Update on Sierra Club vs. Orange County Court Case

In our book on GIS and Public Domain Data, we describe several court cases that illustrate the ongoing debates and ways of thinking about the value of public domain spatial data, who should pay for it, and who should have access to it.  One of the most famous cases is that of the Sierra Club vs. Orange County California.  To recap, the  Sierra Club is suing Orange County for access to its GIS-compatible digital parcel basemap database under terms of the California Public Records Act that include paying no more than the direct cost of duplication.  Orange County has been requiring users of its “OC Landbase” to pay USD $475,000, plus sign a license that restricts sharing or redistribution of its database.

Although Orange County abruptly reduced its price late in December 2011, the case has been going on since 2009.  At stake is whether the public has unfettered access to the GIS-compatible data that its government agencies use to conduct “the public’s business,” in the same geodatabase format that the agencies themselves use, or whether the government can license, restrict and charge high prices for such access.  As more and more governmental decisions and actions are based on GIS analysis, the issue is central to governmental transparency and accountability to citizens.

The California Public Records Act states in §6253.9 that any agency that has information which constitutes identifiable public records in electronic format, shall make the information available in the electronic format in which it holds the information, and that the agency shall provide a copy of the electronic records if the requested format is one that has been used by the agency to create copies for its own use, or for provision to other agencies.  Further, the section states that the cost of duplication shall be limited to the direct cost of producing a copy of the records in the electronic format.  The crux of Orange County’s argument is that its GIS-formatted database is exempted under §6254.9, the so-called “software exemption.”

Sierra Club, joined by 212 individual GIS professionals and 23 professional GIS organizations who co-signed one amicus brief among seven supportive amicus briefs, contend that “computer mapping systems” refers only to software, not to the data on which the software operates.  Further, it has asserted that .pdf files are not equivalent to a GIS-compatible database, and that the public’s right to inspect and review the exact same data that Orange County uses to make its decisions would be curtailed by .pdf-only data.

Keep watching this blog for updates on this and other issues in the rapidly changing landscape of public domain spatial data.  How do you think this case will turn out?

New executive order in USA requires agencies to publish ‘open data’

One of the themes of our book is the continued progress in the open data movement.  US President Barack Obama recently signed an Executive Order to make government-held data more accessible to the public, declaring that information is a valuable resource and strategic asset for the United States.  The Memorandum establishes a framework to help institutionalise the principles of effective information management at each stage of the information’s useful life to promote interoperability and openness.

Federal Spatial Data

The Memorandum requires all major federal agencies under the executive branch to make their data “easy to find, accessible, and usable,” with an important caveat: “wherever possible and legally permissible.”  The White House also released a new set of open source software tools on Github that federal agencies can use to get more of their data out onto the web in software developer and user-friendly formats, including one script that converts databases into software APIs.

Those of us working in the geospatial field know very well that it takes more than memoranda to truly make more data available to those needing it, including geospatial data.  So, in one sense, this type of news seems like something we’ve heard before.  Too often, government orders are issued and portals are designed that gather cyber-dust, largely unused because no GIS users were actually consulted in the process.  Still, this recent news is encouraging.  It is our hope that the people creating portals and systems that result from this new executive order will actually consult with the GIS community.  That way, the data is more likely to be useful to those who need it.

Metadata matters

Interesting post from Arnulf Christl recently on the lifetime of data, in which he discusses our fascination with software at the expense of data. Like it or not, the digital data we create will in all probability out-live us, yet much more time and effort is put into developing software than into understanding and developing data. Will anyone using our data in the years to come be able to trace who created it, any limitations in the data, who has subsequently used it, how they used it, and what other information products have been derived from it? In most cases, given our collective aversion to recording metadata, probably not. Keeping data current, accurate, and well documented so it will continue to be useful years from now, is too big a task and gets in the way of developing great software. Including metadata remains a laborious task and the preserve of the technically minded.

