Published in
Conference, Data
Cross-posted from the GeoIQ Blog
Last Week I participated in a panel with spatial archival experts at the at the Society of American Archivists. Led by Butch Lazorchak of the Library of Congress, and also joined by Steve Morris from GeoMAPP, and John Faundeen from USGS, the panel was a full spectrum discussion of “Geospatial Data Preservation” ranging from the Library of Congress’ $10 million acquisition and access to the infamous Waldseemüller 1507 map Universalis Cosmographia of ‘America’ USGS’s environmental conditions for storing historic satellite imagery to GeoMAPP’s work in gathering time-stamped state geospatial data. Butch in particular provided an inspiring overview on what’s special about Spatial – density of data, representation vs data, and the difficulty in capturing interactivity of more modern digital maps.
The Archivists were a new community to me – people that are passionate about the capturing and storing of data – often until the end of time! But they also vary in their core missions – often diverging on the utility of the captured data and information. Very few seem to be really thinking about archives as a useful resource today and only focusing on the long-time storage and eventual access of the data by some unknown entity. As one member of GeoMAPP said: “All of the Archives are storing this superseded GIS data in dark archives and aren’t really providing access to the datasets and don’t have web mapping interfaces”
Clearly, we think a bit differently about archiving – choosing to focus foremost on access to data which will result in improved archiving of data, distribution, and analysis on utility and benefit. My presentation Maps as Narratives: Making Spatial Archives Accessible
focused on the concept that maps have been, and are increasingly a vital resource for people in their daily lives and work. By providing users tools to access and use historic and realtime data, we can then capture this data and provide it to other users and data repositories.
Particular to internet feeds, and social media we can’t easily predict what data will be useful. Neogeographers create visualizations of twitter streams, photos, foursquare checkin’s, friend locations. How do we know which of these are the modern correspondances of tomorrow’s US President or Global business leader? Through easy mechanisms for sharing data and maintaining links we can begin tracking this information in it’s varied forms, providing better insight and archiving of data for later reuse, whether it is tomorrow or in 100 years.
Published in
Data, Standards
Back in February of this year we worked with the World Bank, USAID, and CrisisCommons to deploy a large amount of map imagery and tiles to the Haitian Government and clusters working in relief. We included a forked version of crschmidt’s haitibrowser to work offline on USB sticks.
One of the issues we encountered were the vast amount of pre-rendered tile images that needed to be moved to the device. The overall size was not that large – in the hundreds of megabytes. It was the number of files that caused issues in copying and replicated these USB sticks in order to aid in the proliferation of data.
I’ve long been an ardent supporter of SQLite and Spatialite as Open Data containers for geospatial data. It’s a portable, offline, open standard, relational data store that provides great access and compression. About a year ago we even added Spatialite support to GeoCommons – so anyone can convert data to a SQLite database.
Almost exactly three years ago, Mikel put OSM on the iPhone after realizing that Apple was using SQLite to store the tile cache for maps. It makes simple sense to put blobs of images inside a table schema for fast storage and retrieval.
Earlier this week Development Seed released a command-line toolset called MBTiles to bundle tiles into SQLite. You can get the source code here. It’s great to finally have the beginnings of a set of tools to better utilize SQLite for storing and sharing tilesets.
Chris Schmidt has shared his ideas and added broadening support to TileCache in support of storing tiles in SQLite so that anyone using TileCache can now easily load tiles offline.
I’m excited to see more adoption of easy mechanisms for interchanging data – raster and vector. We have a couple of ideas and things brewing in how to combine these tiles with other vector data as well as rendering that could really provide some good mechanisms for open spatial data stores.
Published in
Data, GeoCommons, OpenStreetMap
The last 2 days have been filled with coordinating various efforts in gathering information and volunteers responding to the massive Haiti earthquakes of January 12. The analysis team at FortiusOne has put together a news dashboard highlighting the event and current response efforts.
There have been several tremendous groups that have actively been contributing data and tools both with remote developers and responders on the ground. CrisisMappers, CrisisCommons, Ushahidi, OpenStreetMap, just to name a few.
Many data providers have been making their data freely available. This is most notable when looking at Mikel’s screenshots of OpenStreetMap before the quake and after volunteers began tracing over historic maps and newer satellite imagery from Digital Globe and GeoEye.
Other efforts:
- Ushahidi Haiti is crowd-sourcing reports. You can send a text message to 447624802524, send an email to haiti@ushahidi.com, or send a tweet with the hashtag/s #haiti or #haitiquake.
- The CrisisCommons Wiki has a list of available data and organizations
- Sahana has a form to list offices and organizations that are working on the ground
- GeoCommons search for Haiti has all the datasets and maps that people have contributed for download as Spreadsheet, Shapefile, KML, and more
- OpenStreetMap’s Project Haiti has a list of datasets and people tracing data
Besides just the data catalog, the World Bank has provided an excellent inspection by country and indicator for actually moving through the data without having to be a developer. For example, the 
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