Between the Poles

The advantages of using open source components to develop geospatial web applications

Open source geospatial software provides a way develop scalable solutions that avoid licensing costs and that can be adapted for particular requirements with the help of a large developer community. At GeoAlberta 2018, Ebrahim Poorazizi described the advantages of using open source components to develop a web-based solution for converting legal land descriptions to geographical coordinates. Since open source libraries are based on open standards this provides a way to develop solutions that are interoperable, flexible, and easy to integrate with other applications.

The web-based application that Ebrahim developed is Township Canada and it provides a way to browse and find the Canadian legal subdivisions, geographical coordinates, and places on a map. It enables users to lookup legal land descriptions, geographical coordinates, and places, to see the results on a map and to export them into CSV, KML, Shapefile, and GeoJSON to use in other applications.

The open source stack that Ebrahim used comprises PostgreSQL/PostGIS, GeoServer, MapBox GL JS, Map Box Tile Server, and Vuetify.  Vuetify is a material design component framework which provides a number of easily adoptable components adhering to Google’s Material Design guidelines.  The application is hosted on AWS EC2.

As an example of legal land descriptions, any parcel of land in Alberta can be located by its legal land description which is based on the Alberta Township Survey (ATS) system. The ATS is a grid network dividing the province into equal-sized parcels of land.

An important role for national geospatial agencies: mapping underground infrastructure

Since Google Earth's release in June 2005, the rise of crowdsourced OpenStreetMap, the deluge of remote-sensed imagery from private satellite companies Digital Globe, Planet Labs, UrtheCast, and others, and private geospatial data companies like HERE, national mapping agencies and related government organizations involved with geospatial data and technology have found that the traditional role of the government mapping agency is no longer viable.  It has been suggested that national mapping agencies are an anachronism that are no longer required since the private sector is flooding the world with huge volumes of timely, frequent, high resolution geospatial data.   As a result all national mapping agencies have had to reasess their role in the geospatial ecosystem.   At the GeoBuiz conference in Hyderabad, a panel discussion moderated by Karthik Ramamurthy, Regional Director, IPSOS Consulting included Dorine Burmanje, Chair of the Executive Board of the Dutch Kadaster, Dr. Virginia Burkett, Chief Scientist at the US Geological Survey, Nigel Clifford, CEO of the UK Ordnance Survey, and Major General Girish Kumar, Surveyor General of the Survey of India provides a fascinating perspective on how different national mapping agencies are coping with the post Google Map world.

Dutch Kadaster

One of the roles for national mapping agencies which Dorine Burmanje mentioned about which there appears to be a consensus is as custodians of authoritative data. This includes property boundaries (referred to as parcel files in North America), data used to monitor pollution and climate change, and other data that is closely tied to monitoring and measuring national objectives and priorities. Governments have also an important role in making data, whether collected by themselves or more typically by the private sector, available to the public for free.  This is important because it contributed to the public good.  She identified a further key role that a government mapping agency can fill - as a custodian of data about the underground including underground infrastructure. The Netherlands is just embarking on implementing legislation passed by the States General in 2015 and the Dutch experience could be come a model to help the rest of the world address the pressing problem of cost-effectively geolocating underground infrastructure.

US Geological Survey

President Trump's fiscal year 2018 budget requested a 15 percent funding cut for the U.S. Geological Survey and proposes deep cuts for all mission areas.  This is not the first time the USGS has faced large cuts in its funding. 

At GeoBuiz Virginia Burkett gave two very intriguing examples of how the USGS is finding new and interesting roles for itself.  The USGS continues to develop with NASA the Landsat series of satellites.   Landsat 7 and 8 are currently operational, and two more, Landsat 9 and 10, are in development to replace them.  The USGS is finding new ways to reuse the existing Landsat data that currently stretches back to 1972.  Using data cube technology the USGS is able to track individual (cloud free) pixels over time, currently back to Landsat 4, but ultimately to Landsat 1. She gave an example of a pixel in a forested area of the US which recorded the evolution of the forest since 1982 including a fire and the slow recovery after the fire.

She also described how the USGS is supporting citizen science using crowd harvesting - mining social media of evidence of earth tremours and quakes to be able to provide earlier warning - within 29 seconds - than is possible using only seismological analysis.

