Comments on: Don’t Give Away the Farm!

By: ChrisW

ChrisW — Fri, 23 May 2008 13:39:44 +0000

shawno: Thanks for the extra info on INSPIRE. This looks like a good time for a European like me to be getting into GIS. )

By: shawno

shawno — Thu, 22 May 2008 17:27:17 +0000

ChrisW…nice that you bring up the INSPIRE directive, because it’s a “cataloging” service in its first phases, not a “mapping” service. There is a big difference here. It’s based on the CS-W OGC standard. It’s an interoperable Web Service for Search, Update and Retrieval of a cataloged hierarchy of Aggregate and Dataset metadata, not the services to access the “data” itself. Step one is to deliver the ability to “discover” the appropriate data that you are trying to find.

The EU sensor processing stations will “auto” populate a centralized catalog for all the sensors into a single, searchable and secure Geospatial Information Catalog. Direct from the sensor -> Catalog -> “Pay Per Access” Interoperable Web Services Model.

This provides a very “detailed” discovery capability, with the ability to search any ISO metadata entity for the information regarding the data collected by the sensor (spatial search, Time Extent, Processing Lineage, Sensor Information, cloud cover, processing level, anything really!!).

This is leagues ahead of simply creating search results based on the “layer metadata” exposed by a mapping service. It will essentially provide “access” to 100′s of Petabytes worth of distributed data, real time.

It’s really innovative and a totally different approach, emphasizing Internationally accepted standards and interoperability.

The “search” is free, the access to the data is of course a revenue business model.

By: ChrisW

ChrisW — Thu, 22 May 2008 15:20:15 +0000

Here’s another angle on this debate ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/may/22/freeourdata ) : apparently the EU’s INSPIRE directive requires government agencies etc to make their spatial metadata/catalogues visible and interoperable, although it seems there will still be scope to charge for access to the data itself. The UK is still trying to catch up with the US on the idea of geoportals for public data, but I wonder how far the Google/ESRI/Geoserver etc approach to searchable spatial data/services will play a part in future developments here in Europe?

By: Powered by Wires

Data doesn’t keep the doors open and the lights on. It’s what you do with the data that makes it valuable. Remember also that we don’t live in a static world. Data becomes outdated and has to be constantly updated to stay relevant and usefull, just like a blog. I see this as an opportunity rather than a nail in the coffin. What “data availability” via a machine like Google really means is a new power to combine and analyze data sets that were never available across different industries. It’s about having the resources to create new solutions. Have no fear. Besides, if you do a Google search for “GIS data” right now, you will end up with 3.7 million results. 3.7 million. If this is your worst nightmare it’s already happened. Just count your lucky stars that most people have no idea how to dive into a pool that large and return with something meaningful.

By: ChrisW

ChrisW — Wed, 21 May 2008 16:12:07 +0000

It’s not just ESRI, GeoServer 1.7 is aiming to make itself crawlable for Google (sounds kind of kinky…):

http://blog.geoserver.org/2008/05/13/geoserver-and-googles-geo-search/

By: Paul Bissett

Paul Bissett — Wed, 21 May 2008 13:50:28 +0000

@MTBMaven – I think you have hit on the crux of the Google/ESRI “deal”. A large fraction of ESRI’s revenue is through government services. Nearly every government office that I have been associated with has an ESRI product. ESRI’s focus in this deal is not necessarily to enhance the revenue stream of content providers. Instead, it is to provide feature enhancement and functionality to a major customer base.

This is a smart move by ESRI. It keeps their public service customers happy by allowing them to provide enhanced index, search, and viewing capabilities, without any new major investments. Its a good deal for Google because it gets them a new free data feed from tens of thousands of quality controlled geo-content servers.

However, their is little here for commercial content producers other than perhaps enhanced marketing of their products. Jack’s statement in the presentation was that this new search capability allowed quality content to be mashed up for new value-enhanced products. He did not mention who was going to pay for this new value-added mash up…

By: SEWilco

SEWilco — Tue, 20 May 2008 23:18:12 +0000

Maybe you need to look more closely at how other people are providing data to Google. Many publish everything. Some allow the googlebots to crawl everything, but other visitors get a login or summary page. Some allow the googlebots to crawl the first paragraph or a summary page but not the entire data. Over in Google Books, publishers are making many pages of books available but visitors are limited browsing a few pages (and some pages aren’t available at all in the Google Books preview).

What is needed is similar levels of authorization and permission as a web server provides. Then geo servers could be told to let the googlebots access only the first 100 records, give visitors only the metadata, let visitors browse half of Manhattan but no more, etc.

By: MTBMaven

MTBMaven — Tue, 20 May 2008 21:52:41 +0000

@Adan Conner, re: I think the people who are trying to close their doors to being indexed/searched are only limiting their potential revenues.

Not all of us with geographic content are in the business of selling our data, nor can we.

Municipal governments in particular are subject to public information laws, which can prohibit us from selling data owned by the public. (This is not the place to discuss the public’s right to government spatial data except to acknowledge this issue is not a hard and fast rule).

By: shawno

shawno — Tue, 20 May 2008 19:37:49 +0000

I would estimate that the “free data” from Google was generated from less than < .00001% imagery and vectors available today. Imagery and Vectors also only constitute < 0.01% of Geospatial Information (GI). Somebody smarter than me with a lot more time on their hands can do the “commercial” imagery calculation and come up with a more accurate number (and takers?).

GE is a great visualization product! It has also brought into focus the consumer markets better understanding of spatial phenomena and the wealth of spatial information “at their fingertips”.

I think an alternative argument can be made that it has “expanded” the geospatial market into a larger community and a new realized customer base.

“Your” data is very important! It has a documented “accuracy” (I hope), can be used for more than visualization (analysis), provides a greater time extent and is yours to distribute under your rules.

The only people losing in this is the makers of competitive visualization clients. They don’t meet the expected performance watermark set by GE or the ability to scale to the mass of users. The gap with this will closing quickly as well.

In the end, I predict an increase in Pro Services for spatial technology. I also predict an increase in spatial data products available to the consumer (new sensors, new data types, new business models for getting access to data). I also predict a massive increase in “disruptive” technologies. This is GREAT for the market as a whole and our industry.

By: Paul Bissett

Paul Bissett — Tue, 20 May 2008 18:17:36 +0000

@Adam – While I agree in principal with you, we have discovered that a large amount of survey, engineering, and architecture work is accomplished under professional services agreements. The ownership of that content does not typically resides with the content generator. In some these cases, it is unclear if the content generator can even acknowledge that the work was done.

The historical professional services contract just does not deal well with easily distributed digital content. I think the construction, survey, and engineering content providers are going to have to re-think some of their business models as we move into a new digital mapping age.