Spatial Information in the 21st Century

How many Spatial Information organisations in Australia?

2011-08-24T15:33:00.002+10:00

This question was posed on Twitter by @WALISForum, at the beginning of day 2 of the ISDE7 conference in Perth.

This got me thinking. My initial reaction was: "Way too many". But how better to actually find out, than by crowdsourcing the answer to this question.

For the purposes of this exercise, we’ll define ‘spatial organization’ as:

“Any organization whose mission includes furthering the cause of the Surveying and Spatial Information industry in Australia, without being a for-profit or operational entity”

My rules also say that to be included, the organisation will need to have a valid, working website.

I've made a start, see the quick list below. Current count is 29. Know of another one that qualifies? Please comment below, or tweet me @mvandervlugt.

(I still think it's way too many - The more bodies, the more dysfunctional the industry?)

Here we go:

Industry Bodies (7)

SIBA – Spatial Information Business Association
SSSI – Surveying & Spatial Sciences Institute
GITA - Geospatial Information & Technology Association
SEAC - Spatial Education Advisory Committee
ASIERA - Australasian Spatial Information Education and Research Association
Mapping Sciences Institute of Australia
ANZMS - Australian and New Zealand Map Society

Federal Government (4)

OSP - Office of Spatial Policy
ANZLIC - ANZLIC - the Spatial Information Council
ASC - Australian Spatial Consortium
ICSM - Intergovernmental Committee on Surveying & Mapping

State (13)

ACSNSW - Consulting Surveyors NSW
CSA – Country Surveyors NSW
ACSV – Association of Consulting Surveyors Victoria
ICSV – Institution of Surveyors Victoria (yes, you’re reading this correctly: there are two!)
Association of Consulting Surveyors Queensland
Association of Consulting Surveyors Northern Territories
Association of Consulting Surveyors South Australia
WALIS (WA)
NSW Spatial Council (CS2i)
Victorian Spatial Council (Vic)
QSIC - Queensland Spatial Information Council
SMIC – Surveying and Mapping Council of NSW
BOSSI - Board of Surveying and Spatial Information (NSW)

Local (2)

DIGGARS – Downs Interest Group for GIS and Remote Sensing
FUNGIS – Far North GIS Users Group

Other (3)

CRC-SI - Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information
AGTA - Australian Geography Teachers' Association
GeoRabble - An open and inclusive forum for GeoGeeks to share, inspire and have fun

Know of another one that qualifies? Please comment below, or tweet me @mvandervlugt.

Rockstars, Google goes SDI, and DIY Panoramas

2011-04-25T12:40:00.004+10:00

Wrap-up of Where 2.0, 19-21 April 2011

After Tuesday's workshops, Where 2.0 really kicked off of Wednesday. Two things immediately became apparent. Firstly: some of these young entrepreneurs are revered as rock stars. The only thing missing in the opening interview with Foursquare's CEO Dennis Crowley were the screaming teenagers.

Secondly, every self-respecting LBS product company uses the conference for a product launch. Thus we saw exciting new products & capabilities from established players like Microsoft, Nokia, ESRI and Google, and about a million start-ups.

And of course, this was the conference where the iPhone tracking 'scandal' was revealed. If you've been living under a pebble: unbeknown to most of us, iPhones and iPads track and store your location, unencrypted. It’s very easy for others (employers, suspicious partners) to read this.

By the way, lost in the debate, Android phones do the same thing, and actually send the data back to Google every few hours. Would you be happy to share all your movements with Apple or Google?

So what will the location industry bring us over the next 12 months?

At an enterprise level, the launch of Google Earth Builder (available Q3 2011) will be most disruptive to the GIS industry. Remember how for the last 10-15 odd years, the GIS community has been attempting to put geospatial data online, make it discoverable and have it displayed quickly and easily? Despite some good technology and in some cases (e.g. INSPIRE) lots of money, none of these attempts really took off (why not, is something worthy of another post, or even a book or two).

Google Earth Builder will solve that problem. It allows anyone to publish and share spatial data: points of interest, vectors and imagery. And everything is automatically indexed so it’s searchable (indeed: no ISO Metadata required!), automatically georeferenced, reprojected and (voila) displayed in Google Earth or Maps. Oh, and it sits on Google's cloud: so no storage, scaling or performance headaches anymore.

Interesting little fact is that one of its first (beta) users is Australia's own Ergon Energy.

Among the many other amazing technology launches, the one that stood out for me was http://uscapeit.com/. Believe it or not: this app allows you to generate immersive, 3D panoramas, straight from your iPhone. In minutes. For free. For real. Try it!

There were too many other great talks, announcements and launches to mention now. But you can see the slides and videos here.

Where 2.0 - Summary of Day 1

2011-04-21T07:02:00.000+10:00

For the second consecutive year, I am attending O' Reilly's 7th Where 2.0 Conference in California. As I mentioned last year, this conference is a geo-Geek Walhalla. This is where you meet all the big mobile and neo-geography players, and learn about the 'next big thing' (see also 'sites of the day' below).

Of course, the conference is super-connected and hi-tech. Free wi-fi everywhere, under-seat powerpoints and live video streams that are also archived.

This leads to some amazing multi-tasking. I saw the guy next to me write his report of an acquisition announcement as it happened, and publishing it as soon as it was done!

Day one was the pre-conference workshop day, with workshops on a range of topics, including the Twitter Geo-stream, Map Scripting, HTML5 and Google Fusion Tables.

As a non-technical geo-geek (is there such a beast?), I was most interested by the session on Location-based Privacy, run by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Though it might sound a little dull and boring (it was run by lawyers after all), I found it very enlightening.

