Transcript Towards an Open Geo Web: Linking Open Source’s ‘Architectures of Participation’ to the Global SDI Initiative Chris Holmes.

Towards an Open Geo Web:
Linking Open Source’s
‘Architectures of Participation’
to the Global SDI Initiative
Chris Holmes
Architectures of Participation
• Term I use for 'the open source process'
• Coined by Tim O'Reilly
• Strong roots in Yochai Benkler's 'commonsbased peer production' of Coase's Penguin - I
take an architecture of participation to be the
'thing' that results from a commons based peer
production
• Stephen Weber also hits on main ideas in The
Success of Open Source Software
Examples of Architectures of
Participation
• Linux
– First open software project that truly
empowered potential contributors
• Wikipedia
– Very low barrier to entry, lets anyone get
involved in the area they know
• Firefox
– Brought participation to ‘marketing’ - raising
awareness of the product
• World Wide Web (and web 2.0)
A Definition
• An ‘Architecture of Participation’ is
both social and technical,
leveraging the skills and energy of
users as much as possible to
cooperate in building something
bigger than any single person or
organization could alone.
Social and Technical
• It is not possible to simply focus on one,
to take the other as a given
• Community won’t work right if the
technical doesn’t support it properly can’t make it too hard to participate
• Technical can’t do anything if there’s no
community - can’t just build and
assume people will come
Applying to Geospatial
• Software was only the first domain to
see the incredible benefits of succesful
architectures of participation
• Steven Weber is clear in his book that
the process can be applied to other
fields, most any digital good has high
potential
• For geospatial there are two main
possibilities
– Creation of geospatial data
– Sharing of geospatial data
Geospatial Data Creation
• Open Street Map is the clear early
leader in this domain
• Many interesting issues with licensing,
and how to incentivize properly
• Huge potential for cooperation among
citizens, governments and commercial
data providers
• Unfortunately outside the scope of this
talk
Geospatial Data Sharing
• Primary goal of all Spatial Data
Infrastructure initiatives is to share
geospatial data
– To pick one definition: “the sources,
systems, network linkages, standards, and
institutional issues involved in delivering
spatially related data from many different
sources to the widest possible group of
potential users at affordable costs” (Groot &
McLaughlin 2000)
The Success of SDIs?
• If the goal is making it easy to access
geospatial data, then Google in its
private infrastructure has achieved far
more than hundreds of national
initiatives
• 9 million MyMaps vs. ‘thousands’ of
NSDI users
• Google is not an SDI, but it’s useful to
examine how it’s achieved the goals of
SDI so well.
Architectures of Participation:
Factors for success
• Working on something useful (or at
least has the promise of being useful
relatively soon)
• Viewing users as important contributors.
– Give them responsibility, see them as the
most valuable resources and they will
become it
• Lowering barriers to contributing.
– First time contributors won’t come back if it
is difficult to have their effort incorporated to
the commons
Google: Contribute to
something useful
• Very quick win of being able to visualize one’s
data on top of extremely high quality base map
and additional layers
• Relatively easy to customize for even more
advanced visualizations
• Easy for others to download if uploaded, nice
layers get recognized and blogged about
• Gets indexed by GeoWeb Search, others can
easily find it.
SDI: Contribute to something
useful
• Putting data on an SDI seems to have
few clear wins
– Few people use SDIs, so you get practically
no feedback
• Admittedly a bit of a chicken and egg problem
– Only can show something off if lots of time
and money has gone in to making a ‘portal’
– Only can search on the registered catalog
– No interesting visualizations
Google: Users as Contributors
• No discrimination between consumers
and producers
• Everyone encouraged to upload data,
even of things that others won’t care
about
• Google has even hired users who have
contributed extensive data, to become
paid contributors
• Many ‘experts’ have also contributed
very valuable data, it’s much easier
than getting on an SDI
SDI: Users as contributors
• In SDI’s there appears to be a fairly clear line
between producers and consumers
• Data generally comes from national agencies
and ‘official’ sources
• Users get the (correct) impression that training
is needed to fill out metadata
• Only ‘GIS professionals’, with certificates and
degrees are worthy of contributing
Google: Barriers to Entry
• To share data on Google’s
infrastructure you need:
– A browser
• Google MyMaps lets you create new geospatial
data directly with your browser
• Predating that Google Earth lets you save any
data you make as a KML file, which they then
have a site that you can upload it to
SDI: Barriers to Entry
• To share data in an SDI you need:
– Metadata: filled out by someone with
appropriate training
– A server to put your data on
– Software implementing WMS
WFS/WCS standards
– Perhaps data sharing agreements
– Registration of metadata on a catalog
But does user contribution
alone make an SDI?
• No… Not quite
• Commercial players have stayed out of
encouraging creation of ‘real’ GIS layers
– Though many ‘experts’ exploit commercial
platforms as great visualization tools
• They use ‘real’ GIS as a base layer, but
they keep it private
• Not in their incentive structure to make
the public GIS data they gather
available to all.
