Re: GIS Data

Hi Andrew,
You made some interesting observations about Open Data "user segmentation" for lack of a better word.  In my experience working with US civil government (federal) agencies is that there was an initial rush to publish raw data, mostly as proprietary GIS formats, CSV, PDFs, and occasionally (poorly) converted to RDF with few links.  I agree that it was pretty much useless to the general public & frankly to anyone else who didn't have tech resources to manipulate it.

Until recently has been a void in tools to consume the data short of slurping into a spreadsheet.   A very small number of vendors in the US are providing tools to view data in more usable ways and query it (via SPARQL 1.1).  That coupled with more awareness of modeling Open Government data as 5 star Linked Data will IMO, yield the good news the sem tech community has been preaching for the last couple years.

What are others finding in AU & elsewhere?

Cheers,

Bernadette Hyland
co-chair W3C Government Linked Data Working Group
Charter: http://www.w3.org/2011/gld/

On Sep 12, 2011, at 7:26 PM, Andrew Boyd wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 6:18 AM, Chris Beer <chris@codex.net.au> wrote:
>> Hi Brian
>> All Federal level Govt GIS which is publically released in Australia is done
>> so under Creative Commons (CC-by) and is treated as Open PSI. In the same
>> vein I suspect you may find there are US jurisdictions which may have moved
>> to CC and just bundle datasets inc GIS into the PSI CC licensed space.
>> Certain jusrisdictions in Australia (Brisbane City Council for instance)
>> release thier GIS under CC-0 - that is Public Domain, no restrictions at
>> all.
>> GIS Web Services often are an overlooked area here - its not seen as
>> released or published in the classic sense, and service usage rights are
>> often very liberal.
>> A US example of GIS btw is PASDA in Penn. http://www.pasda.psu.edu/about/
>> Cheers
>> C.
> 
> Chris,
> 
> interesting point - there is release of data, then there is release of
> data in a consumable form. I recently completed some work with an AU
> government organisation that has a lot to do with providing GIS data
> to industry and interested citizens. Consumers of the data fell into
> three fairly distinct types:
> - large organisations that just wanted the data that they wanted, and
> as much of it as they could get - based on the understanding that they
> had the resources necessary to manipulate the data in whichever way
> necessary
> - smaller organisations that wanted value-adds wherever possible to
> minimise the required legwork needed prior to consuming the data
> - others (including private citizens) who did not really want data,
> but the answers that the data could provide them, and for whom the raw
> data was pretty much useless.
> 
> The organisation may be looking toward a future where they have a
> smart catalog for those in the first category, a referral system for
> assistance for those in the second category, and a lower barrier to
> entry geoportal for those in the third category.
> 
> If I get back there to assist with follow-on work I will happily
> assist with the case study.
> 
> Best regards, Andrew
> 
> -- 
> ---
> Andrew Boyd
> http://uxbookclub.org -- connect, read, discuss
>

Received on Tuesday, 13 September 2011 17:28:42 UTC