Ordnance Survey

The Ordnance Survey (OS) is the world's oldest national mapping agency - having begun in Napoleonic times as a military mapping agency. Since then the OS has weathered several disruptions including the industrial revolution, the digital revolution, and the current disruption of the tradtional national mapping agncy business model. Currently the OS is effectively a private, for profit company, albeit with a single shareholder, the UK Government.  As CEO not only is Nigel Clifford responsible for national mapping objectives, but he has to generate a financial return to Parliament.  One role he sees for national mapping agencies is becoming custodians for national registers - of addresses, property boundaries and other core national data. Nations also require new data sets including detailed street furniture and vegetation. IGN, the French national mapping agency, is currently piloting a data model for doing this called PCRS 2.0.  Nigel also sees national mapping agencies as undertaking projects that are considered too risky by the private sector but for which the social payoff may be large.  He emphasized that national mapping agencies have to follow a fine line since they should not be perceived as competing with the private sector.  He also mentioned a role for national mapping agencies in providing data for startup incubation, for example, the Geovation hubs in the UK.

The immediate challenge the OS is facing is that Parliament has recently created a Geospatial Commission tasked with determining the role of geospatial data in developing the national economy.  55% of OS revenue derives from selling their premier data set, the OS Mastermap, to government and private companies. The Geospatial Commission is proposing making Mastermap data available at no cost to small business as an economic development stimulus for the SMB sector. Since this initiative would directly impact OS revenues, either large customers would have to pay proportionately more to make up for the short fall or the OS has to find alternative revenue sources.

Survey of India

The Survey of India has been around for 150 years. Incredibly until 2005 the national datum remained the Everest datum - named for the Surveyor General responsible for the first survey of India. General Girish Kumar was unambiguous in recognizing that the availability of huge volumes of private data has changed the national mapping agency business model.  These are clearly challenging times for the Survey of India.  His view is similar to the Ordnance Survey - national mapping agencies cannot and should not compete with the private sector.  He still sees a role for national mapping agencies collecting data in rural areas that are financially unattractive for the private sector.  He also sees that national mapping agencies have a role in setting standards for data quality to ensure that the private sector is collecting data reliably and to prevent "fake data".  National mapping agencies can also provide training to support capacity building so citizens are able to understand how different types of geospatial data should be used.  General Kumar singled out a new role that he suggested only a national mapping agency can take on - mapping underground infrastructure.  He revealed that the Survey of India has already mapped the underground infrastructure of Delhi.

New roles for national mapping agencies

These are clearly challenging times for national mapping agencies, but new roles are emerging for these agencies. There is a consensus that an increasingly large proportion of geospatial data is sourced from the private sector and from crowdsourced data such as OpenStreetMap.  There is also an consensus that government agencies have a a role as the custodian of authoritative data including registers of national base data and data for monitoring and measuring national objectives and priorities such as air and water quality and climate change.  While government agencies are, with some exceptions, no longer in the business of collecting data themselves, they need to quality control data that gets the government imprimatur.  Speakers also said that government mapping agencies have a role in ensuring that nationally significant geospatial data which may come from from many sources including private commercial sources is made open and available to the public for the benefit of society at large.

Mapping underground infrastructure

Two speakers identified as a new role for which national mapping agencies are well suited - mapping and being the custodian for underground infrastructure. Increasing urbanization throughout the world challenges the sustainable development and resilience of cities.  The importance of the ground beneath cities is often overlooked. In many parts of the world the location of underground infrastructure including electric power, water and wastewater, gas, district heating, and other networks is unknown or poorly known.  Information about the underground is captured during excavation and drilling, but this data is typically stored in project or private databases and is not shared.  Government may be uniquely qualified for mapping and maintaining information about national infrastructure, much of which has a national security dimension.  For example, in the U.S. access to infrastructure data including location is restricted under Protected Critical Infrastructure Information (PCII) Program.  There are successful examples around the world where municipal and regional governments have helped enable a shared underground utility network database. 

