Collaborative and public geodata
August 20th, 2006
Chris Holmes’ words on “Why isn’t collaborative geodata a big deal already” got me thinking about how some properties of the world can be observed - like street shapes and names - others can’t, but have to be transmitted - like postal codes and administrative boundaries. A GPS unit and a lot of goodwill will get you some way, but there are a lot of missing pieces.
In the US people don’t appreciate the wealth of data they have; in Europe people don’t realise quite how much they can’t get done. Collaborative mapping is a middle way that has yet really to catch on - there’s either no pressure for it or not enough reference data to act as a framework for it. I hope the current interest in “data mash-ups” in the UK prefigures a movement towards that middle way.
At a European level the legislative discussion over the public right to explore and reuse state-collected geodata continues, with a final vote in Parliament expected “in the early autumn”. Public Geodata is sending another Open Letter, to Ministers in the Council about their viewpoint on the INSPIRE Directive establishing a framework for European spatial data infrastructure going into the conciliation process before Third Reading in Parliament.
Technically, a lot of the “data infrastructure” problem has been about uncertainty in discovery / search / exchange protocols - no shared understanding of base metadata models. I hope the recent work being done at OSGeo on Simple Catalog Interfaces can feed into this usefully somehow; also the tile distribution project further up the stack; in making these “SDI” interfaces and concepts genuinely more useful by citizen developers and potential contributors and ground-truthers.
August 20th, 2006 at 1:46 pm
[…] Public Geodata is sending another Open Letter this time to Ministers in the Council before the conciliation and third reading process on the proposed INSPIRE Directive establishing a spatial data infrastructure in Europe. If you are in Europe it is still very much worth signing the petition and also trying to write to your national Environment Minister asking do they support the Parliament’s stance on amendments 21 and 27 at second reading, and if not why not, and please let us know. There’s more about this on the OKFN blog - looking idealistically towards collaborative production of open geodata. At FOSS4G and EuroOSCON there should be BOF sessions on the subject of public geodata and the effort to balance the approach with pragmatic efforts on open source collaborative tools for geodata and metadata exchange. Public Geodata - geographic information collected by the state - is a public good. This discussion covers how collaborative, free-of-copyright mapmaking and data exchange projects, and hacker-driven political awareness efforts regarding geodata legislation, can work together. […]
September 5th, 2006 at 1:53 am
[…] First off thanks everyone for the great responses, it’s great to have different perspectives refine my thinking on this subject. In this post I’m going to attempt to respond to many of the great comments and questions. Some of my responses won’t be complete, and will beg a full post to themselves - indeed many of the issues raised are things I’ve thought about and have future posts planned. But I like a conversation much more than a monologue, so it makes sense to address what comes up now. […]