[open-geodata] We need more actions in the open geodata movement
Lance McKee
lmckee at opengeospatial.org
Tue Jul 19 12:54:41 UTC 2011
Mauritzio,
re:
> I believe that the geo topic is very important and needs more
> actions so
> we can have more open geo data.
Yes!
Open geospatial data depends ultimately on diverse systems being able
to publish, discover, assess, access and use geographic information of
diverse types. See the work of the hydrology and oceans/meteorology
domain working groups (http://www.opengeospatial.org/projects/groups/
wg) in the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to see how this is
evolving in science. See Mike Jackson's comments below regarding open
geospatial data in other domains.
Yesterday I sent Jenny Molloy "18 Reasons for Open Publication of
Geoscience Data" (see below).
There's a lot of exciting work being done on this topic, and much more
remains to be done. The US National Science Foundation (NSF) is
beginning to look at geospatial as an important aspect of
cyberinfrastructure (http://www.vector1media.com/spatialsustain/nsf-anticipates-16m-in-increased-funding-for-geo-cyberinfrastructure.html
). Computer-mediated collection, exploration and analysis of
geospatial data will become increasing important, and open data, for
reasons outlined below, will be a necessary part of this. As in the
non-geo neighborhoods of open science, progress depens on redesigning
institutions, incentives, practices, business models and habits of
mind that are artifacts of the pre-digital era.
Thanks.
Lance
Lance McKee
Senior Staff Writer
Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)
+1 508-752-0108
lmckee at opengeospatial.org
The OGC: Making location count.
http://www.opengeospatial.org/contact
18 Reasons for Open Publication of Geoscience Data
By Lance McKee
Senior Staff Writer
Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)
lancemckee at opengeospatial.org
Despite rapid advances in technical capabilities for data sharing,
much of the data collected by Earth scientists (other than data from
civil agencies'’ satellite-borne imaging systems) is not easily
available to other scientists. There are at least 18 reasons for
making Earth location-referenced data discoverable, assessable,
accessible and widely usable:
Reason 1: Data transparency
Science demands transparency regarding data collection methods, data
semantics and processing methods. Data – and scientific rigor -- need
to be documented! Subtending to this reason is another reason: cross-
checking between data collections for sensor accuracy.
Reason 2: Verifiability
Science demands verifiability. Any competent person should be able to
examine a researcher’s data to see if those data support the
researcher’s conclusions.
Reason 3: Useful unification of observations
Being able to characterize, in a standardized human-readable and
machine-readable way, the parameters of sensors, sensor systems and
sensor-integrated processing chains (including human interventions)
enables useful unification of many kinds of observations, including
those that yield a term rather than a number.
Reason 4: Cross-disciplinary studies
Diverse data sets with well-documented data models or application
schemas can be shared among diverse information communities. An
information community is a group of people, such as a discipline or
profession, who share a common geospatial feature data dictionary,
including definitions of feature relationships, and a common metadata
schema. Cross-disciplinary data sharing provides improved
opportunities for cross-disciplinary studies.
Reason 5: Longitudinal studies
Archiving, publishing and preserving well-documented data yields
improved opportunities for longitudinal studies. As data formats, data
structures, and data models evolve, scientists will need to access
historical data and understand the assumptions so that meaningful
scientific comparisons can be conducted. Community standards will help
ensure long-term consistency of data representation. (Subtending to
this reason is another reason: support for study and advancement of
scientific ontologies.)
Reason 6: Re-use
Open data enables scientists to re-use or repurpose data for new
investigations, reducing redundant data collection and enabling
science to be done more efficiently.
Reason 7: Planning
Open data policies enable collaborative planning of data collection
and publishing efforts to serve multiple defined and yet-to-be-defined
uses.
Reason 8: Return on investment
With open data policies, institutions and society overall will see
greater return on their investment in research, most directly because
of reasons 6, 7 and 17, but perhaps most significantly because of
reason 15.
Reason 9: Due diligence
Open data policies will help research funding institutions perform due
diligence and policy development because it will be easier to review
researchers’ and research programs’ past performance with respect to
data quality and metadata quality.
Reason 10: Maximizing value
The value of data increases with the number of potential users. This
benefits science in a general way. It also creates opportunities for
businesses that will collect, curate (document, archive, host,
catalog, publish), and add value to data. (Similar to Metcalf’s law:
“The value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the
square” [or, some would say, some positive exponent not always 2] “of
the number of connected users of the system.”)
Reason 11: Data discoverability
Open data is discoverable data. Data are not efficiently discovered
through literature searches or conventional search engines. Data
registered in online Web service based catalogs using ISO-standard XML-
encoded metadata and using services that implement Open Geospatial
Consortium standards enable efficient and fine-grained searches.
Reason 12: Data exploration
Robust data descriptions and quick access to data will enable more
frequent and rapid exploration of data – “natural experiments (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_experime
nt)” – to explore hypothetical spatial relationships and to discover
unexpected spatial relationships.
Reason 13: Data fusion
Open data improves the ability to "fuse" in-situ measurements with
data from scanning sensors. This bridges the divide between
communities using unmediated raw spatial-temporal data and communities
using spatial-temporal data that is the result of a complex processing
chain.
Reason 14: Service chaining
Open data (and open online processing services) will improve
scientists’ ability to "chain" Web services for data reduction,
analysis and modeling.
Reason 15: Pace of science
Open data enables an accelerated pace of scientific discovery, as
automation and improved institutional arrangements give researchers
more time for field work, study and communication.
Reason 16: Citizen science and outreach
Open science will help Science win the hearts and minds of the non-
scientific public, because it will make science more believable and it
will help engage amateur scientists – citizen scientists – who
contribute to science and help promote science. It will also increase
the quality and quantity of amateur scientists’ contributions.