Capturing this data in a shared, open database is a first step toward developing a model of the subsurface that can be reliably used for urban planning, design, construction and maintenance.  The Netherlands has recently embarked on a national program supported by legislation and standards to do just that.  In 2015 a new law was passed by the States General or parliament in the Netherlands creating a Basisregistratie Ondergrond (BRO) or Key Registry for the Subsurface. This law mandates that if you excavate or drill you have to share your data with the registry. In addition if when using the data in the registry you find something is incorrect you have to report it. The registry is required to be open and accessible to all citizens of the Netherlands. This new registry will require new standards for recording data and there is a major effort underway in the Netherlands to develop these standards. The implementation of the new subsurface registry will begin this year.  Furthermore at the Geobuiz conference I was encouraged to hear from the Surveyor General of India, Major General Girish Kumar, that the Survey of India has mapped the underground infrastructure of Delhi.  After the panel discussion General Kumar said that information about the Delhi underground mapping project will be forthcoming.

Conceptual model for open infrastructure standard InfraGML released

InfraGML is the proposed Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Geographic Markup Language (GML)  application schema supporting land development and civil engineering infrastructure facilities. The OGC has just released the OGC LandInfra Conceptual Model, the first draft of the InfraGML conceptual model for land parcels and the built environment.  The document was submitted by Bentley Systems, Inc, Leica Geosystems, Trimble, Australian Government Department of Communications, Autodesk, Vianova Systems AS, and buildingSMART International.

LandXML is a widely used existing standard supported by almost 800 members in the roads and highway transportation sector.  It is intended that the new InfraGML standard will support a subset of the LandXML standard including alignment, road, rail, survey, terrain, land parcels, drainage, wastewater, and water distribution systems.

The main motivating issues for InfraGML are that LandXML is not associated with a recognized international standards organization, was not supported for a number of years though LandXML.org has become active again, lacked a UML model, and in its present form LandXML 1.2 is not compliant with the OGC's GML standard for geographic location.  (A number of years ago an attempt was made to make LandXML compliant with GML.) To address these issues the OGC's  Land and Infrastructure DWG chartered a LandInfraSWG (Standards Working Group) for LandXML. Its first activity was to reverse-engineer a UML model and documentation (which were lacking) for LandXML 1.2 as a basis for assessing the viability of supporting LandXML as an OGC interoperability standard. A number of deficiencies relative to the OGC baseline were identified.

The LandinfraSWG decided that to be able to support LandXML as an interoperability standard, it would be necessary to fix the problems that had been identified.  But it felt that for a number of reasons this would be difficult to do. The LandInfraSWG therefore proposed developing a new standard that would encompass a subset of LandXML functionality.  

The new standard would be called InfraGML and would be supported by the OGC. It would align with existing OGC, TC211 and SQL/MM standards such as GML. Its focus would be alignments/roads, survey, and land parcels, but would be able to expand into other areas as resources became available. It was to be use-case driven and based on a UML conceptual model. It would also synchronize with the concurrent efforts by buildingSMART International in its development of infrastructure-based Industry Foundation Classes (IFCs), for example, for alignments, as well as with CityGML and TransXML.

The first public draft of the OGC's proposed UML conceptual model for land parcels and the built environment has been released for public comment.  The OGC has issued a Request for Comments on the first draft of the OGC LandInfra Conceptual Model.

Australian Government sponsors report on the economic benefits of global positioning systems

The Australian Government has prepared reports on the economic benefits of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) including specific sectors of the Australian economy.  The studies were conducted by ACIL Allen.  

To provide some context for this two countries, Australia and New Zealand, have commissioned studies to estimate the contribution of geospatial data and technology to the national economy.  In 2008 a report prepared for the CRCSI & ANZLIC by ACIL Tasman estimated that the spatial information sector contributed between $6.4 billion and $12.6 billion to the Australian gross domestic product (GDP).  That represents between 0.6% and 1.2% of the Australian GDP in in 2006-2007.  In 2009 a study  sponsored by Land Information New Zealand (LINZ), the Department of Conservation (DOC) and the Ministry for Economic Development (MED) estimated that spatial information added at least $1.2 billion, or about 0.6% of GDP, to the New Zealand economy through productivity gains.  Canada has announced the award of a similar project to a team that includes ACIL Tasman, who conducted the Australian and New Zealand studies.

Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) is the generic term for constellations of satellites that provide a signal that enables users to determine their position anywhere outdoors. The first GNSS system was the U.S. global positioining system or GPS.  Since then Russia, Europe and China have launched their own satellite systems GLONASS, Galileo and Beidou.

Augmented GNSS provide greater accuracy and reliability to end user by bringing in additional  external information.  These systems are composed of multiple ground stations, located at accurately-surveyed points. The ground stations take measurements of the signal from the GNSS satellites and estimate the errors which impact the signal received by the users.  This information is transmitted to end users by satellite or by terrestrial radio.

The report finds that  augmented GNSS services have delivered economic benefits to Australian industry through improvements in productivity and more efficient use of resources. It estimates that: in 2012 augmented GNSS added between $2.3 billion and A$3.7 billion to Australia’s real GDP through improved productivity. It also projected that in 2020 real GDP would be between $7.8 billion and $13.7 billion higher as a result of the ues of augmented GNSS.

The report found that the greatest economic impact from the use of augmented GNSS was found to be in the agricultural, mining, construction and surveying sectors. But the utilities and transport sectors also realised important economic benefits.

The greatest economic benefits in 2012 were derived from the use of augmented GNSS in surveying, machine guidance, automation of operations and asset mapping. The levels of accuracy required for these applications ranges between 2 cm and 10 cm.

Augmented GNSS and utilties

Augmented GNSS contributes significantly to the productivity and competitiveness of the utilities sector which in this study includes electricity, gas and water services. Utilities use augmented GNSS data with geographic information systems to construct, monitor and manage network assets, manage outages, maintain systems and forecast demand.  Augmented GNSS lowers development costs and invreases the efficient of asset management. Output from the utilities sector is estimated to have been between $50 million and $81 million higher as a result of the use of augmented GNSS in asset management and maintenance.

It is estimated that With increasing adoption of augmeneted GNSS in asset mapping and control systems, this could increase to between $173 million and $305 million by 2020. Further improvements in productivity are expected as the technology is adopted more widely across industry and as more innovative applications emerge.

Sharing geospatial data among government and municipal agencies

In a very interesting presentation at the Latin America Geospatial Forum in Rio de Janeiro, Juan Acuña Arenas, Program Director of CEDIZ in the Secretariat for Economics and Small Business in Chile, gave an overview of Chile's CEDIZ program whose objective is to reduce the time it takes to start a business in Chile to a single day.

One of the requirememts of starting a new business is identifying the location of the new business to ensure that it complies with zoning and other requirements.  One of the initiatives undertaken as part of the CEDIZ program is to create a national Urban Parcels Base Map (CBPU) to provide a common base map for all government agencies and municipalities to share,   The CBPU will be the first map in Chile with a scale less than 1:5000 standardized for the entire country.  When an entrepreneur decides to start a new business, he or she will be able to acces the CBPU map on line, identify the location of the new business, know immediately the zoning and other restrictions of that location, and if compliant get a digital zoning certificate for the new business.  In addtion it allows the goverment to monitor new business activity geographically to enable it to ensure that zonng and other regulations are designed to maximize economic activity.

Wadih João Scandar Neto, Director of Geosciences at the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), who chaired the session pointed to two important trends occuring worldwide that are facilitating the sharing of information among government agencies.

• Shared acquistion of satellite and other imagery to improve efficiency and reduce costs
• Government institutions collaborating to establish standards for sharing geopatial information

Orange County parcel file now freely downloadable

I blogged previously about a court case involving Orange County in California about open access to county GIS data under California's Public Records Acts (PRA). 

After trying to obtain Orange County's parcel file at the cost of reproduction, in 2009 the Sierra Club initiated a lawsuit against Orange County under the PRA.  May 31, 2011 a California appelate court decided in favour of  Orange County which charged $375,000 for their parcel database.

On Monday, July 8, 2013, the California Supreme Court reversed the previous 4th District Court of Appeal ruling in favor of Orange County. As a result, GIS data owned by all parts of California government - is now public record available for the cost of duplication.

Orange County Parcel File is now available for download.

