
OK so this metaphor is a little facetious, but it can be extended, how about connecting my and my neighbours houses plumbing together to create a regional SDI… the point is that an infrastructure developed in isolation to it use runs the major risk of not meeting the users needs.
My second point and this is an important one also, is that we are beginning to see many applications outside of the SDI community really adopt the “cloud computing” model, where in addition to local repositories of data used to build and maintain data, data itself is published to the cloud and makes use of the robust and scaleable infrastructure that commercial operators like Amazon and Google and even ESRI are making available.
This type of architecture is perfect for deploying SDI’s as it has the potential to scale with need, Information is my design easy to find and share, and of course it’s cheap !
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
Footnote : Still unsure of what an SDI is, read the SDI cookbook
Categories
Richmond Maps nearly everything…
Its great to see my own local authority making great use of Google Maps, as pointed out by the Mapperz team , Richmond Council have produced a series of maps using Google Maps to illustrate most of their local services, including a pet subject of mine Recycling sites.
There is much to be said for a very simple approach like this, the maps are straight forward and communicate a single type of service each, and therefore are simple to use.
Behind the scenes the locations could also be indexed and become part of the ever increasing geoweb discovered by other websites and services, remember key to the success of the web is the ability to consume information via different channels.
Such an approach also illustrates the potential for developing a UK Spatial Data Infrastructure from the ground up, at least one focused at the needs of citizen in contrast to the more formal approach developing SDI’s for professional use.
The next step would be for Richmond to publish these points of interest as a feed (KML/GeoRSS), so they would be more easily accessible to anyone wanting to integrate local services in to their own applications. But for the residents of Richmond having this information easily accessible in this way is an important step forward..
Well done Richmond !!
Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.
As highlighted by Keir on the excellent Google Maps Mania last week, AfricaMap is an interesting attempt to build a repository of geospatial data about Africa, developed by the Center for Geographic analysis at Harvard University.
What is interesting about this site, is both the scope of the project and the approach taken.
From decades many individuals, groups and organisations have been trying to develop Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) at a regional or global level (GSDI), with it must be said very limited success so far.
Unlike many previous attempts at developing a portal to a regional SDI, Africamap tries to hide as much complexity as possible from the user just presenting a map display and a search tool – Great start after-all I would argue that more than anything else a SDI is really just an example of a vertical search application.
But no.. You have been mislead dear user, just searching for something like “Sudan Population” or Nile Delta won’t give you any results – you need to select which maps layers (data-sets) you need to search first. This is not unusual in SDI implementations, but it would be like having to tell a generic web search tool, which websites the information you are looking for can be would.
This approach is, I believe, the result of a culture of system design that is dominated by data providers, not users. The user interface here has been influenced I’m sure by the creation of the metadata that SDI convention states is always the first step in building an SDI.
It’s not that the data is not available, it’s just that the approach taken so far by the SDI community makes its inaccessible to almost anyone other than the original data provider or someone who has the time to work out which map layers should be searched.
So some may argue, this and similar sites are designed for specialised users, who have intimate knowledge of this type of data and how it is structured, even so there is no reason to make access to this more difficult than it needs to be..
OK rant over, from a technology and tools point of view Africmap demonstrates what is possible now with a freely available web tools and open standards based geospatial services, and without doubt the team at Harvard should be congratulated for doing the hard back office work to provide access to all this important information from one place.
This is not yet GSDI 2.0 then, but GSDI 1.5 and a pointer to the direction which ultimately may finally deliver on the GSDI vision.
To understand more about the efforts to create a GSDI, visit the GSDI conference this year in collaboration with the EC’s third INSPIRE conference in Rotterdam in June.
Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.
Finally after an extended delay the Dept of Communities and Local Government has published the UK location strategy, Place matters. The blueprint for a UK Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI), or an extended job application for someone in Southampton…
You decide !
Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.
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 number of press releases including those from the Commission, the Finnish Presidency Website and the European Parliament all provide limited detail as to the final text of the INSPIRE directive, which was agreed late yesterday as a result of a formal conciliation process.
Although the actual agreed text of the directive does not appear to be available yet, it appears that organisations like OS will continue to be able to charge for access to data with some restrictions. Organisations supplying spatial data should be able to “to license them to, and/or require payment from, the public authorities or institutions and bodies of the Community”, but such licenses “”must be fully compatible with the general aim of facilitating the sharing of spatial data” and “be kept to the minimum required to ensure the necessary quality and supply of spatial data sets and services together with a reasonable return on investment”.
I would caution anyone reading too much into these early reports, the devil will be in the detail here.. and we should also not forget that INSPIRE is about a lot more than the licensing regime.
From now on the technical experts can get on with drafting the principles around which the infra-structural components that will allow spatial data to be shared can be built- in my mind the really important part of INSPIRE
– the creation of metadata
– the technology of interoperability
– the development of data services
– mechanisms to promote national co-ordination.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.