In very articulate, plain English, the speakers highlighted:

You need to care about privacy as a developer/custodian, because your user do;

Most privacy laws precede modern location based services, and are therefore outdated;

Most of us are not aware what sites may do with our private data; and

There are a lot of examples of bad and good practice.

To help with the latter, the ACLU provides a 'comparison chart' of location-based privacy issues for 5 Social Media sites, including Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter here.

Sites of the day

Of all the new sites and apps that were shown today, two stand out for me:

http://geoloqi.com/ If you’re now (rightly) more worried about privacy, Geoloci enables private & secure location sharing within your network, and more.
http://www.localmind.com/ - A service that lets you find out what's happening at a certain place, by asking people who are checked-in at that specific location

More cool sites and links tomorrow, including the launch of Google Earth Builder and how to record 3D streetscapes with your iPhone. Watch this space...

Bushfire Connect - Trust, Transparency & Timeliness

2011-03-23T17:46:00.000+11:00

Today I presented Bushfire Connect to the 'Innovative Emergency Management' conference in Sydney. During this two-day conference, several speakers brought up issues around community resilience, the changing behavioural and technological context for Emergency Managers and the need for communities to self-organise in the face of more frequent and more extreme natural disasters.

All this was a perfect lead-in for Bushfire Connect. As the slides show (see below), I was able to segue in with a quote from an earlier speaker Craig Lapsley, Victorian Fire Services Commissioner, who said that "there is a need for change", and "...empower communities with Timely, Relevant and Tailored information".

Bushfire Connect does exactly that: collecting and sharing timely and relevant information, and delivering tailored alerts to the community.

It was very encouraging to find fertile ground among the audience consisting largely of hard-core Emergency Managers. Positive experiences, questions and suggestions from the room. Would we have seen the same response 12 months ago?

Who knows. One thing is for sure, with every disaster, from Queensland to Christchurch and Japan, the role of Social media is increasing and becoming more and more sophisticated.

Bushfire Connect - Trust, Transparency & Timeliness

View more presentations from Maurits van der Vlugt.

Atlas of NSW a Pleasant Surprise

2011-03-06T22:35:00.002+11:00

Last month, the NSW government launched its online Atlas (in Beta). Developed under the radar, it would have taken many by surprise. And surprise me it did. Not in the least because government mapping sites, especially in NSW, need to be viewed with a healthy dose of suspicion. With a few exceptions, we have over the years been underwhelmed with clunky, slow, unusable and unmaintained mapping initiatives that – if they are still around – are gathering dust, rather than servicing taxpayers.

So I had a look at the NSW Atlas with some trepidation and maybe a little sense of impending doom. However, I was pleasantly surprised with that I saw, though there are a few concerns.

The Atlas of NSW does many things right. First and foremost: it’s an actual Atlas in the proper sense of the word; that is it presents information in a number of topics, where appropriate in map form. Thus the information provision is the starting point of the Atlas, and the mapping functionality (part static maps, part dynamic through the ‘Atlas Explorer’) is quite rightly subservient to this.

Secondly, the site is slick, well designed and performs fast, including the Atlas Explorer, which zooms, pans and redraws layers at a speed that we’ve become used to from Google Maps.

All in all, it’s a good-looking and fun resource to explore, with topics ranging from Economy, Elections, Environment, and History, to People. The content is illustrated with plenty of well-designed maps and infographics such as this trade-routes map.

Having heaped all this praise on the NSW Land and Property Management Authority (LPMA) who published the Atlas, now is a good time to voice thee key concerns I have with the site:

Conceptually, the Atlas is very similar to the Australian Natural Resources Atlas, which was launched about a decade ago. At the time, ANRA was ground breaking, but as a static snapshot, it was not maintainable and the data quickly became outdated and 'stale'. In that context, it must be hoped that LPMA have a good maintenance plan (and budget!) in place, or risk a very short Atlas lifespan;
As the latest Apps4NSW contest (and many similar initiatives) has shown, making government data available under a gov 2.0 agenda, works best when the raw data is published in addition to sophisticated viewing applications such as the Atlas, preferably as web services. I’m giving LPMA the benefit of the doubt here (despite previous track record), and am looking forward to seeing the dataservices in the next release, so that the (mobile) app developer community can go knock themselves out;
And finally one of my pet soapbox issues: “thou shalt not visualise absolute values in choropleth maps”. Choropleth (shaded area) maps are not meant to be used for the presentation of graded absolute values such as total population. This presentation provokes a wrong data interpretation.

Look at this example from the Atlas – a map of Total Population. The darker blue area is the Shire of Cobar. To the East is Bogan Council. Clearly lots of people more in the Cobar area, right? Well, yes and no. You will notice that Bogan covers a much smaller area, it is actually only 1/3 of the size of Cobar. So though Cobar has more people (5200 over 3000), its population density is only half that of Bogan (0.11 people per km2, with 0.21 people per km2 for Bogan). So, on average, Bogan has almost twice as many people on its land surface than Cobar.
That is why every cartographic textbook will tell you that Choropleth maps should only be used for relative data such as population density, labour participation rates, or average family income.

But hey, in this era of spin, maps can lie just as easily as statistics.

Sydney Geo-events in March and April

2011-02-28T18:16:00.001+11:00

You can be forgiven for thinking that of all the state capitals, Sydney is the sleepy hollow of GIS location innovation and associated events. For a while, Sydney had Ignite Spatial, but that quietly went away, as did the SSI Young Spatial Professionals events.