"The G.L.I.S Landbase Information Systems Section is where the County of Orange Landbase is generated and updated. This unit prepares and maintains an information system consisting of a very accurate, parcel-level digital basemap containing over 665,000 parcels.

"The Landbase contains street centerlines, right-of-way lines, and parcel boundaries, linked to text information, such as assessor parcel number. The foundation of this system is the County Control Network consisting of over 2400 control points on an approximate half-mile grid. This strong foundation makes the County Landbase very accurate and allows new map information to be added without losing any accuracy.

The Landbase is available for download in ESRI shape format listed below:"

You can download it here.

ESRI UC: 3D and other themes of this year's conference

According to Jack Dangermond who led the plenary sessions on the first day,  this year in San Diego 12000 people from 130 countries were in San Diego for the 33rd Esri International User Conference.

I gravitated primarily to the utility sessions.  According to Bill Meehan, who is responsible for ESRI's utility business, there were 750 utility folks at this year's UC.

GIS is everywhere

GIS is being used in diveerse areas including environmental monitoring, climate change, permafrost melting, sea level rise, agriculture, water resources, aquaculture, pollution remediation, energy resources management, land information systems, urban design, utility network management, wasteshed modeling, utility pole inspection, sewer rehabilitation, port management, indoor GIS, iInsurance risk management, health-related mapping, law enforcement, mapping where space debris might fall, flood risk mapping, storm tracking and damage assessment,  geodesign, crowdsourcing for collecting a variety of data, interoperabilty, citizen engagement, government transparency, cartography, geology and mining, automatic generalization of different scale maps, story maps, portals for infrastructure, and open data, to mention just a few of the things that were singled out in the plenary session. 

Some of the areas that were singled out  for special recognition were

• Special Achievements in GIS award went to the Dartmouth Atlas for showing geographically how outcomes and the cost of medical procedures varies depending on location across the U.S. 
• The Hong Kong Lands Department received the Enterprise GIS award for their land management system which they started in the 1990's and is now in its second generation. 
• Tbe President's Award went to Direct Relief which distributes different types of equipment to people around the globe in need with 99% efficiency according to Forbes.

Themes

The theme of this UC was GIS transforming our world, not only changing the physical world as we know it, but also changing our perception of the world and how GIS has and will fundamentally help us collectively build a better future.  A classic example that has impacted everyone on the planet is GPS or more generally GNSS.   As a number of speakers including Dangermond said we are never lost any more and that is fundamental change to how we perceive the world.

Some of the major themes that emerged at this UC are common to many software and service providers in the IT sector, but some of these are new or unique to ESRI. 

Climate change

We are facing serious global challenges, in particular climate change, which both at the Geodesign Summit and at this UC conference appears to be a personal challenge for Dangermond who sees GIS as contributing in major way in creating a more sustainable future.  He sees GIS helping to change how we think and act and how we do basic things such as design. 

GIS across the organization

A theme that was pervasive throughout the conference including in the utility sessions was the need to make GIS pervasive across the organization because 90% of the data that organizations are collecting and managing has location.  This was also true in utility sessions I attended, where the thrust is to expand the use of GIS outside of the traditional area of records management into other departments.

Vertical industry "templates"

In the utility and telecommunications sectors there is a major effort underway to create preconfigured vertical "templates" for specific vertical industries.  In the utility sector one was announced yesterday for the electric power Industry, and others are underway for gas and telecommunications.  These templates are a collection of data and tools for vertical industries and are available as open source on Github.

Web

The web was pervasive, It was hard to find a session where the theme that desktop GIS is being transformed into web GIS did not come up.  It doesn't mean that the desktop is going to go away in the near future, but sharing data, applications, and apps is being recognized as a common goal and web GIS makes this very easy to do.  This includes web portals for accessing enterprise data over the web.

Cloud

A lot of the traditonal desktop GIS capabilities are now being made available in the cloud so that all you need is an iOS or Android device or a web browser.  This is also available to large enterprises who need to keep their data on their own servers for security reasons.  Cindy Salas from Centerpoint Energy demonstrated ESRI's cloud capability but running "on premise" completely wthin Centerpoint's fire wall. 

