My BP comments..part 1

Dear BP editors

Many thanks for the great work you have put into this. I too have read the draft from top to bottom, made lots of pencil notes. On the whole they are just typos and for ease of reading, as someone coming to this document relatively afresh. BP 15 is the only one that I question is in scope, but that comment will be in a later email.

Meanwhile, here is the first tranche of comments (numbered RHn; they get less dense later on through the document!). If you want me to process the simple changes in github myself please let me know and I’ll try to get to grips with it (something I really should do at some point anyway...). I have today and tomorrow free...

Best wishes,
Rachel


RH1
Table of Contents 1.2 Expand "SDI" (in addition to being expanded when first used in the main text. Someone browsing the contents to see if they want to bother reading the document could be put off by a load of acronyms)
RH2
Table of Contents 6.3 Linking spatial data
s/Linking Spatial Data/Linking spatial data      (change to lower case for consistency)
RH3
Table of Contents 6.5 expand "API"  (reason as in RH1)
RH4
Table of Contents Annex C:  s/best practices/Best Practices   (upper case for consistency)
RH5
Table of Contents 6.2.1 (geo)spatial data
Not completely clear from this title if this section is just concerned with geospatial data. If it is, then suggest change title to "geographic spatial (geospatial) data", and do we need a separate section to deal with spatial data that is not geographic ?
OR, is this section intended to cover non-geographic cases too, in which case the title could be "geographic and non-geographic spatial data", and some examples of the latter need to be added.
RH6
Table of Contents 6.2.3 Temporal data
Suggest changing this title to "Temporal component of spatial data" or "Spatio-Temporal data" so the relevance to the best practices is clearer when eye-balling the table of contents.
RH7
Table of Contents 6.2.4 Sensor and observation data
Suggest changing this title to "Spatial data from sensors and observations" so the relevance to the best practices is clearer when eye-balling the table of contents.
RH8
1.1. General Introduction
We need to introduce the term “geospatial data” here. (see also Frans point 6)
e.g. in paragraph 1
“Spatial data, or data related to a location is what this Best Practice document is all about. We use the term geospatial if the location is geographic.”
RH9
1.1 Suggest merging para 2 to 3 to remove repetition, and change “geospatial data” to “spatial data”
"It's not that there is a lack of spatial data on the Web; the maps, satellite and street level images offered by search engines are familiar and there are many more nice examples of spatial data being used in Web applications.  However, the data that has been published is difficult to find and often problematic to access for non-specialist users. The key problems we are trying to solve in this document are discoverability and accessibility, and our overarching goal is to bring publishing spatial data into the web mainstream as a mechanism for solving these twin problems.”
RH10
1.1 s/Commercial operators, including search engines operators/ Commercial operators, including search engine operators
RH11
1.1 NOTE: s/technolgies/ technologies
RH12
1.1 NOTE: Can we make any statement about the state of play of standards for non-geographic spatial data ?
RH13
1.1 “For Web developers..” paragraph, can we add a mention of the source of the location data e.g.
“But Web developers are increasingly creating and using data related to locations, e.g. obtained from GPS enabled mobile devices and sensors,...”
RH14
1.1 s/partiipants/participants
RH15
1.1 “ The public sector...” paragraph, I think a paragraph break is missing here i.e. “by the European Union. <p/> Spatial data often”
RH16
1.1 Can we add a glossary or external link for Internet of Things (or add description to the NOTE suggested below in RH17).
RH17
1.1 “The best practices we describe in this document....”  Can we add a NOTE section after this paragraph for people not familiar with linked data, similar to the one above, e.g. (though feel free to improve on this!). Could combine with Frans point 5 to explain why we have adopted this approach.
“NOTE
If you are not a web developer, Linked Data may be one of those buzz words that doesn’t mean much to you. Essentially it is about publishing URIs to represent bite size pieces of information or real world things, and publishing well described relationships between pairs of URIs, all in a way that is machine readable thereby enabling data from different sources to be connected and queried.”
RH18
1.1 “How to publish environmental monitoring data, such as sensor output, with sufficient context to unambiguously interpret the values.” This bullet point is very specific compared to the others and comes a bit out of the blue. This document should only be concerned with spatial attributes, so perhaps it should be something like “How to publish data from sensors and observations with sufficient context to unambiguously interpret the spatial component”.
RH19 (duplicate with RH1)
1.2 Difference between spatial data on the Web and current SDI practice
Expand "SDI" in the title, as RH1
RH20
2.Audience
As Frans point 7, repetition of the multiple groups of users. Suggest simplifying the first paragraph to
“The audience is the broadest community of Web users possible, three important groups of which are described below. Application and tool builders addressing the needs of the mass consumer market should find value and guidance in the document.”
RH21
2.Audience and BP17 – it seems important to engage developers of social media tools with these best practices, to enable citizen authored information to be properly “spatialised” at source.  Can we say anything about how that might happen ?
RH22
2.1 Geospatial experts without Web knowledge
Perhaps change title to “Geospatial experts (not necessarily with Web knowledge)” or something similar. Some do have both skillsets ☺
RH23
2.1 In this section, these users are described according to their role as a publisher of data, whereas in the introduction their role is “find and use data”. Can these two sections be made consistent, or perhaps have a matrix of expertise group (geospatial OR web) crossed with their role (publisher OR consumer OR ?custodian). Relates to ISSUE-190.
RH24
2.2 Web developers without geospatial knowledge
Perhaps change title to “Web developers (not necessarily with geospatial knowledge)” or something similar, consistent with RH21
RH25
2.2 Web developers without geospatial knowledge
This section has a distinct change in voice (lifted from an old email from Ed I think?). For consistency suggest reword to
“These are people who just want to work with (find, publish, use) spatial data on the Web and are not necessarily experts in geospatial technology. Spatial data is just one facet of the information space they work with, and they don’t want to be required to have up front knowledge. These web developers will be writing Web-based applications that use spatial data directly, but also writing applications that help non-technical users publish spatial information on the Web, for example, people who are publishing information about their village fête or local festival; they are just creating content, which happens to have a spatial aspect.”
RH26
2.3 Content publishers
re ISSUE-190 whether we need this category, perhaps we rename to Spatial Data Custodian and text is "These are people who are responsible for acquiring, managing and publishing spatial data. They want to know how to publish their spatial data so that it can be used to its full potential, by using the skills of the geospatial experts and web developers.


...more later...

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