Dublinked IRLOGI Spatial Data Event 19th April 2012
On Thursday 19th April, Dublinked & IRLOGI held a joint spatial data event at Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Council Offices in Dun Laoghaire. The event explored the area of spatial open data, with speakers showcasing useful tools to incorporate when working with spatial data. The event also identified associated challenges and issues in using spatial data. The format presented attendees with the opportunity to listen to spatial data exports, network and participate in breakout discussions under themes of Technical Formats, Aligning INSPIRE & Opendata, Crowdsourcing and GIS actions in eGovernment Action Plan. Speakers on the day included: Martin Charlton National Centre for Geocomputation, NUIM Presentation Title: Spatial Data, 16th Century Dutchmen, GPS & GIS Richard Cantwell GAMMA Presentation Title: Open Geodata- What’s out there? Colin Broderick UrbanRural Presentation Title: My experience of working with data Bruce McCormack IRLOGI Presentation Title: MyPlan.ie – A National Planning Information Infrastructure To view presentation slides, please click Speaker Presentation Title
About Dublinked Dublinked, a new regional data sharing initiative sees previously unreleased public operational data being made available online for others to research or reuse. With the initial data coming from Dublin City Council and Dun Laoghaire Rathdown, South Dublin and Fingal County Councils, it is expected that other public and private organisations in Dublin will link up with Dublinked to share their data and invite research collaborations. The information is curated by NUI Maynooth to ensure ideas can be commercialised as easily as possible and to minimise legal or technical barriers that can be impediments for small and medium businesses (SMEs) seeking to develop and prove business ideas. If you would like to hear about future Dublinked events, send an email to dublinked@nuim.ie to join our mailing list.
Discussion Theme: Aligning Inspire & Opendata Feedback Issue: Metadata There is a need for an alignment of government metadata profiles for data publishing. There was a discussion as to which datasets the Dublinked Metadata profile and the ISDI/INSPIRE Metadata apply to. It was felt that the ISDI profile is a lot more onerous to fill in for local authorities involved in Dublinked and duplication of effort is occurring. The Dublinked datasets on the INSPIRE Monitoring and Reporting list are seen as the minimum required to be filled in with the INSPIRE Profile. It was suggested that after that it is up to individual public authorities to decide their business case & customer need with regards to metadata profiles for spatial data. There was a suggestion for having a common online metadata editor for both profiles. There was a suggestion that there is a need to agree common vocabularies for metadata and data modelling
Issue: Discovery Services There will be a need for alignment of Discovery Services at the national level for spatial and non-spatial government data, i.e. metadata catalogues. Two case studies for Discovery Services highlighted: 1. Data.gov.uk – national catalogue with am Open Data catalogue harvesting from CSW spatial data catalogues. 2. Spatial NI – a CSW spatial data catalogue acting as a centralised metadata repository and supporting the Open Data profile.
Discussion Theme: Aligning Inspire & Opendata Feedback Issue: Data publishing Currently local authorities are asked to publish to many different data projects e.g. myPlan, INSPIRE, Dublinked etc. There is a lot of administration to this. A ‘publish-once and use-many’ service based approach can be catered for by GIS server software, i.e. web services can stream spatial data on the web in many concurrent formats., including Open Data prescribed formats. Common data templates needed at national Level for public authorities. This will streamline data transformation workflows.
Actions needed Spatial data and Open Data publishing and metadata standards need to be coordinated centrally by government and overarching policy is needed.
Theme: Crowdsourcing Issue: Quality & Validation How do you know it is correct Do Local Authorities validate data Copyright considerations
Action Tools inability to counter act this, automated tools. An infrastructure needs to be built in
Issue: Motivation to Share What’s in it for me Functionality issues User friendly interfaces Motivate through education section
Action Make it easy, tools to engage , reward Gameification Identification, Ease, Reward
Issue: Coverage Need to frequently update Don’t leave things out Establish links with groups using crowdsourcing Avoid duplication More public data to be open – open by default
Action Timelines & Maintenance to avoid areas of duplication Networking with groups to grow coverage
Theme: Technical Formats
Issue: Formats for Providers vs Amateurs • Shapefiles are scary to amateurs • QGIS can do most things - there should be a tutorial. • KML has licensing issues and is restricted to WGS84 • Proprietary Issues, problems as each system has preferential treatment of its own
Issue: Metadata • Should Explain better what is in there, not just a descriptor • Need to know assumptions inherent in the data • There are Issues that are difficult Capture • Scale of data (resolution, for example 10000:1 or 100:1) • Need to Share experiences – Issues such as scale assumptions
Other Actions: QGIS for dummies needed (uni) Screencast of 10min for tools Need more explanation of basic tools
Theme: eGovernment Action Plan – Digital Mapping/ GIS Issue: What is the definition of data to be released Is it all data? Just electronic data? Do we have to release all of our data?
Action: Initially we are only concerned with digital data. The eGovernment Action Plan states that public bodies will be required to identify datasets that they hold and release these by default – it should be clarified it this solely refers to digital data. The eGovernment Action Plan states that all newly released data should be made available as Open Data and over time additional data for release should be identified.
Issue: At what level should data be published – Local, Regional, National? While Dublinked is great, is there any other mechanism for publishing data? We need to ensure that we don’t have duplication of datasets in multiple locations – ideally data should be made available via a web service to be consumed by online services and applications
Action: The Government has announced that there will be National data portal available via www.gov.ie – it is important that this is followed through. Ideally, data should be published as close to source as possible, but made available for discovery at all levels through aggregated data catalogues
Theme: eGovernment Action Plan – Digital Mapping/ GIS
Issue: Data Protection Issues relating to Data Protection need to be clarified. Some datasets might appear to be suitable for release but might not be appropriate e.g Record of Protected Structures datasets contain information about people’s private residences It is not appropriate to release personal information, etc
Action: Guidance should be produced on releasing data including what is and what is not appropriate. Templates should be developed for the release of common datasets to ensure consistency – especially for Local Authority datasets as there are 32 different Authorities who will all be releasing data independently
Issue: Data & Commercial Semi-State Companies Is there any possibility of having data released from the commercial semi-state companies – particularly infrastructure data from the likes of Bord Gáis, ESB, etc.
Action: This would be desirable and it is something that Dublinked can pursue. However, it should be noted that the eGovernment Action Plan does not apply to commercial semi-state companies.
Issue: Location Identifier in eGovernment Action Plan What is meant by a Location Identifier in the eGovernment Action plan and how is this different from Postcodes.
Action: It was the opinion of the group that the best location identifier is the X,Y coordinates of the location.
Theme: eGovernment Action Plan – Digital Mapping/ GIS Issue: Legislation & Data Sharing How does current legislation deal with data sharing?
Action: Data sharing is enabled by the Re-Use of Public Sector Information Directive as transposed into Irish Law www.psi.gov.ie and can also be done in accordance with the principles of Freedom of Information legislation www.foi.gov.ie All data sharing must comply with Data Protection legislation www.dataprotection.ie
Issue: Implementation What’s to prevent the eGovernment Action Plan from just sitting on a shelf?
Action: The plan includes an implementation section which requires all Public Bodies to develop detailed eGovernment Plans to implement the outlined actions. They are also required to report on progress to CMOD.
Callan Institute National University of Ireland Maynooth Maynooth County Kildare Ireland
www.dublinked.ie dublinked@nuim.ie Twitter: @dublinked