However, for some reason the planets seem to align this March and April and there are a raft of interesting (and informal) geo-events on the agenda:

http://GeoRabble.org

9 March: GITA GIS drinks with Neatstreets' Neil Kuruppu (FREE EVENT)
16 March: SSSI twilight seminar: "The Fire Season 2011 - and what it means to you"
16 March: Inaugural GeoRabble evening: "An open and inclusive forum for GeoGeeks to share, inspire and have fun" (FREE EVENT)
22 March: State Library Map Section Tour (Limited Numbers)
10-15 April: "34th International Symposium on Remote Sensing of Environment"
13 April: SSSI twilight seminar: "An Introduction to Mashups - Ad Hoc Mapping"

Not bad huh? I will be at the inaugural GeoRabble event on the 16th, which promises to be something new, fun and exciting.

See you there!

Bushfire Connect goes ‘live’

2011-02-07T18:19:00.001+11:00

http://bushfireconnect.org

After more than 6 months of preparations, today saw the first ‘live’ action of http://bushfireconnect.org, a not-for-profit website to report and share (hyper-) local news and updates on bushfires in Australia.

Driven fully by volunteers, Bushfire Connect (BFC) integrates citizen reporting with official agency information, and allows anyone to subscribe to receive customised alerts via email or SMS.

It was great to see that despite BFC being spawned in Victoria, West Australians picked up on its potential and started reporting on the devastating fires raging around Perth at the moment. Traffic to the site is peaking attracting hundreds of unique visitors on its first day in action. The servers are coping admirably so far.

I must say I feel really pumped to get to this point, having worked with a really great bunch of volunteers who all donated lots of their spare time for this cause. The team page on our blog is unfortunately not up to date, so I hereby extend my deep gratitude to all of you:

Daniela Fernandez (Sydney)
Keren Flavell (Melbourne)
Serene Ho (Melbourne)
Anthony Joseph (Sydney)
Darren Mottolini (joining us today from Perth to moderate WA reports)
Vicky Pinpin-Feinstein (Sydney)
Martin Tomko (Zurich & Melbourne)

And lastly to Ushahidi’s Patrick Meier for bringing the original team together back in May 2010, and being there for lots of advice.

Australian Floods - Overview of online (mapping) resources

2011-01-11T15:54:00.014+11:00

[Last updated 14 Jan 2011, 3:40 PM AEDST]

Source: smh.com.au

There is an abundance of information and mapping resources springing up online to deal with the

ongoing Australian floods.

I have compiled an overview of online resources that can assist the affected communities in dealing with this disaster while it happens, and in the aftermath.

NOTE - RESOURCE LISTINGS HAVE BEEN MOVED TO REGION SPECIFIC PAGES:

As resources will come and go, this will be a bit of a moving feast, but with your help, I will try & keep it as current and accurate as possible.

If you have any suggestions or links to be added, please comment below, or send me a tweet (@mvandervlugt) or email (mauritsrutger -at- gmail.com).

And please share these pages with others!

Vision on "SDI 2.0"

2011-01-10T12:35:00.028+11:00

At last November's annual conference of the CRC for Spatial Information, I presented a vision on "SDI 2.0", or what Spatial Data Infrastructures will look like in the 21st Century.

There will be a shift from SDI 1.0: top-down, supply driven, slow and expensive initiatives, that mainly generate a flurry of (user-less?) YAPs (Yet Another Portal), to SDI 2.0, which is demand driven, mobile, crowd-sourced, cheap and immediate. In SDI 2.0, the default 'authoritative source' is no longer assumed to be a government department or large commercial provider.

SDI 2.0 will harness the forces of Web 2.0 and neo-geography, where there is less and less distinction between users and consumers of geodata. There will be a long tail of many producers of little amounts of data and small applications and mash-ups. This dramatically shifts the demands on government, industry and data providers, who ignore these trends at their peril.

You can watch the slides below, or download them here.

CRC-SI Soapbox Presentation on SDI 2.0

View more presentations from Maurits van der Vlugt.

PSMA, Sensis or OpenStreetMap: what makes Spatial Data “Authoritative”?

2011-01-04T14:06:00.001+11:00

You are probably aware that recently in Australia, Google switched map data providers. They ditched the government owned data provider PSMA in favour of Sensis' Whereis, and this data will (at least in part) be maintained by users themselves.

The switch has created a bit of a stir in the Australian spatial information community. Our industry association (SIBA) sent out a stern word of warning about authoritative data and the risks of dealing with User Generated Content (UGC).

Firstly, let’s recognise that Google Australia is not alone in moving to a model where it’s reducing dependency on 3rd party content providers. Since 2009, Google worldwide has been sourcing its own streetmaps, and making them updateable by its users . And major online mappers such as Mapquest and Microsoft’s Bing Maps have already adopted the free, crowdsourced basemaps from OpenStreetMap.

Now why would they do this? There is of course the driver to reduce commercial dependencies. But more importantly: these companies recognise that crowdsourcing spatial data is not only much cheaper, but also much quicker. You can read blogger James Fee’s excellent analysis on this phenomenon.

The second thing to note here is the implicit assumption about what makes spatial datasets authoritative. In warning about the risks of using UGC, SIBA writes:

“In applications where data integrity/quality is of high importance, spatial data should be current, accurate, the best quality possible and from an authoritative source.”

Actually, there are two assumptions hidden in this statement: (1) crowdsourced data is not authoritative, and (2) only authoritative sources can provide data that is current, accurate and of the highest possible quality. However, neither of these two assumptions really stand up to scrutiny.

Crowdsourcing has given us the concept of ‘decentralised authority’, where the confidence in an (online) information source is derived from the community that maintains it, instead from the reputation or mandate of a central organisation. The success of Wikipedia over its traditional counterpart the Encyclopaedia Britannica is the most well-known of many such examples.

