Geospatial Data: A Two-Way Street?

The key innovation in the Internet trend sometimes known as “Web 2.0” isn’t carefully crafted user interfaces, quirky error messages, or the magic AJAX pixie dust, so much as the growing understanding that what makes web sites and services great are users—their contributions, their creativity, their interactions, and their love.

Geospatial maps and data, however, hidebound as they are by decades of practice in traditional GIS, have yet to evince awareness of this understanding. Google Maps, MSN Virtual Earth, and their ilk - along with their 3-D counterparts, like Google Earth - have universalized the expectation that digital maps should be fast, interactive, and visually appealing. The development of technologies like KML and the Google Maps JavaScript API have made it possible for users to publish their own geographic data within these applications, but mapping on the Web is still a fundamentally one-way street: Someone else publishes data, and you consume it. Worse, the underlying road network data and satellite imagery isn’t Free for reuse (in the libre sense), and any new data based on it runs the risk of having its ownership tainted thereby.

We can look ahead to a future, however, in which geospatial maps and data become, like Flickr or Wikipedia, a two-way street, in which users can collaborate not to only produce new maps, but also to produce and share new freely reuseable geographic data. We will consider the successes and failures of the OpenStreetMap as object lessons towards understanding how geospatial data is both like and unlike other forms of creative content. We will also look at large data sets like NASA’s LandSat-7 imagery on a low-latency basis over peer-to-peer networks, without the need for the large server farms employed by the big Internet content companies for that purpose.

Finally, we will discuss what shapes appropriate “architectures for participation” might take in collaboratively developing free geospatial maps and data sets in an open and distributed fashion. What’s the role of Free and Open Source GIS software, and where do existing projects need work? Is the “wiki” model right for developing geographic data, or are other models for collaboration more appropriate? What techniques exist for building distributed databases that have application in this domain? What are the security and privacy issues in developing collaborative geographic data sets? What are the licensing and copyright ownership issues? How can we create a profusion of high quality geographic data, well, everywhere?