I’ve collected my fair share of data without metadata – at the time I failed to appreciate who else would be trying to use it in 20 years time and when the focus was on trying to capture a lot of data very quickly, developing new systems and trying to convince a sceptical audience that GIS was the future, perhaps the value of metadata got lost in the rush. In the GIS Guide to Public Domain Data we ask readers to consider if they should use data that has no metadata.  If  the results of any analysis based on that data are to used in reporting, policy making and planning, can you really afford not to be as certain as possible about the accuracy and provenance of the data?

We need software to help us work with data – data won’t clean itself, analyse itself, print itself, or archive itself without software (and us to press the appropriate buttons). But we also need software to help us more with metadata – make recording metadata an automatic, and easy, part of the data capture process. That’s the challenge for software developers but it’s also up to those who capture and use data to insist on it.

Abu Dhabi Environment Agency launches Enviro-Portal

As we state in our book The GIS Guide to Public Domain Data, areas around the world where not long ago it was very difficult for data users to obtain data are now opening up some of their data archives.  One example is in Abu Dhabi, whose government is an extensive user of GIS technology.  The Environment Agency Abu Dhabi recently launched an “Enviro-Portal”, announced during the Esri Middle East and Africa User Conference on GIS Technology solutions at the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition.  This portal (http://enviroportal.ead.ae) offers access to environmental data such as geology, soils, flora, fauna, marine habitats, and protected zones within Abu Dhabi.

Some of the links offer historical data back to the 1990s.  The site is available both in Arabic and in English.   The “browse” function offers a straightforward way of offering the data, similar to a view of folders on one’s own computer.   The metadata on the site is quite useful, and the data areavailable in a variety of formats, depending on the data type, from design files to shapefiles and geodatabases.  On the “Download” tab, data users can download data by providing an email address.  The site also offers a map gallery, from which the data user can search by theme but it also offers very helpful searching by polygon, line, or point buffer, shown in the image below.

Abu Dhabi Environment Agency Map Gallery and Data Portal

As with any data portal, unique features of this portal require the data user to spend some time getting comfortable with the features and options.  However, the wealth of data themes here makes it worth spending time with, and for a fascinating and rapidly changing part of the planet.

Putting a Value on Geospatial Data

One of the themes running through our book The GIS Guide to Public Domain Data is the great value inherent in geospatial data.  These data increasingly help us make everyday decisions more efficiently in just about every walk of life from health care to city planning to climate studies.  The belief that better data will lead to better decisions, and the increasing value that people throughout society are placing on GIS is fueling initiatives to make geospatial data more available, accessible, and open.

But, how can this value be assessed quantitatively?  According to a recent article in Earthzine, Putting a Value on Geospatial Data, geospatial data can help governments cut expenditures and increase efficiency.  However, since the benefits are spread across multiple departments inside and outside an organization, it is very difficult to measure the benefit.  Measuring the number of downloads of a data set hardly begins to explain the story of these benefits.

Article: Putting a value on geospatial data

Nevertheless, the article does cite some interesting statistics from around the world.  For example, in England and Wales, between 2008 and 2009 the GDP was an estimated £320 million (about $500 million) more than what it would have been if local governments had not made use of geospatial information for service delivery, according to a 2010 report co-produced by British firm ConsultingWhere and ACIL Tasmin. In Australia, according to a 2008 report, the financial gains from using spatial information account for between 0.6 and 1.2 percent of that country’s gross domestic product (GDP). The report focused on sectors including agricultural, fisheries, property, mining, and government.

The article therefore provides some relevant information to back up the arguments we make in the book, and some fascinating reflections to consider as you teach and learn about geospatial data.

A five star scheme for open data

The UK government recently published a white paper on open data , setting out how the UK will “….continue to unlock and seize the benefits of data sharing in the future …”.  Among the various themes discussed in the report, including strategies for improved engagement with developers using the data and providing guidance to public authorities on the re-use of datasets, is a statement of intention to adopt the five star scheme proposed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee for publishing data on the internet. The more accessible and powerful the data, the higher the rating.

★	Available on the web (whatever format) but with an open licence, to be Open Data
★★	Available as machine-readable structured data (e.g. excel instead of image scan of a table)
★★★	as (2) plus non-proprietary format (e.g. CSV instead of excel)
★★★★	All the above plus, Use open standards from W3C (RDF and SPARQL) to identify things, so that people can point at your stuff
★★★★★	All the above, plus: Link your data to other people’s data to provide context

Sir Tim also added that metadata should accompany the data, and be registered to and available from major catalogs such as data.gov or data.gov.uk.