What’s more, UGC often provides us with content that is more accurate, and certainly more current than traditionally sourced data. Where updates such as new roads or developments typically take over 6 months to make it to the PSMA datasets, they are visible in OpenStreetMap almost instantaneously. It’s been reported to me that in for instance in Brisbane OpenStreetMap is routinely more up to date than other sources.

For many users data currency is a critical component in determining quality and fitness for purpose. To suggest that only so-called ‘authoritative’ providers can give us ‘the best quality possible’ represents a rather limited perspective.

Bloody Big Deal: European Union extends Quality of Service regulations for Geodata Network Services

2010-12-21T18:25:00.001+11:00

Last week, the EU issued a directive to extend its Quality of Service regulations for Geodata Services. This directive adds specifications for download and transformation services to the 'discovery' and 'view' services that were regulated in 2009.

Though this event earned little more than the odd footnote in the industry press and blogosphere, it is actually a bloody big deal. The directive sets specific minimum parameters for performance, capacity and availability of geospatial services published by EU governments. And these are binding.

So why is this so important? Well, it enforces a change of mindset with the publishing agencies. They are now forced to engage in a 'contract' with their users and live up to that. What's more: users can complain and take providers to task. This is also know as 'accountability', and tends to scare the bejesus out of government agencies.

On the flip side of course: users can now start confidently building applications that rely on a minimum performance and availability of the underlying government services.

This is exactly why such regulations should be a critical part of the regulatory environment for an Australian and/or New Zealand spatial infrastructure, if we're ever going to see one of those. Though the Kiwi's seem to be very much on the front foot.

The regulations provide minimum benchmarks for performance (response times under 'normal' circumstances), capacity (number of simultaneous requests to be serviced without degradation) and availability (minimum percentage up-time). They will come in force in staggered intervals from 2011.

More diversity needed at Spatial@Gov

2010-10-10T20:03:00.013+11:00

Day three heralded the graveyard shift for the speakers at Spatial-at-gov 2010. It was a case of speaking in the morning, while delegates were still fuzzy after the night before, or speaking in the afternoon, when everyone's waiting to go home.

I had the morning slot, in the government 2.0 stream, to talk about Where 2.0 and Neogeography. Despite geo-beers the night before, the room was full, and the audience seemed attentive to hear about Paradigm shifts and Bushfire Connect. The slides can be found here.

After lunch the day dwindled on, while the exhibitors were packing up. Everyone was looking out for the closing plenary, and -of course- farewell drinks.

With a topic named "Aligning the Spatial Capabilities of the Three Tiers of Government", the closing panel discussion was doomed to fail, despite facilitator Gary Nairn's best efforts. It didn’t help that really only one (federal) tier of government was present. Panellist Drew Clarke tried to stir things up by stating that government should reconsider its role: become more of a regulator and enabler, while leaving implementation and innovation to industry. The rest of the panel hosed him down quickly.

The panel discussion's fizzle was also due to a notable lack of diversity. Made up of four Anglo Saxon males of over 45 years old, representing (semi-) government institutions, there was never going to be a wide spectrum of viewpoints, let alone any real debate . While useful from a point of self-affirmation, it didn’t contribute to a very entertaining conference close.

Thus, my suggestions to the organisers for next year's event include:

Entertaining discussions with diverse panels. Watch ABC's Q&A for ideas;

Break through the Death by Powerpoint, by having one or more Ignite or Pecha Kucha sessions;
Deploy Social Media and Web 2.0: Twitter walls, Facebook event pages, Free Wifi, etc.

See you next year: 15-17 November 2011

Spatial@Gov - Day 2

2010-10-07T09:08:00.002+11:00

The second day of the Spatial-at-gov conference was the first 'real' conference day. A morning of keynotes and an afternoon of parallel sessions, followed by the Conference Dinner, which doubled as the annual Spatial Excellence awards night.

To a large extent, it was business as usual for a typical spatial event: lots of inward looking observations, lamenting that our industry remains so misunderstood, and mild outrage if someone dares to mispronounce (or take the Mickey out of) our beloved SSSI. Oh, and death by PowerPoint. Slow and painful.
The good thing of course is that in this context, the positive highlights really stand out. With four parallel session in the afternoon, I'm sure I have missed one or two, but these are the ones I noticed:

Westport's Michael Haines' keynote on his vision of a 'Virtual Australia' was a breath of fresh air. The main reason being that he's not one of us! Westport has a real, massive logisitical problem to deal with, and is turning to experts from many domains, including the spatial industry, to help fix it. He wants to build an accurate and topographically correct virtual model of the greater Melbourne area to simulate different transport and planning scenarios.

An outsider armed with a real, quantifiable business case is someone we should embrace warmly!
Late in the afternoon, I attended Peter Bayley's (OpenEarth) Smart Images presentation. The first truly innovative thing I saw at the conference so far. In short (and I'm not doing it full justice), smart images give you all the benefits of dumb images (e.g. portability), but add data and functionality to the image file. Modern browsers will then let you not only view the image, but also access the underlying data, perform analysis, build DEMs, or whatever you can think of.

It's like GeoPDF on steroids. Watch this space!
My highlight of the awards night was Stuart Nixon's acceptance speech after winning the "Professional Eminence and Excellence in Spatial Sciences" awards. A serial, and highly successful entrepeneur, he wasted no time pointing out that if we really want to achieve success as Australians, the last place we want to be is in Australia! Or as he put it: "Australia is not a market, it's a testbed". Amen

Did you spot the common theme? All three are pointing to innovations and opportunities outside of our known world and comfort zone. I for one will try and follow their lead.