Integration

Being able to integrate location and the spatial dimension into enterprise applications such as ERP (SAP), business intelliegence (IBM Cognos), Salesforce, MS Dynamics, and Excel spreadsheets is a new focus for ESRI.   They have already created plugins for several well-known applications.

Mobile devices

In the past when you talked about mobile in the context of utilities, you were normally dealing with Panasonic Toughbooks which could cost up to $6 000 each.  At this conference just about every application was able to run on a variety of low cost mobile devices including iOS and Android mobile devices.  One of the sessions I attended was about the National Broadband rollout in Australia where the 500 field folks who are doing 300 000 pit inspections were all equipped with iPads, which you might have thought were too fragile for pretty rough field work..  This project has been underway for something like 18 months and todate only two of the iPads have been damaged.

Big data

Spatial data volumes whether from sensors at utilities, from LIDAR scanning of transmission lines, or from earth obsevration satellited are now reckoned in terabytes.  There were sessions on spatially enabling Hadoop, SAP HANA and other big data management systems for managing these data volumes.

Real-time

In the utility track managing real-tme data from sensors on transformers, smart meters, phasors, and other devices and enabling near real-time decision making was a common theme.  A general event processing capability that can be triggered by rules has been added to the quiver to make this possible for any data stream. 

In the area of imagery, Digital Globe imagery can be accessed with 4-5 hours of acquisition.

Analytics

Big data and real-time means that we need to be able to understand what these huge volumes of data are telling us and then enable decision-making, automated or human mediated, as rapidly as possible.  If a transformer is running hot, we can't wait a week until the next service check to reconfigure the network because by then we may have reduced it projected lifetime by 10%.  There were "location analytics" sessions in most of the vertical industry sessions including utilities.

Content

Software companies like ESRI and Hexagon are now in the content busines.  And with the data beng made available in the cloud, you can access it through web GIS or desktop GIS. The data includes traditional topographic maps, digital terrain models, imagery from earth observation satellites from Digital Globe and others some of it near real-time (fr example, from Digital Globe within 4-5 hours of acqusition), demographics, and others.

Dangermond's term for this is the "living atlas" because this body of content is intended to be dynamic, real-rime and comprehensive.  The goal seems to be all the data you would need to manage the planet.

Some of the content explicitly mentioned includes

• basemaps
• community. content
• imagery
• 30 cm coverage of the US
• 60 cm coverage of Western Europe
• imagery for the middle east and asia in total covering 2/3 of the world
• health
• lifestyle
• economics
• demographics, at the zip code, county, state, and national levels
• scientific maps including environmental, energy, infrastructure, and terrain models
• landscape layers

This data is accessible to web and desktop applications and makes it very easy to do standard spatial analytical things like multi-criteria suitability or site selection mapping.  Users can also publish their own data to the cloud.

Education

This has always been a strong focus area for ESRI and from Dangermond's perspective with the challenges the world is facing, GIS professionals will be even more critical in the future.  There is focus on advancing spatial literacy to a broader audience than in the past.

LiDAR

Laser scanning is a major source of important data for the construction industry (right of way determination and construction progress monitoring), utilities (transmission vegetation management), and other industries.  ESRI has made this a focus area and there were a number of sessions devoted to managing and analyzing point cloud data.

3D

Dangermond specifically singled out 3D as a major capability area for ESRI.  There are specialized 3D products, but 3D is also being built into ESRI main stream GIS and spatial analytical products.

3D city models

At the plenary there was a demonstration of how to quickly build a 3D city model from 2D data, including extruding buildings from a 3D building footprint and height, adding textures depending on building types, and then tools for analysis such as zoning and shadow analysis and visualization including flythroughs.  These models are sharable on the cloud as web scenes requiring only a web browser (with no plugins) or iOS mobile devices.

Geodesign

At the UC ESRI is demonstrating a prototype of a product designed specifically for geodesign.

Open data

Dangermond specifically mentioned the newest national open data initiative in Peru. 

Crowdsourcing/volunteered data

There are sessions specifically on editing and manipulating OpenStreetMap data.

