UN: Future trends in geospatial information management

A new document from the UN describes a 5- to 10-year vision in geospatial information management.  Published by the UK Ordnance Survey at the request of the Secretariat for the United Nations Committee of Experts on Global Geospatial Information Management, the lead authors are John Carpenter and Jevon Snell from the Ordnance Survey. The document was  commissioned in October 2011 and the first edition was just recently published.

UN: Future trends in geospatial information management document.

The document is worth examining for all those who are in the field of geospatial technology.  The language of the document is thankfully clear and concise, and quite thoughtful, something often lacking in documents such as this.  I especially like sentences such as these, “A number of important technology‑driven trends are likely to have a major impact in the coming years, creating previously-unimaginable amounts of location‑referenced information and questioning our very understanding of what constitutes geospatial information.“

The authors have done an excellent job in recognizing the diversity of government, nonprofit, and private sector needs regarding geospatial information.  The authors also strike a nice tone by encouraging partnerships and progress so that everyday decisions can be enhanced with a greater volume and a better quality of data as we move forward.  Yet, they are realists and realize that this won’t happen overnight. Throughout, the bulleted paragraphs make the entire document accessible and easy to read and understand.

Chapters include key trends (cloud computing, open source, open standards), legal and policy (privacy, liability, funding), skill important in the future (education, extracting value, working with data), the role of private and non-governmental sectors, and the future role of governments.  Many of these topics are those that are core to the themes of the GIS Guide to Public Domain Data book, and thus the Public Domain Data book provides a good introduction to and background for the UN document for use on the job or in instruction.

Too much information

I wonder how many social media users have ever considered how much of their personal location information they reveal unintentionally in posts and comments? The odd location-infused post may not be any cause for alarm, but over a period of time, interested third parties can harvest this information to build up a profile of location habits and preferences that can be exploited for targeted ad campaigns or more malicious activities such as stalking and robbery.

USC Dornsife GIST master’s student Chris Weidemann has investigated how much location information is shared, intentionally or otherwise, by Twitter users (Mapping the Twitterverse). Approximately 6% of all Twitter users pro-actively allow the social media platform to share their location information, with users able to specify the granularity of that information (state, city, address or coordinates). Although the remaining 94% of users have elected not to GPS-enable their tweets, a great deal of location data can still be gleaned from profile information and references to past, current or future locations. Weidemann has developed an application that allows users to generate a report on their geosocial footprint. The report includes an assessment of the level of risk posed by the amount of spatial information in their tweets along with some suggestions for reducing that risk.

There are other tools available including Ready or Not, developed by International Computer Science Institute, to alert Twitter and Instagram users to the potential risk many are exposing themselves to. As social media users become more aware of the potential for misuse of their personal location information, perhaps the social media applications themselves will include some of these options for highlighting the risk before the tweet/image/comment is posted.

Location Data Privacy Guidelines Released

Key questions we pose in our book include “how is location data being shared?”, “Who has access to it?”, and “Who controls the data?”  A new resource helps organizations become aware of these issues and helps them set their own strategy on information sharing.  On pages 12 and 13 of the July-August 2013 edition of ApoGeo  is a description of this resource, Location Forum’s Privacy Council’s new report, Location Data Privacy: Guidelines, Assessment & Recommendations.  These guidelines represent the first industry-created set of best practices for improving how location data is gathered, used and managed, along with a ‘scorecard’ for quantitatively measuring a company’s privacy risk level.  Our book discusses privacy implications for spatial data, which are rapidly changing for many reasons:  First, an increasing number of applications, devices, and activities in our everyday lives are becoming geo-enabled.  Second, organizations are increasingly recognizing the value of this locational information.  Third, the ability of organizations to use, and misuse, that information is becoming easier and easier.

Location Data Privacy: Guidelines, Assessment & Recommendations.

Natasha Léger, President of The Location Forum and editor of LBx Journal, explains  “These guidelines enable users and companies to understand the value of the information so that they can both take the appropriate measures to safeguard what type of data is disclosed, and determine how it is used and shared.” While location data are now seen as vital for businesses to maintain a competitive edge, the “problem with location data today is that it changes as it weaves through various hands—applications, vendors, developers, government, companies, data providers, and individual users.”  The article points out that another complication is the “diversity of legal protections across countries and states that make developing a consistent privacy policy a moving target. All this is set against a business atmosphere of continuous pressure to develop innovative location-based products and services.”