Metadata, data portals and catalogs, spatial data infrastructures (SDI) and partnerships for data sharing are topics that we discuss in The GIS Guide to Public Domain Data. With so much spatial data now available on-line, from both the more traditional authoritative sources such as national mapping agencies and increasingly from asserted crowd sourcing, it is more important than ever before to establish provenance and a measure quality for public domain data. It is no longer a simple matter is asking if the data is good, rather is it good enough for the stated purpose? Data doesn’t have to be perfect to be useful, but if the results of any analysis derived from that data are to be considered reliable and beneficial, it is important to know what you are dealing with in terms of the source of the data, any errors, restrictions or legal issues.

Cucumbers, E. coli and Open Data

 

Cucumbers, E-coli and open data: This unlikely trio appeared in a recent report entitled Science as an Open Enterprise, which looked into the issues surrounding the huge volumes of public domain data that are currently available, what will be required to exploit that data and how the principles of openness can be preserved. The 2011 outbreak of E. coli poisoning in Germany illustrated the changes in attitudes to sharing scientific research and data; within weeks of the outbreak, the genome of the bacteria was identified, and given the seriousness of the outbreak, the results were published on the Internet as soon as they were available.

The working group that produced the report, led by Geoffrey Boulton FRS FRSE (Regius Professor of Geology Emeritus, University of Edinburgh), set out to ‘identify the principles, opportunities and problems of sharing and disclosing scientific information’ and the measures required to create ‘.. a socially responsible open data regime’. The report goes on to state that curated open data is imperative for science and scientists to meet the increasing demands for public access to scientific data and to address some of the issues caused by the sheer volume of data that is now available for analysis. Sharing, compiling and integrating data sources will increasingly provide the basis for academic and scientific investigations.

Although the report focused on the academic and scientific communities, it touches on many of the issues we discuss in The GIS Guide to Public Domain Data – the value of open and unrestricted access to data, the importance of being able to establish the provenance of data, metadata, data curation to establish a measure of quality, citizen science, crowd sourcing, and what is good data? What may be considered good for one application may be wholly unsuitable for another. Vast amounts of public domain data are now available from a diverse range of sources – it is up to the individual or organisation to assess what is good enough for their requirements.

Data, data, every where, nor any point to map

Having spent more time over the last 2-3 years than I care to quantify trawling the internet for public domain datasets to use on various projects, I’ve reached some disappointing conclusions: I will rarely find exactly what I’m after, working with data portals can be very frustrating, adding and maintaining metadata is a frequently neglected chore, and all too often data are published but not adequately promoted.

Co-author Joseph Kerski recently described a particularly frustrating day spent trying to find some geology data for a presentation he was working on.  Having failed to locate a data source on-line,  he ended up contacting a colleague at a state geological survey office who was able to provide access to some data. Joseph was also given permission to publish the data on ArcGIS Online for others to use, but he was left wondering why the organisation hadn’t chosen to publish and promote the data source itself.

In this era of open access, when organisations are rushing to liberate their data stores, many of these new on-line repositories often lack an effective interface to the data. Increasingly sophisticated search engines quickly return a list of candidates for each inquiry, but the success of a query can often rely on the syntax of the search instruction. Depending on how each query is worded, the whole process may be very hit or miss. From my own experiences, it would be good to see a more task-based approach to searching for, and providing access to, data. When people go looking for data, they generally have specific requirements for a given task and they’re looking for specific data, in a specific location, over a specific time period, with a view to producing a specific information product as the output.  Few people have the time or inclination to trawl through everything every to do with ‘housing’ or ‘planning’; they also need the tools to allow them to extract the information that will serve their purpose.

Frank Biasi (National Geographic Maps) once commented on the demise of a conservation geoportal noting, amongst other things, that  “.. the concept of sharing data is much more advanced than the practice“. Seems like we still need a lot more practise.