Survive or Thrive?

Directly geo-referenced

An aside - Widely held assertion #1*:

80% of all organisational information

is geographic

Geo-referencing, geo-coding and geo-parsing

All adds up to a collection of data, services, policies and procedures constituting a

(BUZZ WORD ALERT):

Development of the academic SDI is in parallel with broader SDI initiatives at UK government and EU level which provide simulataneously both obligations and opportunities, specifically:

The UK Location Programme

Cross domain, public sector effort to establish the UK SDI and to partially realize UK obligations under:

INSPIRE

A pan- European Directive for the establishment of an Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community

The aim of INSPIRE is to:

• improve the sharing of spatial information between public authorities and
• improve accessibility to the public.

INSPIRE will improve the quality of spatial information and enable information from different sources to be more easily combined.

Implementation of INSPIRE in the UK will deliver a step change in data management, data interoperability and data sharing across the public sector, supported by better integration with mainstream information services.

As a result, citizens will have ready access to the information they need to go about their daily lives, whether at home, in business, in research or in government.

Doing this will exploit the full value of the UK’s spatial information. Specifically, this will allow us to:

• Know what data we have, and avoid duplicating it;

• Use common reference data so we know we are talking about the same places;

• Share spatial information easily through a common infrastructure of standards, technology and business relationships.

The definition of ‘public authority’ (as per FoI) includes universities and Research Councils - the upshot of this is that Universities are required to comply with the Directive.

Implications of this depend on which perspective we take:

• Academia as Data Provider/Creator
• Academia as Data User

In reality, it is likely that BOTH perspectives will pertain!!

Data harmonization (information will adhere to specified common standards that INSPIRE will lay down)

Provision of online services such as:

• discovery (find out what data exists),
• view (to display viewable spatial data sets)
• download (to obtain the data)
• transform (to enable data interoperability)

Licensing arrangements that allow information to be shared, accessed and used in accordance with FOI legislation, EIR and the PSI Regulations

(It won’t necessarily be free…)

Monitoring mechanisms to demonstrate that the information is being made available

Co-ordination mechanisms to ensure effective operation

The Directive covers spatial data sets which fulfil the following conditions:

(a) they relate to an area where a Member State has and/or exercises jurisdictional rights;

(b) they are in electronic format;

(c) they are held by or on behalf of any of the following:

(i) a public authority, having been produced or received by a public authority, or being managed or updated by that authority and falling within the scope of its public tasks;

(ii) a third party to whom the network has been made available in accordance with Article 12;

(d) they relate to one or more of the themes listed in Annex I, II or III. (Article 4.2)

For university institutions it is unlikely that

much of the geospatial data they hold

would come under INSPIRE...in the first instance

However, there are two caveats to this:

• as the focus shifts to the third annex, it is possible that data held within universities might come within scope e.g. species distribution, habitats, atmospheric conditions.

• studies of environmental change require an understanding of how phenomena change over time. This requires access to historic data and earlier editions of data which may be held only by universities (or rather researchers and research teams within universities).

In both cases, Universities would be required to make these data available.

Geospatial data sets held by the research councils would be more likely to come under INSPIRE.

The Commission has stated that it is “a fundamental right of third parties to enrich the European Spatial Data Infrastructure with data sets currently hidden or difficult to find”.

This philosophy also underpins the UK LP (aka UK SDI)

Mashup APIs

Augmented Reality “Augmented reality will become a mainstream technology in the next five years.”

Revival of Cartography and Visualisation – making sense of the geodata deluge.

GNSS “the trend is clear: a single, accessible global datum used to store and model all spatial data will evolve and be mandated”

Sateliite & Aerial Imagery – 385 new instruments by 2015 majority of the hi-res data in public domain; UAVs

Semantic web - £30M RC budget; Better interpretation of colloquial and personal geographic inferences is expected to be a major challenge for geospatial web development over the next few years

Software - rise of OSS; realtime 3D challenges; convergence of browser as primary UI

Political

Adapting to global economic power

Building appropriate GI capacity;

Creating a UK based global market

leader / partnership;

Supporting a new type of public sector;

Responding to location privacy issues.

“There is already an interesting fragmentation within the education sector with proliferation of courses that offer some element of GIS analysis within a specific domain, such as environmental studies but not as specialism; significant drop in numbers of dedicated, full time ‘MSc in GIS’ students and some increase in distance learning, continual professional development and evening studies of GIS – probably by people who joined the sector and want to improve their knowledge.

this prezi avaiable at:

http://prezi.com/n8ui3umrjxfh/

Geospatial information – it’s pretty...ubiquitous

• 3 billion

Number people now with access to high resolution satellite images.