Denmark's open data initiative estimated to save government over $45 million per year and generate returns of $87 million for the private sector

In 2007 I listened to an exceptional presentation at a Spatial Sciences Institute Biennial International Conference in Hobart, Tasmania given by Tim Barker and Neale Hooper, of the Queensland Treasury, part of the government of the State of Queensland.  The effort within the Queensland government was motivated by the finding of an internal review that within the government licensing is non standard, there are inter-jurisdictional problems, and in many cases it is easier to get geospatial data by buying it from the private sector than to work through the licensing issues to get it from another government agency.  What Tim Barker and Neale Hooper were recommending to the Government of Queensland that all government spatial data would be available under Creative Commons (CC) licenses.

In Denmark there is a similar problem.  Both governments and businesses spend large amounts every year on buying and administrating basic data.

The Finance Minister of Denmark has just announced that from January 1, 2013, individuals, public authorities and private businesses will have free access to retrieve and use what in Denmark is callled basic data.  Basic data is fundamental information that is used by government for day to day adminstration.  It included data about people, companies, addresses, land/properties and administrative geographic data, such as administrative and electoral boundaries.   (Personal data that is included in basic data is protected by the Act on Processing of Personal Data).

Basic data falls into nine databases called registers; business registers, the Danish cadastre, the Danish Building and Dwelling Register, Danish administrative and geographical boundaries, a Danish elevation model as well the Danish place name register.  Givernments use basic data for collecting land tax, paying social benefits, planning climate change adaptation, emergency services, and other day to day administration.

Reducing government administration costs

It is estimated that by making basic data open and freely accessible, government administration will be improved.  In particular the cost of buying data from other government organizations will be reduced.  It is estimated that this could save Danish governments DKK 260 million ($45 milllion) per year from 2020.

Contributing to the economy

It is also expected to benefit the private sector, by reducing red tape, reducing the cost of acquiring data from governments, improving publice services, and creating opportunities for wealth creation from new digital products and services.  By eliminating redundant information (often the same information has to be submitted by businesses to the public sector several times over) and making data freely available to businesses could save Danish businesses up to DKK 0.5 billion ($87 million).  It is expected that real estate, insurance, finance, and tele-communications and geospatial  companies in particular will directly from open basic data.

Who pays for capturing and maintaining basic data ?

Financing basic data acquisiton and maintenance will be reorganised so that governments contribute to basic data acquisition and maintenance through their ministries' appropriations, or block grants in the case of municiplities. 

The process of managing basic data is being centralized to make it more efficient,

• Basic data in all nine registers will be harmonised and converted to interoperable formats.
• More information will be added to the basic data registers to better support public administration processes.
• A common IT infrastructure will created.  Basic data will be distributed by a single entity, called the Data Distributor.

Ordnance Survey forms OS International to offer national mapping assistance internationally

In the UK the 1790's were responsible for two major advances, the elimination of scurvey in the Royal Navy through the issuance of limes, and the creation of the Ordnance Survey tasked with identifying sites for artillery placement along the English seacoast.  Both contributed to preventing an invasion of the UK by Napoleon.  Interestingly at roughly the same time a survey was being carried out in France from South to North to measure the meter, then defined as one ten millionth of a quarter of the Earth's circumference.  If Napoleon had invaded Britain, it is interesting to speculate that Imperial units would have been replaced by SI in the early 19th C which might have avoided the units debates in modern times.

Since then as the world's first national mapping agency, the Ordnance Survey (OS) has been a model for other government mapping agencies around the world.  The OS has just announced the formation of an international service, Ordnance Survey International, to provide specialist services to other national mapping agencies.  It is estimated that location-based data contributes more than £100 billion to the UK economy.  Ordnance Survey International will start in September 2012 and will be headed by Steven Ramage, former Executive Director at the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)..  Carsten Roensdorf, currently with the OS in Southampton, will also be joining OS International and will be located in the Middle East.  I've known both Steven and Carsten for many years.   This is an outstanding team that will add a lot of value to national mapping internationally at a critical time when many of these organizations are experiencing rapid and dramatic changes.