The Location Data Privacy Guidelines “bring attention to issues that many organizations and companies have chosen to ignore, due to lack of legal certainty around requirements, and provide a framework of location data practices for developers, managers, marketers, and executives.”   You can download the guidelines here.  The guidelines are not free but are the results of 8 months of interviews and extensive research, and they might be well worth the investment.

UAV/UAS: The next influx of spatial data

UAVs or UAS (unmanned aerial vehicles or unmanned aerial systems) are a hot topic this year. We have already discussed some of the privacy concerns in an earlier post, and for many, privacy will be the first thing that comes to mind when UAS are mentioned. However, for all the concerns, the increasing adoption of UAVs for capturing aerial imagery is heralding what Mike Tully described in his article for Sensors & Systems, The Rise of the [Geospatial] Machines: The Future with Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS), as a ‘…..technological earthquake’. Although Tully’s prediction of Jetsonian skies cluttered with remotely operated UAS raises some other concerns, his description of a UAS-borne pizza delivery made me think how much better life could be for those of us who live just outside the current fast-food delivery area.

Pizzas aside, perhaps the most important change that’s coming with UAS is the deluge of information that’s soon to be available to mapping companies and geospatial professionals. Recent technical innovations in UAS design, computing power, data capture techniques and processing software have demonstrated that bulky and expensive sensors (such as manned aircraft) are no longer required to produce high-quality spatial data. Imagery from an increasingly extensive network of light-weight and affordable UAS equipped with cameras, will be continuously relayed to mapping service providers at a fraction of the cost.

Base maps previously updated on an annual or quarterly basis will be updated in a matter of hours, turning the once static background “wallpaper” into what Tully describes as an “operational layer”. This will provide end-users with up-to-date and high-resolution data and become an invaluable resource for those responding to emergency situations who were previously reliant on out-of-date and expensive mapping products. Although crowdsourced local information has helped in these situations, the quality of the data can be variable and in some cases proved too unreliable to be of any benefit.

To make optimum use of this new influx of data, new processes and analytical tools will be required to deal with both the volume and resolution of the data. Just when the dust seemed to be settling after the geospatial cloud revolution, it seems another upheaval is on the way.

Inexpensive and crowdsourced remote sensing

In an article entitled “The Watchers”, David Samuels discusses a company seeking to deploy small satellites into orbit 500 miles (805 km) above the Earth.  This company, Skybox, founded by ex-Stanford University students, seeks to shake up the commercial space imaging industry by doing two things:  (1) Deploying smaller, less expensive satellites than what the commercial space imaging industry is currently using, the size of a dormitory room refrigerator, and (2) Using crowdsourcing for data classification.  They seek to have ordinary citizens classify the incoming data, as well as do some classification themselves, even from images that the company has collected but does not sell.  This could be the number of cars in every WalMart parking lot in the USA, the size of slag heaps outside the world’s largest gold mines in South Africa, and the rate at which the wattage along key stretches of the Ganges River is growing.  These bits of information, they reason, are clues about the economic health of countries, industries, and individual businesses.  Therefore, this information will be so valuable to investors, environmentalists, activists, and journalists, to name a few, that they will be willing to pay for the information.  The company is working with the government of Russia for a launch vehicle and hopes to launch its first satellite this month, SkySat-1.

The future: More cameras overhead?  Photograph by Joseph Kerski.

This story connects well with issues we raise in the book The GIS Guide to Public Domain Data, including data quality and resolution, military vs. civilian uses of data, crowdsourcing, and privacy. The resolution of the images returned from Skybox’s satellites will be comparable–less than 1 meter–to those from large commercial satellite imaging companies such as Digital Globe.  However, the cost of constructing them should be considerably less and the size of the satellite itself considerably smaller.  Skybox has added numerous advisers with connections in the defense industry “to avoid any military-industrial squelching of its technology before launch.”  Relying on crowdsourcing to classify images is not a new concept, but what is new here is the scale at which it could be employed, and that it is embedded in the company’s business model.  How standards will be established to assure data quality to potential purchasers of the derived information will be very interesting indeed.  Lastly, the idea of inexpensive, high resolution, easy-to-deploy satellites imaging the planet has enormous privacy implications for those of us on the ground, whether from Skybox or for others who are sure to follow.