Spatial@Gov - Day 1

2010-10-06T09:05:00.002+11:00

Yesterday the 2nd spatial@gov conference kicked off in Canberra, with among other events, an open day, a series of workshops and presentations, and the highly anticipated launch of the Bureau of Meteorology's GeoFabric.

The Open Day was a great initiative, allowing non-delegates to visit the exhibition and mingle. It worked well for especially locals to drop by, see the booths and the people, without having to pay the registration fee (even though these are very reasonable for a conference this size). Likewise, the exhibitors benefit from the extra traffic, and delegates like me from a larger networking audience. Win-win-win.

I then attended the ERDAS workshop in the afternoon. I thought I was going to be bombarded with hard-sell on their Apollo Suite. In part that was true (why won't salespeople learn that listening is often the best sales tool), but I was very pleasantly surprised by inspiring talks from guest speakers Gary Nairn and OGC's Steven Ramage. Gary spoke on SDI and lamented the lack of vision with Infrastructure Australia to recognise soft and smart infrastructure. Steven has a new role in OGC, coordinating and promoting the business aspects of spatial standards. Steven's main message was that in order to promote technology and standards, we have to focus on the business case and demonstrate the (economic) benefits in specific application domains or communities of practice. Nothing new you might think? Yet still very little adhered to in practice.

Finally, the ERDAS tech team Rob Clout and Chris Tweedie gave a mildly chaotic product demonstration. The one thing that blew me away though was the performance of the ERDAS tile server, exposed through an OGC WMTS service. WMTS does to OGC standards what Google Maps did to web-mapping: it makes it fast and sexy. Viewed on Google maps, and through a 3G card, the Apollo WMTS tiles just seemed to fly onto the screen, and easily kept up with Chris Tweedie's rapid zooming and panning. Awesome!

At the end of the day, people gathered in the exhibition room for drinks and the official launch of the Bureau of Meteorology's Australian Hydrological Geospatial Fabric (Geofabric). Though the launch itself was drowned (pardon the pun) a little in the lack of space and decent audio equipment, this doesn’t make it a less significant achievement. The Geofabric gives Australia for the first time in history a complete, fundamental and interconnected dataset of all surface water features, without which no serious national water observations, modelling or prediction would be possible.

Dare I say the Geofabric is a critical cornerstone of a national soft, and smart infrastructure?

Watch this space for more updates in the coming days…

"Random Hacks of Kindness" comes to Sydney

2010-06-08T15:11:00.003+10:00

Last weekend, 40 committed volunteers came together at the University of New South Wales' Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship to participate in what's geekily known as a 'Hack-a-thon'.

After a successful first event last year in the USA, Random Hacks of Kindness this year went global, organising hacking events with multiple global locations bringing together developers from all over the world to hack on real-world problems. Over the weekend, groups were working away in Washington DC, Jakarta, Nairobi, Sao Paolo, Porta Alegre, Santiago de Chile, and of course, Sydney.

The Sydney team tackled no less than 6 different projects (see them all here), ranging from tools to find beds for volunteers, tracking where your aid money is spent, to "Bushfire Connect" - a tool for building community resilience for the next Victorian Bushfire Season.

Videos showing the teams at work as well as presenting their results are all on this YouTube Channel.

As one of the initiators of "Bushfire Connect", I am really excited that by Sunday evening, the team had managed to install, deploy and customise a proof-of-concept Ushahidi instance for presenting real time information submitted by local community members and emergency agencies.

We know when bushfires happen, people want fast access to trustworthy information. Bushfire Connect aggregates information from multiple sources: official and social, about events and incidents such as community meetings, fires, and road closures, in a way that empowers anyone to contribute local knowledge and make informed decisions.

Feel free contact me if you want to learn more about Bushfire Connect.

There were many people responsible for making this event a success, too many to mention them all. However, a special mention should go out to Martin Bliemel from CIE and Heather Leson from CrisisCommons for their tireless efforts.

Photo: Martin Bliemel

Neo-geography by numbers

2010-05-09T19:01:00.005+10:00

I've always believed life's a numbers game (OK, accuse me of being a left-brained rationalist) - look at it: elections, the economy, 'all good things come in threes', online poker, and the list goes on.

So, as a bit of entertainment, let's look at some topics in neo-geography by counting up. This post will go from two to four, and I'll be happy to take suggestions for topics for number five and further (though I have some wicked ideas already).

TWO paradigm shifts

In my previous post, I identify two key paradigm shifts in Neo-Geography. The first one is the shift away from digital maps emulating paper maps. Digital maps are becoming spatial canvases for collecting, searching, exploring, integrating, and sharing information. The second paradigm shift is the one where location-based systems (particularly mobile) are no longer about exploring 'somewhere else', but about getting information about 'where I am now'.

THREE trends on how local governments can adopt Geospatial Web 2.0 platforms

That doesn't roll of the tongue very well, and is unlikely to impress that cute girl in the bar on a Friday night. Nevertheless, this chapter from a report by Sukumar Ganapati (hint: scroll to the end) does a good job identifying three important trends in neo-geography that will empower (local) governments implementing better citizen participation.

Firstly: the ability to make (GIS) data available as online services (i.e. machine readable APIs), greatly enhances transparency.

Second: tapping into information collected by citizens is much easier with location enabled mobile phones, theoretically turning every citizen into a human sensor reporting anything from potholes to bushfires or traffic jams.

Thirdly: enhancing Citizen Participation in Decision Making. This is currently least developed, but the potential, for instance in collaborative urban planning, is enormous.

The FOUR Cs of Spatially Enabled Government

These were presented by Warwick Watkins, NSW Surveyor General, in his keynote at the FIG2010 conference in Sydney last Month.

These Cs combine to form the four critical ingredients for successfully spatially enabling government.

