Spatial Data on the Web Best Practices from the Open Geospatial Consortium

The Open Geospatial Consortium recently published progress and an update of their document on “Spatial Data On the Web–Best Practices”, here: https://www.w3.org/TR/sdw-bp/ which I believe is relevant reading for the community of readers of this blog and anyone interested in spatial data–particularly those who are hosting data.

The purpose of the document are as follows: This document advises on best practices related to the publication of spatial data on the Web; the use of Web technologies as they may be applied to location. The best practices presented here are intended for practitioners, including Web developers and geospatial experts, and are compiled based on evidence of real-world application. These best practices suggest a significant change of emphasis from traditional Spatial Data Infrastructures by adopting an approach based on general Web standards. As location is often the common factor across multiple datasets, spatial data is an especially useful addition to the Web of data.

Readers of this blog will note items that we have discussed in this blog over the years, including FAIR practices, ethics, and more. The 17 best practices are:

• Best Practice 1: Use globally unique persistent HTTP URIs for Spatial Things
• Best Practice 2: Make your spatial data indexable by search engines
• Best Practice 3: Link resources together to create the Web of data
• Best Practice 4: Use spatial data encodings that match your target audience
• Best Practice 5: Provide geometries on the Web in a usable way
• Best Practice 6: Provide geometries at the right level of accuracy, precision, and size
• Best Practice 7: Choose coordinate reference systems to suit your user’s applications
• Best Practice 8: State how coordinate values are encoded
• Best Practice 9: Describe relative positioning
• Best Practice 10: Use appropriate relation types to link Spatial Things
• Best Practice 11: Provide information on the changing nature of spatial things
• Best Practice 12: Expose spatial data validation schemas online
• Best Practice 13: Expose spatial data through ‘convenience APIs’
• Best Practice 14: Support requesting and returning geometries in a specific CRS
• Best Practice 15: Include spatial metadata in dataset metadata
• Best Practice 16: Describe the positional accuracy of spatial data
• Best Practice 17: Interact with spatial data in a responsible way

I especially like the frequent inclusion of “why” in the document, and the efforts the editors have made to create a readable and helpful set of guidelines. It is my hope that all those creating and hosting spatial data will keep this document in close proximity as they do so.

–Joseph Kerski