Let commercial players run
SDI?
• Though they’d love that this is an awful idea
– SDI’s are a public good
– Commercial players all have a profit motive
– Each would like to own the entire infrastructure, to
get to a monopoly where they control the
infrastructure and can extract whatever they want
out
– This is a real danger, many governments are
handing over data without opening it to anyone else
• Only those who have the resources to have workers
constantly try to extract data will have it
• Turns public good in to opportunity for private gain
Towards the Geo Web
• GSDI should be a single, shared
infrastructure that all participate in.
• Term ‘Geo Web’ emphasizes a single
project, instead of different initiatives
• Has the potential to go much further
than even the full infrastructures that
Google and Microsoft are building
• Build on what’s out there, on successful
architectures of participation
Principles: Towards an Open
Geo Web
• Don’t think of SDI as just a set of data sharing
policies, top down requirements and mandates
– At its most successful it’ll only cover government
agencies and a few more
• Figure out how to set up architectures that
aligns the various incentives of all those who
create and consume geospatial information to
participate in a single geospatial web
– Resist just letting big companies run it, as it will lose
its key property - that it is a public good.
GeoPortal 2.0
• Vision of an SDI/GeoWeb node that is
built to encourage participation in a
number ways
• Most ‘portals’ died with the dot com
crash, web 2.0 puts the user first
– Flickr, facebook, delicious, youtube, ect.
• Provide real value to users, reward
them for using and contributing
• Bring participation in to every aspect
GeoPortal 2.0: Evaluating
datasets
• Provide statistics and rankings on how
many times layers are accessed
• Enable commenting, rating, tagging and
reviews by users
• For providers that allow it, wiki style
editing of ‘official’ metadata records
• Amazon style collaborative filtering
based on user profile (rated high by city
planners) and similar users
– Rating and tagging more gives you better
results
GeoPortal 2.0: Viewing data
• Easy to add a bunch of layers and
create a ‘view’
• Save your favorite views
• Link to ‘embed’ on blog or webpage
• Rate and comment on views
• Others can start with another user view
and remix ( amd evem style and add
data)
GeoPortal 2.0: lightweight
data contribution
• Easily add personal annotations to a
view
• Easy to start a new data layer, that
others can collaborate on
– Set options for sharing, wiki-style anyone
can edit, only approved users can edit, ect.
• Enable easy online editing, but also
editing through GIS with WFS-T
• Simple upload of KML created from
Google Earth or GPS traces
GeoPortal 2.0: GIS data
contributions
• Simple form to upload a Shapefile
• No required metadata, but prompts for
some easy fields to fill out, or upload of
FGDC/ISO form
• Set up permissions on who can view
and edit
• Easy online styling of data for default
view, or import ArcGIS style files, SLD,
ect.
GeoPortal 2.0: Data
availability
• All data contributed becomes available
in a wide variety of formats
– WMS, WFS/WCS
– GeoRSS, KML
– Cached tiled rasters, Shapefile
• Can be used on Desktop GIS, webbased slippy maps, on Google Earth
and Maps, Virtual Earth, easy embeds
for blogs and webpages, ect.
• Crawlable by Google’s GeoWeb Search
GeoPortal 2.0: Registering
Services
• Easy to register a new geographic
service (WMS and WFS/WCS)
• Registered layers gets tiled and cached
• Tiles are available on Google Earth and
Google Maps
• If back-end service goes down cache
lives on
• Can limit caching to ‘official’ services, or
just have it cache the most accessed
tiles
GeoPortal 2.0: Metadata
• No metadata requirement to use the
infrastructure
• Derive metadata from user’s active and
passive actions
• Enable wiki style editing of metadata
records
• Make metadata creation a ‘game’:
recognize users who contribute the
most good metadata (both editing and
ratings, comments, reviews, ect.)
Official vs. user contributed
data
• Providers of official data should use
exact same infrastructure as ‘amateur’
users
• Can limit permissions to a controlled
area before official ‘publication’
– At publication time metadata record should
be complete, data verified, ect.
– Before it can be internal wiki, editing, ect.
• Like on youtube can disable comments
and ratings
GeoPortal 2.0: Technology
• Future is not about SOA - it’s about
users
• Enable participation all the way down,
software must be open source,
standards used must be open, should
be seeded with as much valuable open
data as possible.
• Technology and community are always
linked, GeoPortal 2.0 must be built
iteratively and be useful every step of
the way
My SDI/GeoWeb Goal
• Internet made it so citizens
demanded e-government, let’s
build a GeoWeb that’s so
compelling and easy to use that
the question ‘why isn’t my
government making its geospatial
data available’ comes from
everyone, not just ‘the experts’.
Learn more
• Justin Deoliveira’s talk on
GeoServer at 15:00 today room 1
• Stop by our booth
• http://geoserver.org
• http://opengeo.org
• http://cholmes.wordpress.com