The Cloud not only lowers the threshold for governments to participate, by offering functionality and through subscription services, but also greatly enhances the access to base data such as Bing Maps or Google Maps.

Which segues into Content: make sure you offer as much as you can, update regularly, and (often overlooked) don't worry about the visualisation. Content is king, leave the development of viewers and portals to the users.

Which brings us to Code: the provision of online service APIs is what enables user communities to adapt your content, mash-it up to their heart's delight and use it for purposes we could not have begun to imagine!

Finally, Commons refers to the need for good, consistent and standardised governance, and licensing that protects IP while maximising take-up.

(this summary is mine, and not taken verbatim from Warwick's Keynote)

The Paradigm Shifts of Neo-Geography

2010-04-14T11:06:00.002+10:00

Attending the world-wide Surveying and Spatial Information Conference FIG2010 this week in Sydney, I can't help but notice a growing divide between the traditional GIS and Surveying community and the rapidly evolving world of 'neo-geography', represented at the Where 2.0 conference just before Easter.

What sets these two apart, other than the average age of the delegates (about 60 and 30 respectively), is the way they approach the paradigm of computerised mapping.

The traditional paradigm is one of emulating the pre-computerised science and practices in an automated environment. In other words: creating an interactive equivalent of the paper map, preferably with overlayed 'acetate layers'.

The neo-geography world is characterised by two key paradigm shifts. The first is the concept of the map as (literally) a 'place-holder'. The map forms the spatial canvas for collecting, searching, exploring, integrating, and sharing information. For example, this paradigm is demonstrated by two Where 2.0 talks: Jack Dangermond's ArcGIS.com launch and Google's Michael Jones' "the new meaning of mapping".

Though I consider it a major shift, this paradigm still shares with paper maps and 'traditional GIS' the concept of using the map to convey information about places that are typically away from my current location. And it is still very much 'map-centric'.

The second paradigm shift was very well presented by Google Australia's Raul Vera's keynote at FOSS4G Sydney last year. It is the shift away from the map-centric viewpoint. Ubiquitous, location aware mobile devices are in our pockets today. That means firstly that all of a sudden we typically want information about where we are now, not about somewhere else: the special offers at the nearest coffeeshop, the names of the stars we see at night or when the next bus arrives. What's more, most of the time this information is best communicated by text, voice or images: there is no map in sight. In this paradigm location is 'just' an attribute, a bit of metadata, or an input parameter. And by making the location attribute, along with base data services, freely available through APIs, we can leave to the developer community at large to develop the next 'killer app'.

"Ignite Where" Rocks!

2010-04-06T22:18:00.003+10:00

One of the many highlights of the Where 2.0 conference was definitely the "Ignite Where" evening.

If you have not heard about ignite before, check out this previous post.

Having attended a few Ignite events in Sydney and Perth, I thought it would be nice to try my hand at presenting here. It provided a comfortable and relatively neutral, opportunity to try out one of my favourite soap box topics: is the surveying industry stimulating or instead holding back innovation in spatial information in Australia? Judge for yourself here.

Other than mine, there were no fewer than another 13 Ignite presentations in San Jose that evening. Without fail, they were inspiring, humbling or outright exceptional. You can check them all out here.

These are my favourites.

Inspiring: Jonathan Stark's case against Apple's App Store, in which he argues its proprietary and commercial nature is stifling innovation.
Humbling: Ushahidi's Patrick Meier on how people all over the world joined forces to support the search & rescue teams in Haiti with crowdsourced geo-information, actually saving lives! Keep an eye out for Patrick, we will be welcoming him to Australia in July.
Exceptional: Open Source guru Paul Ramsey's very original take on a well-known issue: we all know your data is not perfect, so be a man and fess up to it!

Reverse Geocoding the Twitter Geo-Stream

2010-04-01T11:57:00.003+11:00

I'm at O' Reilly's Where 2.0 2010 Conference in San Jose, California. It's a great event: absolute geo-geek heaven. There's a multitude of technologists around, and all the big players in online and social media(Google, Bing, Twitter, Foursquare etc.) have their 'Directors of Geo' present.

The conference is a breath of fresh air after a few too many GIS conferences in Australia which (to be honest) are getting rather boring after more of the same presentations on spatial database management, web-mapping and failed metadata projects. It makes no difference really whether you go to the WALIS Forum, SSC, FIG or Spatial at Gov.

Conversely, Where2.0 is about geotagging tweets, embedding real-time video in Bing maps and crowdsourcing roadmaps in earthquake-ravished Haiti. In other words: Cool Stuff!

The conference goes on for three days, and these are my impressions of day one:

The most interesting presentation for me was by Raffi Krikorian from Twitter on handling what he calls "real-time geo-streams". Since Twitter enabled geo-tagging last year, they have generated an avalanche of 140-character events in time and space. This generates endless opportunities, for instance in emergency management.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mager/4476018907/sizes/o/

What really struck me though is that when the Twitter Geo-Team realised they needed to translate the geotag coordinates to understandable placenames (i.e. reverse geocoding).

Twitter's decision seems to go completely against the grain of best practice principles of distributed web services such as custodianship: let the local providers with the local knowledge collect and maintain their own data. When asked about this, Raffi explained rather laconically that "it was just easier to integrate with our other systems this way, and sometimes we just do crazy things".

I guess if you have this much clout (cloud?), you can make calls like that. The future will tell if they can afford to continue down this road.

Spatial Information is the key to Smart Infrastructure

2010-03-16T12:09:00.004+11:00

Last Friday (12/3/2010) I had the pleasure of attending the "Smart Infrastructure Conference" in Canberra, hosted by the House Standing Committee on Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government. The conference was part of the parliamentary inquiry into Smart Infrastructure, which (in short) tells the government how best to implement and maximise the benefits from Smart Infrastructure, such as dynamic train management, smart utility grids or hydrological sensor networks.

