... now HOW open is open?

[Update: Part II is on my Medium professional channel 2½ year later: Almost open data]

A lot of (virtual) ink has flowed around opening up data, as in this blog, GISuser crowdsourcing open data (below left) etc. etc. And everyone is getting into the act, from White House (below center) and Whitehall (UK Cabinet Office) to the number of open data hits (below right).

Maps are forever (Part III)

My first post on this theme traced beautiful medieval maps from the British library in London to the Harvard Libray online, to land on a 1610 beauty.

Andrew Zolnai map catalog

Happy New Year! Don't you think that 175 blog posts and almost 150,000 page views over 7.5 years merit a catalog of my maps? This also coincides with my first end-to-end project:

1. collect on the desktop
2. disseminate and receive feedback via social media
3. post as a webmap on private AWS account

Releasing data really works! Part IV

[Update: this was summarised into a story map here posted also on this blog here]

Two years then one year ago I QC'd UK Ordnance Survey data for East Anglia, and sent the polyline spike and kickback errors to the Agency, who posted the corrections this year. They noted the errors I reported fell below their own QC criteria, but they invited me to retest their updated dataset. This issue is topical as  posted on GISlounge on the same topic proposing other tools.

Releasing data really works, Part III

More and more free data are available that are quality-controlled and verifiable. Guardian Data Blog's @smfrogers (now at Twitter) was quite sanguine about this:

Comment is free, but facts are sacred

Maps are forever...

... or they are Man's best friend. I'm a big fan of the British Library, not only because it's next to Kings Cross station I alight when coming to London often (or rarely hop onto the Eurostar at nearby St Pancras to Bruxelles or Paris) - bl.uk has an amazing array of old maps, which they just finished georeferencing through a significant effort in crowd-sourcing (the 21st. c. variant of volunteering).

Releasing public data really works!

[03 Nov 13 update: "relooped the loop" by testing the corrected Ordnance Survey data
Feb 2013 update: Ordnance Survey cartography stylesheets made available for QGIS
19 Jul 2019 update: reposted it on ArcGIS Online]

UK Ordnance Survey released Open Data to the public two and a half years ago. English Parish boundaries have been more or less constant since the Domesday survey in 1087. That allowed me to post University of Cambridge Don HC Darby and Yale University student Julie Bowring socio-economic data, by simply adding attribute data to the Ordnance Survey shape files. That onerous, if one-time, task was entirely manual: when 1SpatialCloud launched Online Validation  it seemed only natural to try it out; they actually wrote some simple rules and we thus co-branded as quality assured by 1SpatialCloud Online Validation Service wherever I posted the data. Here are the resulting error shape files:

More creative Maps

I ran across these interesting web-mapping innovations - three on data consumption (multi-modal maps on steroids) and two on data creation (down to earth to outer space).

On-line spatial data validation, part II

[2013 update: Socium is now 1SpatialCloud]

Three weeks ago I introduced Socium's Online Validation Service (OVS). I showed the Ordnance Survey vector data QC, on the UK Parishes used as a geographic unit for the Medieval Fenlands project. Two weeks ago Socium kindly created a new rule, to post unexpected variations in adjacent feature attributes. In an essentially agricultural era, economic wealth of the Domesday period was quantified by Darby via the number of plough teams per parish. That is the attribute the rule was written for (it's hard-wired right now and Socium plans to add metadata pick lists in the future).

Cloud futures #2: on-line spatial data validation

[Update: follow ups for this project are Releasing Data Really Works Part I and Part IV]

Following vector maps on the web (cloud futures #1), here is a freemium online validation service (OVS) that helps us QC, quantify and clean up spatial data on the web. A speciality of 1Spatial is its spatial validation, an essential first step to setting up proper spatial data infrastructure. They spun off 1SpatialCloud to offer the same service online.

Social media at work

I've been a LinkedIn member for over six years and have learned to use Groups by now. It's a great place to ask questions among peers, without bothering others who aren't interested in that singular itch of yours. While unfortunately used at times for trawling emails or marketing shamelessly, every once in a while I run across a brilliant idea. Robin Wilson a student at Southampton University, UK, posted the free GIS data links he found and simply asked for more on LinkedIn's GIS group. Well! to date he got almost four dozen replies and he'll post the results here.

Who said history or surveying had to be boring?

My friend Brent Jones' video is worth watching only for his tongue-in-cheek humour. I thought only Cambridge dons remembered that Newton deemed longitudes NOT calculable! But then along came that clockmaker Harrison, the tinkerer who beat the thinker, as accurate watches made longitudinal calculations possible.

Web maps and Skype

Brisbane floods in eastern Australia affect areas I grew up in, and where friends still live. There are many map resources online through news media, for example Ushahidi community flood reporting map on ABC News, showing maps becoming mainstream.

Global Poetry System

This is a totally geo poetry project out of the London Southbank Centre! It allows you to post poetry in its largest sense - poems, photos, videos, any multimedia - on this website and tag it by its location.

What's in a name, Part II

A sure sign of succesful map, is when it blends into the application and serves an unobtrusive yet key role. I noted earlier in What's in a name? two such examples that make a mappliance (map + appliance). I found last week during 13 October English Day a fun project asking the same question - Location Lingo joined the English Project to the Ordnance Survey, and allows the man in the street to enter anecdotal names they know to share with the rest of the world - isn't this yet another form of crowdsourcing?

Trending oilelefant.com, part V

Quarterly traffic figures to oilelefant.com show a pickup after the traditional summer lull. Of interest is the increase mostly due to visits outside my blog-twitter-web trio in slide 4 below. While next quarter may give us more details on this trend, it does suggest that readership is spreading across the web. Is this a new form of syndication that occurs naturally, like plants seeded in a garden without the garderner's intervention? If this is a form of crowdsourcing, then the twitter logo may be serendipitous... as birds are a main carrying agent of garden volunteers!

5 Ws for citizens-as-sensors

Des Kilfoil at the CBC in Calgary, Canada introduced me 20-odd years ago to the 5Ws, the basic tenets of any investigative reporting, from journalists to police, from Wikipedia:

• Who? Who was involved?
• What? What happened (what's the story)?
• Where? Where did it take place?
• When? When did it take place?
• Why? Why did it happen?
• How? How did it happen?

The power of context, Part II

In preparation for tomorrow's TEDxOilSpill meet-up in Cambridge UK, let me highlight two among the many, many postings on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill (I also wrote about here and here).

Web 2.0 in action

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?

A tale of two approaches

Continuing on my "tale of two" series - conferences, cities and systems - here are current affairs promised in my previous blog. Two events displayed contrasting approaches in finding novel ways to solve old problems.