Europe's Digital Agenda review: EUROGI recommends geospatial including BIM, open data/services and an EU property service

In 2010 the Digital Agenda for Europe (DAE) was the first thematic strategy launched under the Europe 2020 strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth.  The European Commission launched the Europe 2020 Strategy with a vision to achieve high levels of employment, a low carbon economy, productivity and social cohesion.  The Digital Agenda for Europe is one of the seven flagship initiatives of the Europe 2020 Strategy.

The Digital Agenda is the European Commission's strategy for using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to the benefit Europe's society and economy for the period 2010-2015.  The Digital Agenda is linked to various other EU policies, such as the single market, consumer protection, research and innovation, industrial policy, regional and rural development, environmental sustainability, skills and culture, or healthcare. It is expected to contribute to major challenges such as climate change and the aging population.

In 2010 the Digital Agenda for Europe was the first thematic strategy launched under the Europe 2020 strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth.  In 2011 the Digital Agenda Scoreboard reported on the first year of implementation of actions as well as on progress on performance targets.

As of 1st July 2012, the DAE is being managed by the European Commission Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DG CONNECT).

EUROGI's submission to the DAE mid-term review

Given what we know about the contribution of geospatial technology to GDP from Australia and New Zealand, it is surprising that the DAE does not directly reference geospatial data and technology.  And given the importance of sustainability in the goals of the DAE and the recent EC prioritization of energy efficiency, it is also surprising that it does not mention the integration of building information modeling (BIM) and geospatial.  In response to the geospatial gap EUROGI, which is the umbrella organization for European geospatial organizations, has offered recommendations as part of the mid-term review of the DAE currently taking place.

EUROGI's recommendations are

Open geospatial data and services

Identify types of public sector generated geospatial data which should be made available within a range of access models, from no cost and no restrictions on usage to those requiring payment and with access restrictions.  Across Europe barriers to the use of the data still constitute constraints. INSPIRE and the PSI Directives aim to remove these barriers,  but further measures are needed.

Geolocating digital public sector information

Geotagging the huge volume of digital data, such as text documents, spreadsheets, pictures, videos, remote sensed data, and tweets, that is produced daily by state bodies at all levels would contribute to transparency about public policy, implementation, monitoring and review.

Building information modelling and geospatial information/services

Produce an outline of how best to promote building information modelling (BIM) and its full and seamless integration with geospatial data and services.  One of the most important technology advances transforming the EU construction and building industry is BIM.  Sustainability programs like BREEAM and  LEED require natural lighting, solar radiation, wind, renewable energy, and noise analyses all of which require integration of geospatial information with the building design information which is contained in BIM models.  BIM also enables greater understanding and transparency between public client stakeholders and citizens.

Integrated property information service

Develop an outline for a comprehensive European property information service.  Trillions of Euros are invested in property across Europe and yet there is no overall integrated multi-lingual property information service which facilitates seamless tracking of trends based on location, identifies financial flows, provides property details, explores the impact of natural hazards (eg flooding, landslides etc) and other factors. It could be argued that the presence of such a service may have contributed at least to some extent to predicting the disastrous property market collapses which have taken place in certain European countries.

European location strategy

A strategy for location is required to unlock the potential of location information for supporting the objectives set out in Europe 2020 such as job creation, social inclusion and environmental and development sustainability.

Realizing the potential of spatial data infrastructures

Establish a program to support sub-national and focused thematic Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) and set out minimum and desirable specifications to facilitate interoperability between these SDIs through open APIs.

Geospatial sector in a global context

Identify ways in which European geospatial companies can better compete in the global geospatial information and services market place.  The INSPIRE initiative is recognized throughout the world as a global leader in the SDI field and yet the increasing and deepening experience in harmonization processes across different cultures and languages is not fully being exploited internationally.

Developing the geospatial skills/knowledge base

The Commission should develop a strategy for supporting the expansion and deepening of geospatial skills.  Employment in the geospatial sector is expanding at a rate which exceeds overall economic growth levels but skills shortages remain.  This creates an opportunity in memeber states with high rates of unemployment.

Emerging trends and new opportunities

Support a process of regular reviews of emerging technology trends such as Internet of Things,
remote sensing, cloud computing, open data initiatives, seamless indoor/outdoor positioning, and social media which will impact the geospatial sector in order to identify opportunities for the EU ICT sector and the public sector.