Image Source: www.lbxjournal.com/node/260011

Many representatives, like me, would have come to parliament house with some trepidation. Only last year Infrastructure Australia published its recommendation for national infrastructure priorities, which focused almost exclusively on "hard" infrastructure investments, that is steel, concrete and fibre. This despite many passionate submissions (such as this one from Gary Nairn) from the ICT and Spatial Industries arguing quite rightly that in the 21^st century, soft infrastructure (also known as "Info-structure"), is at least as critical for the economic and environmental well-being of Australia.
I was therefore delighted to hear the Minister for Infrastructure, Anthony Albanese, in his opening address make a passionate case for seeing Smart Infrastructure as being "shorthand for innovative, adaptive and technology based infrastructure", encompassing "systems as a whole, and how they integrate". Indeed, when you think of it: steel, concrete and fibre is dumb, it is the sensor networks, the data and the services that enable smart management and decision making on top of and between these hard infrastructures.

The next logical step is to realise that all infrastructure related information is by definition location-based, so location enablement of Smart Infrastructure is key to enabling integrating systems on a common canvas. This canvas would be provided by spatial info-structures (aka an SDI!), delivering a raft of services including access to fundamental data sets, positioning networks, geocoding (name or address lookup), geoprocessing services, and the like.

It is very encouraging therefore that the recognition of Spatial Information as the common canvas for Smart Infrastructure was repeatedly and strongly confirmed by the majority of speakers, and also in all four break-out groups (addressing the water, transport, energy and communication sectors).

There is no escaping the fact that Smart Infrastructure is going to generate what is sometimes referred to as a 'Data Tsunami': millions of readings from water sensors, smart meters, RFID tags etc. Businesses and the Community will expect that Smart Infrastructure will be digesting this Tsunami in real-time for better management and decision support for our water supply, energy reliability and transport logistics.

The technical challenge facing our industry will be to support this need with tools that will take these massive, location-based data inputs, apply spatial and business rules and generate 'actionable information' (such as alerts) in real time. This is an opportunity for existing and proven complex spatial event processing services such as Indji watch.

Awesome Ignite Sydney 4, and why is Spatial so un-cool?

2010-03-03T17:13:00.005+11:00

Yesterday I was delighted, inspired and awed at Ignite Sydney 4 - Sydney's opening of Global Ignite Week.

Photo: Jean-Jacques Halans

For those of you who are not yet familiar with Ignite: it's like geek-speed-dating with PowerPoint.

I've been to a few Ignite events in Australia now (always perfectly organised by Stephen Lead and his team), and this one was the best ever.

Where usually there are one or two disappointing presentations, this time they all shined: they were quick, pointy and very entertaining. Highlights for me were Andrew Jessup's "What 180 nuns can teach us about evolution", where he presented scientific evidence that optimism makes you live longer (hear, hear!), and Ralph Kerle's new party trick "Haikugami", in which he literally crowdsourced a pile of Japanese Haiku poems in under 5 minutes using paper planes!

Ralph Kerle teaches Haikugami Photo: Jean-Jacques Halans

What worries me though is that 'general-purpose' geeks (the types that presented yesterday) seem to deliver much cooler and more exciting presentations than all the spatial geeks I've watched at a total of four Ignite Spatial events to date. Even the spatial presentation yesterday, though slick, seemed to lack that little bit of extra 'punch' (sorry David).

Surely I am not alone in making this observation? I remember the audience at the first Ignite Spatial voting overwhelmingly for the only two presenters without a spatial background!

Whether it is due to our genes, our education or our customers: the spatial community is scoring very, very low on the cool scale. I am looking forward to more Ignites to start fixing that.

Climate Change Mapping: Keep it Simple, Stupid!

2010-02-22T09:36:00.010+11:00

In the previous post, I wrote about the challenges of presenting complex data on the risk from sea-level rise and climate change to people who are looking for 'simple' answers and guidance.

One of the main take-away messages that I got from day 2 of the National Climate Change Forum is that local authorities really are asking for (demanding!) a national, coordinated set of data and decision support tools to help them assess the risks coming from climate change, confirming the points made in the previous post.

This exposes yet another aspect of the tension between the scientists, who love dealing with complexity and uncertainties, and the public & local authorities, who want simple, straight answers, unambiguous numbers and understandable messages. A point that was raised repeatedly at the forum. Mind you, most of the journos need short and simple messages too, which is why they love quoting Tony Abbott, a Bondi Surfer, and Lord Monckton, rather than Penny Wong, Tim Flannery or the IPCC. But that's beside the point.

The key questions local authorities need to answer to do their risk assessment are, "where will it happen", "when will it happen", and "what will the damage be"?

To our industry, that screams "GIS". And for such a large and diverse audience: "Online Mapping". And if we succeed in depicting complex risk patterns on a map (as discussed in the previous post), and overlaying that with affected population, property and critical infrastructure, we're well under way.

One BIG word of caution though: for an online application like that to succeed, it needs to be a true "decision support tool", that includes mapping capability. The last thing we need is another online GIS, "by GIS boffins, for GIS boffins". And that's actually not that easy. As an example, I once made the mistake of succumbing to a client's request to add 'Layer Control' to the spatial visualisation tool we were building for them. Never mind that the target audience would typically have next to none GIS experience. Ever since, we were in repeated discussions on how to customise this capability and write long training manuals to explain its functionality to the poor deluded users. Who would have been fine without the thing in the first place!

