... intermittent sunshine and showers predicted tomorrow. No this is not a meteo prediction, but a metaphor for opportunities and confusion that cloud computing creates. I see it as a pressure-release valve, where the constant demand to deliver more for less is pushing both sectors, for-profit and not-for-profit.
I discussed earlier technologies available over the web helps reduced implementation costs - that's for the consumption or demand side. On the supply or delivery side, geospatial data have been available on the web in various guises for a while
The government sector was an obvious starting point for web-delivery, as it truly resolved both mandated delivery and decreasing costing issues that squeezed them forever it seems. However ExxonMobil's global license for cloud computing and ESRI joining Amazon's AWS partner network are sure signs that the for-profit cloud-geocomputing is here. And while the data quality vs. ownership debate rages, there are signs of sunshine on the horizon:
the UKMAP (business) was endorsed by the UK Land Registry (agency) to register parcel data (via #thierry_g)
volunteer mapping on the web using OpenStreetMap in Haiti is mainstream news
and a common operatin picture, termed by Don Murray here, seems to be emerging
In other words, while Larry Ellison rants about the cloud - salesforce.com has been around for a decade, and I add AWS for half that time - we geospatial types stand the most to benefit from distributed production and consumption on the web. A lot has been done already on portals such as GEOSS, data repositories such as WeoGeo mentioned above, and tools such as SafeSoft to rationalise and bring together data formats and metadata for all to use. I think the key new benefit is the geotagging events and data, tweets being an excellent starter - this will be more widespread, once it's settled which format works best - while data.gov.uk discussions and semantic websters push RDF, yet another battle of protocols clouds the horizon... And at the risk of sounding like a broken record, proper metadata will ease the burden of choices, as data and applications will actually have a handle to grab onto, no matter which lever will be used in the end.
Current affairs bring such beauty on the web in the form of maps! The exhilerating is what makes the news, and that can be both joyful and sad.
The 8.8 earthquake 22 mi. beneath Chile where the Nazca oceanic plate goes under the South American continental plate affected millions of people in Chile and possibly around the Pacific rim. This picture however is an absolute beauty, if potentially terrifying. News had it however that the tsunami had abated by the time it reached Hawaii.
[click on image above for website]
On the other hand, many were enthralled by the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics. [We followed it asynchronously via BBC iPlayer (UK only) both on TV an on line.] Dig a little further and you find this stunning synoptic map: it is both visually appealing, and clever in the depth and variety of information available.
[click on image above for website]
A lot has been written on web- and infrastructure mapping of these two events. These two nuggets were too good to pass up. It never ceases to amaze me what beauty can be wrought from raw data given the right ideas and tools. I look forward to finding and posting some more...
The Finding Petroleum (FP) January Conference at Inmarsat in London was the first topic on rebranding conferences. Yesterday's Forum on collaborative technologies at the Geological Society, London was a second type of offering. According to FP founder David Bamford, forums are:
an alternative venue for small oil independants and technology start-ups to have a voice, and they ultimately are the drivers of the new economy
Small business is indeed seen as both a driver and beneficiary of the new economy. And as oil fields mature world wide, smaller operators will take over more of the mature field developements such as the North Sea, whilst super majors continue farther afield in larger plays such as Iraq.
This forums talks will soon be posted: its keynote was bp on the Oil Field of the Future using Energistics standards to
knit together multi-faceted oilfield contractor data (mud logging, MWD etc.)
transfer much of the decision-making to onshore offices from offshore rigs
That is indeed the best place for collaborative environments also decribed by Capgemini and Kongsberg. Kadme and Paradigm rounded up the line up on web and subsurface topics.
Facebook/twitter diary excerpt from an information manager:
Vast majority of information is not held on computers but in people's heads If Information is Communication, then what is Metadata? Monday E&P IM mantra: METADATA. METADATA. METADATA Data, data everywhere. Hidden. [...] High value. Low awareness Would like to take a broom to the data management techniques used
Such day-to-day concerns are symptomatic of the need to organise the data ballooning in any organisation. My industry has singular amounts of data, and PPDM, Energistics and ESRI PUG's wiki (login required) address metadata needs. So does the Open Geospatial Consortium in a broader cross-industry context, and the semantic web written up abundantly elsewhere...
Tear down this wall
There is a revolution of linked data under way. Be it on the internet or on intranets, data are being linked like never before... And therein lies the problem! At least in the oil industry, data have been kept in silos for so long that tearing down the walls and building bridges have been, are and will be an on-going challenge.
And the opening quotes are mirrored in governements trying to open to the public, such as the US data.gov a second generation geodata.gov, or the UK data.gov.uk discussed on previous postings here. And at the end of my last blog post, one answer is to:
build the metadata so that the web can be usefully searched, and build a community to help out
Build bridges Metadata is literally data about data, and is best summarised in James Fee's posting. The best example may be surveying data, where the careful and thorough documentation of projection parameters is absolutley necessary. And as, say, the EPSG site will indicate, it has built bridges and fostered cooperation among diverse parties for decades, in their own words to:
develop and disseminate best practice provide a forum for the exchange of experiences and knowledge influence Regulators and Standards organisations liaise with industry associations be the voice of Surveying and Positioning in the Oil and Gas industry
So what does this all mean? Metadata links create bridges across related domains and topics. It permits greater enquiriy, and to drill down searches. And metadata are not only key to each process, but they can also reside in other business processes.
The recent announcement of data.gov.uk under none other than Tim Berners-Lee is a great step towards freeing UK data to the public - I won't reiterate the arguments going back and forth between for-free (tax-paid) and for-fee (cost recovery) - and such availability has raised eyebrows even in the land of the free - namely, how useful is it to the end-user ranging from guv contractor, thru spatial business to end-users, perhaps in decreasing order of patience &/or savvy?
CROWD SOURCING
A recent posting on the UK Government Data Developers Google Group (free login required) says it very well. This is crowd-sourcing at its best, not just of data but on access:
A number of journalists and myself (representing the hackers!) had a little bit of a moan about the datasets on data.gov.uk. Don't get me wrong: we are very happy that the government have released all the data, but decided it would be useful to see if we could prompt the data.gov.uk people into somehow figuring out how to turn all those PDFs and Excel files into real data files (XML, JSON, CSV, RDF et al.)
So I've built a little app to crowdsource the donkey work of statistics collection.
I launched it on Twitter about ten minutes ago, and we've already had about a hundred entries checked.
This is a patent example of what I talked about the last couple of weeks, as reported at the end my last post. So here's another instance of Web 1-2-3:
build geospatial communities in the blogosphere and twitterverse (don't we love neologisms?)
create feedback mechanisms within them, and
then offer further feedback to other communities (such as gov.data.uk in this case)
STANDARDS & METADATA
The longer view however is that if standards had been in place in the first instance, then such crowd-sourcing may not have been needed. And there are examples of such initiatives, such as UN/CEFACT that
announces important improvements in the exchange of data across industries and applications
In petroleum standards and metadata has been a thread in my blog - search for those terms, or go here - and that was the question put to me at FindingPetroleum by the session chair Dave Bamford:
Q: what do you see as the most pressing need today? A: build the metadata so that the web can be usefully searched, and build a community to help do that
And the following question by Energistics' Paul Maton was (all this from memory):
Q: do you know that Energistics has a metadata standards initiative? A: yes, Jerry Hubbard and I tried to connect, and so do PPDM and OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium, not UK Office of Government Contracts)
And that means building bridges - both toward communities and amongst them - such as this one across the Ural River in Atyrau, Kazakhstan, looking west across from Asia toward Europe:
