Collaborative and public geodata

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.

Related posts:

1. Open Letter from Public Geodata An Open Letter regarding the INSPIRE Directive to Members of the ENVI Committee in the European Parliament was published by Public Geodata yesterday. OKFN has been providing support resources to Public Geodata as part of the Open Geodata awareness raising...
2. Public Geospatial Data and the OSGeo Foundation I admit that I vacillated for a while over being nominated to the board of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. The idea clicked for me when I realised that I would want to put at least as much time into...
3. Why open geodata in an open source software foundation? I was lucky enough to be able to attend the pre-OSCON meeting of FLOSS Foundations – a group of people too-intimately involved in the management of free and open source software foundations – representing OSGeo. I gave a short talk...