Try and find your way around this! (source: https://mapguide.osgeo.org/images/MapGuideAjaxViewerHiRes.png)

Let it be gone. The decision support tools that councils, local planners etc. need to manage the risks from climate change will be extremely user friendly. That means pointy, targeted and devoid of any unnecessary functionality or jargon.

Mapping Climate Change and Sea-level Rise

2010-02-18T17:19:00.003+11:00

Today (18 Feb 2010) and tomorrow, I am attending the National Climate Change Forum (http://www.nccf2010.eventplanners.com.au/) in Adelaide. The focus of this two-day forum is on coastal communities: how can they assess the risks from climate change and sea level rise, and how to develop priorities for adaptation strategies.

(Not a lot of Social Media activity here BTW. I seem to be the only one sending out updates on Twitter for now. Follow me or look for the #nccf hashtag)

Most of the delegates represent coastal councils or state governments, and are acutely aware of the issues and pressures from their constituents: "What are the effects (if any), and what are you going to do about it? And by the way: if you screw up, we'll sue you! "

No wonder they have a dire need for guidance and most of all: consistent, reliable and accessible information. The typical question is along the lines of: "which properties or assets will be at risk in my council in 2030".

The simple tool to answer that question is to provide 'inundation maps' for a certain area for that year. These provide a nice 'crisp' area that will be flooded. Inside the boundary 'not good'. Outside the boundary: 'good'

Source: http://www.climatechange.gov.au/en/publications/coastline/~/media/publications/coastline/0-executive-summary.ashx

A complication arises when you think it through: what 'level' of inundation do we depict? The plain 'bathtub' model does not take into account temporal variations (such as king tides) or dynamic events (e.g. storm surges). In fact the main threat does not come from pure sea level rise, but from an increased frequency, as much as the extent, of flood events. Maybe what we need is a visualisation mechanism that's a bit more 'clever'. Something like combining the probability of an event with the different sea level rise scenarios:

Source: http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/coasts/nps/coastalInundation.php

So is this the silver bullet? Of course this requires a lot more data modelling and processing. And does this violate the "keep the message as simple as possible" principle for the people saying: "Just tell me if my property will be affected"?

Would love to hear your views...

National Emergency Warning System still has some way to go

2010-01-31T16:21:00.006+11:00

Partly in response to the Victoria Bushfires in February 2009, the Federal Government late last year launched the "National Emergency Warning System" (NEWS): http://www.alp.org.au/media/1209/msag040.php . It was immediately also trialled in NSW under the name 'Emergency Alert'.

The system works by sending voice and text (SMS) messages to phones in the threatened area.

Telstra and the government are quick to point out the obvious flaw in this system, that they say will be addressed in future versions: Messages go out according to phones with their billing address in the area under threat only, which is not guaranteed to be the phones' actual location, especially in case of mobiles. Furthermore, people may be interested in areas beyond their phone's location.
To reach everyone in a certain area with an emergency message, cell broadcasts (i.e. to all mobiles that are actually in an area of interest) is a proven, working alternative. However, this is not included in the NEWS initiative. Some sources claim technical limitations.
However, when the NEWS was first used in anger, other issues emerged, as illustrated by Eric Liepin and Sally Jackson's story in The Australian. Though a relevant text message was received, and the mobile phone's billing address was the same as their property, it still did not assist Sally Jackson in determining the extent of the threat. This was for two reasons. Firstly the SMS (constrained to 160 characters) covered a very wide area (see map), too large for Ms. Jackson to determine if the threat was relevant to her. Secondly, RFS phone and web sources did not add any further information to help narrow the threat area.

This got me thinking. If you have an interest in an area that is prone to emergencies (fire, floods, tsunami), this may be for a number of reasons: you may have your home, property or business there. It may be because your kids go to school there, or you have friends/family living in the area.

The value of a National Emergency Alert system would be greatly enhanced by:

• Allowing people to 'opt-in' for alerts in certain areas (beyond their phone's billing address or location at the time)

• Adding more precise geographic locations to alerts. Granted, this is not always possible in 160 SMS characters, but people should be able to get more information using online maps or subscribing to GeoRSS feeds. By the way, GeoRSS allows the definition of a line or polygon as the area of interest (http://www.georss.org/Main_Page), not just points.

Not surprisingly, such technology and services are already available. I'm aware of four examples, though there are undoubtedly more:

• Microsoft VINE (http://www.vine.net/about.aspx) allows the definition of areas of interest, and will then allow you to send and receive alerts for that area.

• FireMash (http://mashupaustralia.org/mashups/firemash/) is one of the highly-commended winners of Mashup Australia (mashupaustralia.org). It is a real time service that analyses notices from the NSW Rural Fire Service and the community for warnings and sightings. It combines and analyses all of this information to determine the location and proximity to your house. If you are at risk, it instantly sends you a specific tweet, giving you the crucial early warning needed to stay safe.

• The Australian Early Warning Network (http://www.ewn.com.au/) has been operational for years now, and seems to be studiously ignored by the authorities, despite being robust and effective in delivering a host of warning types to defined areas of interest.

• Indji Watch (http://www.indji.net/) is an online hazard monitoring system that analyses risk data against asset locations in real-time. It's a B2B, rather than consumer oriented application that applies sophisticated spatial business rules to determine if and when an alert needs to be issued, and to whom.

Two relevant findings that came out of the Emergency 2.0 project are: (1) in a Web2.0 enabled society, the community expects warnings that are relevant and personalised, and (2) Agencies need to make emergency information available as standards-based web-services, so that 3rd party (niche-) operators can provide such relevant & personalised services.
It seems that the $15 million NEWS system still has some way to go towards achieving this.