• 400 million

Number of Google Earth users.

• 100 million

Number of people using a web map eevery month

• 42.85 Tb

Virtual Earth imagery update per month.

• $40 billion

The amount spent on collecting geospatial information each year.

• £30 million

Commercial value of data down-loaded from Digimap

Geospatial

as an organising principle: enabling and INSPIRING research and teaching

James Reid

EDINA, Geoservices

University of Edinburgh

Geo-technology is “one of the fastest growing sectors of the US economy” (& above biotechnology)

US Bureau of Labour Statistics 2006

“students starting a 4 year technical degree will find that half of what they learned in their 1st year will be out-dated in their 3rd year”

“Location services is going to be a really big deal on the iPhone...it’s going to explode. We get location data from cell towers, from Wi-Fi, and now we also get it

from GPS.”

Steve Jobs, Apple’s WWDC'08

"The next web will be about place and time.“

Marc Davis, Yahoo's Social Media Guru @ Web 2.0 2008

So what is 'geospatial' ?

"Having to do with entities or events that can be described in a geographic fashion."

“Geo-everything” one of the top 6 emerging technologies that “will have a significant impact on higher education over the next five years”

Horizon Report 2009

So what are the Drivers behind this rapid uptake?

Two broad impulses:

• Grass roots up, hacker driven, Web2uey type approach – 'the informal'
• Top down, governance heavy, standards driven approaches - 'the formal'

• Technology drivers

e.g. mobile,PND,LBS,GYM,GPS,GPGPU

• Policy drivers

both governmental e.g. data.gov and private sector e.g. Googles geo strategy

+ the community Open movement

Indirectly geo-referenced

So - How do we exploit the value of these resources?

JISC Funded Services

Maps and Data

(directly geo-referenced)

What are the issues and opportunities for opening up content?

+ Web Services (built on Open Standards - ISO,CEN,BS,OGC)

+ Help and guidance (NDC helpdesks , JISC Geospatial Working Group)

Discover and share tools

JISC Funded Services

Maps and Data

(indirectly geo-referenced)

A little more on the policy driver

So what does that mean in practice?

Surely though its scope is quite limited?

UK HFE as INSPIRE Data Provider

ANNEX I

1. Coordinate reference systems

2. Geographical grid systems

3. Geographical names

4. Administrative units

5. Addresses

6. Cadastral parcels

7. Transport networks

8. Hydrography

9. Protected sites

ANNEX III

1. Statistical units

2. Buildings

3. Soil

4. Land use

5. Human health and safety

6. Utility and governmental services

7. Environmental monitoring facilities

8. Production and industrial facilities

9. Agricultural and aquaculture facilities

10. Population distribution

11. Area management/restriction/regulation

zones and reporting units

12. Natural risk zones

13. Atmospheric conditions

14. Meteorological geographical features

15. Oceanographic geographical features

16. Sea regions

17. Bio-geographical regions

18. Habitats and biotopes

19. Species distribution

20. Energy resources

21. Mineral resources

ANNEX II

1. Elevation.

2. Land cover

3. Identifiers of properties

4. Orthoimagery

5. Geology

So much for the formal – what about the informal?

AddressingHistory & Walking Through Time

Work at CASA “Our research is showing that crowd sourcing can be effective in change detection, for example. The biggest challenge in the context of public services is to deal with the digital and spatial bias inherent in crowd sourcing and the need for universal coverage and service delivery. Possibly this can redefine the role of public services – to complete the picture that is available from the crowd through targeted effort.”

Emerging (geo) Linked Data

Whats Next?

“Geospatial technologies converge over months not years, location is ubiquitous “

Industry Foresight Study 2010

Geo-personalisation

Web 2.0 pioneer – OSM

Key Challenges

(courtesy of AGI Foresight Report, May 2010)

Economic & Social

• Embracing a continuous turmoil of change;
• Responding to the challenge of free and the different business models that support it;
• Harnessing the crowd;
• New entrants will seize the opportunity to fuse the geoweb and social media – established incumbents will need to react or die;
• Developing the role of location information in socially significant applications, such as participatory democracy, mega city planning and consumer applications;

Technological

• Discarding the location-specific baggage and enter the mainstream;
• Co-operating with Google and other emerging global players;
• Engaging with Location-based Services (LBS) developers and service providers;
• Providing services to help users migrate through these paradigm shifts;
• Communicating with end users who don’t understand maps;

Environmental

• Understanding and responding to climate change.
• Encouraging public participation by explaining complex geographic phenomena in simple terms.
• Integrating and modelling land, air and sea aspects of environmental information.

Final Word

Muki Haklay, University College, London, AGI Foresight Study, May 2010