Institute For The Future

Geodata Obscura

While a new wave of users are geocoding informal or folksonomic contextual information by using new homegrown geotagging extenstions to google maps, del.icio.us and flickr, a legion of geographers, librarians, and computer scientists are quietly building a global library of more traditional digital cartographic data. Meta geographer Michael Goodchild, a leader of some of of the most important efforts recently took an hour to chat with Anthony Townsend and me as part of the Institute for the Future's ongoing research on context awareness...

 

Goodchild described a some dificult challenges ahead in organizing geospatially coded data for contextual applications. Here are a few preliminary notes from our discussion:

 

Currently, public and academic geographers often can't find the existing geodata they need online. There are no comprehensive search engines. The few existing online somewhat searchable "one stop" repositories of public geodata in the US and few other countries mostly offer only their own limited data, not offering scalable linked collections, e.g. limiting offerings of national geodata only or state collections, excluding relevant national geodata, or city specific coverages, or county map collections with no city data,...etc. and narrowly thematic collections at universities and libraries , eg historic geodata, from one region, biologic data from another, none of it, at all indexed for search globally across the web.

 

Here are some of the structural problems: Although a vast amount of digital geodata has been created over the last few decades that might be potentially useful for contextual applications, a very large number of digital cartographers, working in the sciences and public and private sectors haven't been labelling their data - at all - with any identifying meta data, regardless of data formats ... and a large number of geodata collections and archives have no meta data describing the collections themselves of geodata, which may or may not include properly labeled geodata objects.

 

So there is identifiable, but unsearchable data, and unidentifiable, though valid geo data both rendered useless without any descriptive narrative by the cartographer or librarians. So, before public or private agencies can offer public access to contextually useful geodata in their collections, the data has to be rehabilitated.

 

We'll be expanding this discussion later this fall as part of our forecast summaries on the future of context aware environments.