Google “Data Liberation” probably doesn’t mean spatial data
September 15, 2009 14 Comments
Look, I get it. Letting me get data in and out of SaaS products is critical. But I can’t see how this will ever truly affect Google’s spatial data product given their licensing restrictions. The OSM guys are thinking that Google could just do what Yahoo! did and let people digitize off the imagery. Of course that is based on the assumption Yahoo! actually had the right to give users the ability to digitize “their” imagery in the first place. Spatial data owners rule the world…
The open data crasher squirrel is on the case...
About James Fee
Google geographic content is the most proprietary, least exportable format of any of the geographic systems. As is (are??) Bing content, as well…and anyone else who’s serving rasters over the web.
Sure, you can scrape your screen, but the cached crapola is still just a bunch of tiles twiddling their metaphorical thumbs waiting for the Squirrels to come clicking.
It’s one thing to export ‘real’ data…quite another to export munged tiles of pretty pixels. I suspect the terms of endearment between Google and Teleatlas are firmly placed in the “don’t you dare extract/export/release/share my commercial products” camp, so that’s out.
Us geo-nuts gotta find our content elsewhere: http://www.iceagemovie.com/
“the OSM guys are thinking that Google could just do what Yahoo did”
hell no, we’re chucking a brick through the window and seeing what they throw back at us.
If Google truly cared about opening up data content, they would put their sketched-up user generated map data for India and other countries back into the public domain. How about donating it openstreetmap? How about giving it back to the local governments of those developing countries?
Google talks the talk but does not walk the walk.
Johnrm has it right. Google likes to talk about making data available to everyone, but they leave out one very important part. You have to access this data via their websites, software or APIs. In the end Google has to make money somehow… data is never really free. It would just be nice if Google didn’t promote themselves as making the data ‘freely available’. My personal pet peeve is all the great data that is locked up in Google Earth. Wouldn’t it be better is they just hosted all the data for any client to read?
Cam
“In the end Google has to make money somehow… data is never really free.”
Exactly – something has to pay for the infrastructure.
“Wouldn’t it be better is they just hosted all the data for any client to read?”
And thus removing the ONLY source of revenue you mention above???
Playing the opposite angle – if data are ‘freely available’ using ‘free tools’ that cost ‘nothing’ to use, then why push on the tree just to make it fall in a forest where no-one cares? For the sake of ‘pure’ access and openness? hmph.
the core argument for ‘real openness’ is that profit is evil and shouldn’t get in the way of the public’s right to access anything they want, wherever, whenever, and however they choose.
them darn comm-nists tried that for a while. Worked well for the crooks inside the system (Gazprom, Putin’s mafia, etc.) back then, and continues to work very, very well for them now . For citizens outside the loop, not so much.
Google may be disingenuous with their claim of “free” but it’s better than the absurd nirvana of everything should be shared openly and without fee.
Now, if the US gov’t could only get past it’s own absurd ineptitude on data publishing (http://www.fgdc.gov) and adopt something more useful (http://www.data.gov) and improve that with open storage, open formats, and open schemas so we can extract the content us US taxpayers are paying for (again and again) then we might be on to something.
See (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SgbbrP3cw4) for evidence of the success of post-communist systems in Russia.
http://data.vancouver.ca/
– ‘nuf said
The one thing about Vancouver’s site is they use a very proprietary and closed format, DWG. It would appear no data is available yet on that format, but hopefully they’ll have more open formats as well for that data.
Right – but it’s *published* which beats the rest of the geocrowd here in North America with a big ol’ hockey stick.
I had a look at the Vancouver data catalog and cannot see a single dataset in DWG format. The column is completely empty.
Plenty of csv, kml, shp, ecw which are all open.
Maybe the real trouble is that it is competition for Weogeo?
Yes the column is completely empty, but it is there. Open geodata sites shouldn’t use proprietary data formats. DWG on its own isn’t a problem as long as it is a choice among others. If Vancouver released their parcels as DWG only, then we’d have a problem IMO.
Kimo,
Curious why you think DWG should be part of an open and free data source. I too was caught by that being in their list.
Really what I’d like to see is Spatialite being a choice. Give me data in that format and I can do anything with it.
The hell with Google. Really who gives a rat’s ass about their data. OSM is making good headway in having as good a map as Navteq or TeleAtlas.
Actually we probably need to thank Cloudmade for wasting their money on cleaning up the USA maps. Thanks guys!