Reason 17: Forward compatibility
Open Science improves the ability to adopt and utilize new/better data
storage, format, discovery, and transmission technologies as they
become available.
Reason 18: Timely intervention
“Changes to the Earth that used to take 10,000 years now take three,
one reason we need real-time science. ... Governances must be able to
see and act upon key intervention points.”
See:
• Part One: 18 Reasons for Open Publication of Geoscience Data. By
Lance McKee, posted on August 4th, 2010.
http://www.earthzine.org/2010/08/04/18-reasons-for-open-publication-of-geoscience-data/
• Part Two: Geospatial Standards: Opening Up the Geosciences. By
Lance McKee, posted on February 2nd, 2011
http://www.earthzine.org/2011/02/02/geospatial-standards-opening-up-the-geosciences/
• Part Three: Standards Enable Open Geoscience Opportunities. By
Lance McKee, posted on March 30th, 2011
http://www.earthzine.org/2011/03/30/standards-enable-open-geoscience-opportunities/
On Jul 18, 2011, at 7:13 AM, Jenny Molloy wrote:
> Hi All
>
> Just a reminder for those interested in contributing to the Royal
> Society 'Science as a Public Enterprise' Call for Evidence that I'll
> be on Skype and Etherpad from 17:30 GMT (18:30 BST) this evening to
> draft out a response. Please join me!
>
> If the timing is inconvenient please leave any comments you would
> like included on the Etherpad http://okfnpad.org/sciencewg-RS-SAPE
> at some point during the next week. These can be a stream of
> conciousness if you like - they can always be edited :)
>
> The date for submission is 5th August and I hope we will have
> something together by the end of July.
>
> Jenny.
>
> On Sat, Jul 9, 2011 at 11:19 AM, Jenny Molloy
> <jenny.molloy at okfn.org> wrote:
> Dear All
>
> We have a couple of writing based projects on the go at the moment
> so in an effort to get them well on the way and divide them between
> people in manageable chunks, we'll be holding writing sprints for
> the next two Monday evenings:
>
> Monday 11th July (17:30-19:30 UTC/GMT) - Panton Principles Case
> Studies http://okfnpad.org/sciencewg-PPcasestudies
> (previous email http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/open-science/2011-June/000837.html)
>
> Monday 18th July (17:30-19:30 UTC/GMT) - Royal Society SAPE Call for
> Evidence http://okfnpad.org/sciencewg-RS-SAPE
> (blog post http://science.okfn.org/2011/05/19/royal-society-townhall-meeting-on-open-science/)
>
> If you're interested in contributing, read the background before
> dropping in, add your name to the Etherpad and we'll start off on
> Skype to assign tasks before shifting to Etherpad. Left over
> sections will be divided up at the end for people to take away with
> them - if you want to :)
>
> If you can't attend on the evening, please still contribute comments
> and suggestions to the pads at your convenience and if any sections
> are left unclaimed on the night I'll email them out to the mailing
> list.
>
> Thanks very much and I look forward to writing with some of you next
> Monday!
>
> Jenny
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> open-science mailing list
> open-science at lists.okfn.org
> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-science
On Jul 19, 2011, at 6:19 AM, Mike Jackson wrote:
> Please see my talk related to this topic that I gave at the Third
> Open Source GIS Conference (OSGIS 2011) University of Nottingham, UK,
> 21-22nd June 2011. 'The impact of open data, open source software
> and open standards on the evolution of National SDIs' http://uiwapmds01.nottingham.ac.uk/QCSPlace/ondemand/Events11/a5a1e446858f4867b77716111a/run.htm
>
> I would be pleased to receive feed-back on the thoughts presented.
>
> Mike.
>
> Prof. Mike Director
> Centre for Geospatial Science
> The University of Nottingham
> The Nottingham Geospatial Building
> University of Nottingham Innovation Park
> Triumph Road
> Nottingham NG7 2TU
> UK
> Tel. +44 (0)115 8468130
> Mobile +44 (0)781 0867674
> www.nottingham.ac.uk/cgs
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: open-geodata-bounces at lists.okfn.org [mailto:open-geodata-bounces at lists.okfn.org
> ] On Behalf Of Maurizio Napolitano
> Sent: Tuesday, July 19, 2011 10:48 AM
> To: open-geodata at lists.okfn.org
> Subject: [open-geodata] We need more actions in the open geodata
> movement
>
> When I speak about open data, one of the first things that is taken
> into
> account is the geo data topic.
> They are often referred to as "magics", "specials", "importants" ...
> Despite this the talks at the OKCon conference about the geo topic
> were few.
> Furthermore, in those few, the google map was present in 90% of cases.
>
> I believe that the geo topic is very important and needs more
> actions so
> we can have more open geo data.
> This mailing list might help you grow.
>
> The traffic is very low.
> http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/open-geodata/
>
> I'm the only one who feels this problem?
>
> _______________________________________________
> open-geodata mailing list
> open-geodata at lists.okfn.org
> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-geodata
> This message and any attachment are intended solely for the
> addressee and may contain confidential information. If you have
> received this message in error, please send it back to me, and
> immediately delete it. Please do not use, copy or disclose the
> information contained in this message or in any attachment. Any
> views or opinions expressed by the author of this email do not
> necessarily reflect the views of the University of Nottingham.
>
> This message has been checked for viruses but the contents of an
> attachment
> may still contain software viruses which could damage your computer
> system:
> you are advised to perform your own checks. Email communications
> with the
> University of Nottingham may be monitored as permitted by UK
> legislation.
> _______________________________________________
> open-geodata mailing list
> open-geodata at lists.okfn.org
> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-geodata
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/open-geodata/attachments/20110719/1adb0b8a/attachment-0001.html>
More information about the open-geodata
mailing list