There is still no wifi at XTech.

Schuyler Erle from MetaCarta, wrote Mapping Hacks and Google Maps Hacks. Disappointed that Steve Coast was unable to make it…

maps tell stories – two dimensional narrative about place.

“maps provide a bounding box for a story” – Aaron Strauss Cope yesterday

everyobody has a story to tell, every story happens somewhere… and everybody should be able to tell their stories on a map.

but maps were hard.

but software can now encapsulate some of that expertise. eg Google Maps apis gave access to mapping capability to many…

However – you can’t make a map without data

Traditional geodata collection – involved surveyors, aerial imagery, satellite imagery, etc.

Traditionally a one way street – professionals collected and compiled data, and then passed on/sold a finished product for constrained – licensed – use. Geographic data is owned.

UK-wide OS costs £100,000,000 pa; that is a barrier to innovation. OFT – £1bn pa detriment to UK plc. OS says £100bn pa Gross Value Add. So the data more than ‘pays for itself’ in VAT returns.

“the more people that have access to a bit of information, the more valuable that information is” (Ed Parsons, ‘metcalfe’s law applied to data’)

Data is a ‘non-rival good’

publicgeodata.org / freeourdata.org

US Public Sector Information market 5x size of that in the EU… – because it’s free? Average age of US topographic map… about 25 years old. OS data more current. Gaps in tiger/line data… only collected to locate households for the census. No State remit to ensure coherence.

Therefore… is there an incentive for Benkler’s ‘commons-based peer production’ to fill the gaps? [from a paper] More efficient at labour allocation; individuals can decide how to contribute. Not limited by market forces. Not limited by administrative overhead within an organisation.

Open StreetMap – map the world, and release the data under an open licence. Free. Up to date. ‘Easily’ corrected. Occasionally apocryphal. Gaping holes. Inconsistent. Always susceptible to improvement.

A means of self-correction? Checks and balances to monitor accidental or deliberate degradation. Community of interest. Architecture of participation. Tags used on attributes in database, but rather chaotic implementation. Now seeing documentation of shared views of the ‘right’ tags.

Is CC BY-SA right? Not just data v creative work… but implications for aggregated works…

Differential quality – will you ever be able to rely upon it? Accurate enough for what ?

‘they who control the map, control reality’

Technorati Tags: Linked Data, open data, Talis, xtech, XTech2007