GeoWeb 2008 Conference – Infrastructure: Local to Global

Cascading and Federated WFS and the Concept of Geolinking

As many people have pointed out, especially here in Canada, there is a great deal of geographic or geographically related information which does not reside in spatial or GIS databases. Nonetheless there is the need to link this information with associated geospatial entities (e.g. administrative or jurisdictional boundaries) for the purposes of spatial analysis and map display. In fact, a geolinking service has been proposed at the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), for just this purpose.

An apparently unrelated issue is that modeling of geographic features and their consequent support in a Web Feature Service (WFS). One organization might for example, model a road as a generic “RoadWay” and define specific subtypes for “Street”, “Highway”, “Expressway”, while another might simply add a classification attribute to the “RoadWay”. Clearly the two models are not equivalent, but they are very similar.

Another apparently unrelated issue is that of traditional conflation. In this case you may have two different descriptions of a building, with different geometric and non-spatial properties. In conflating these two descriptions, you might like to use the geometry from one description and the spatial and non-spatial properties of the other.

How are these three issues – geolinking, model representation and conflation related to each other? And what has this got to do with the WFS (Web Feature Service)?

For a quick review, a WFS is a web service that provides transactional (update/delete/insert, request) to geospatial data using XML messages in a manner that is vendor neutral and that hides the underlying data store (e.g. storage technology, schemas etc). Most WFS have been implemented as client-server architectures, and many even employ RPC (Remote Procedure Call), but this is not really required. REST-based architectures are not inconsistent with the WFS specification.

Let’s start with the idea of geolinking. To make matters more concrete, we assume that we have two databases, one a relational database containing population data (birth rates, mortality rates, and current populations for a variety of jurisdictional entities (e.g. cities, municipalities, provinces, counties, states, etc.). The schema of this data base is as follows:

Jurisdiction	Jurisdiction Type	Birth Rate (births/year)	Mortality (deaths/year)	Population (current)

A sample fragment from the database table might then look like:

Jurisdiction	Jurisdiction Type	Birth Rate (births/year)	Mortality (deaths/year)	Population (current)
Niagara	County	10.62	6.81
Welland	Municipality	10.7	6.9	51,275

Completely separate from this database (i.e. located in a different data store and likely managed by a different organization) is a database that contains the boundaries or extents of the jurisdictional entities for example the Province of Ontario. (This is the Canadian Province containing Niagara and Welland). Assume that this database provides the spatial extent, expressed as a polygon, for all of the jurisdictional entities in Canada, and that there are features defined for Municipalities, Counties and Provinces, with each instance of these feature types having an ID value (e.g. type = Municipality, ID=”Welland”).

Now let’s proceed to link these two databases together – to geolink them – which is to associate the attributes in the relational database with the geometry in the spatial database.

To begin with, take a feature perspective on the relational database, and implicitly assert features, with types defined by the values of the enumerated attribute “JurisdictionType”, and with local database resource identifier “Jurisdiction”. Such a mapping could readily be supported by installing a WFS on the relation database and suitably configuring the WFS schema mapping (see http://www.galdosinc.com/archives/525 ). Note that this will give rise to a particularly simple GML schema representing the demographic data.

Now let’s also install a WFS onto the geospatial database as well, so in both cases we can request features by ID and other properties, using the WFS request protocol.

To link these two datasets there needs to be a special kind of cascading WFS that can perform the needed schema mapping, and effect the desired geolinking. This special WFS presents the usual WFS interfaces to the rest of the world, namely GetCapabilities, DescribeFeatureType, and GetFeature operations. It then translates these operations into further operations against the two WFS installed above. A GetCapabilities operation to this cascading WFS would result in GetCapabilities requests to each of the WFS’, with the Cascading WFS using its mapping rules to create a single Capabilities document response. For example, it could return a single list of feature types, namely Province, County, and Municipality. If we then requested a DescribeFeatureType (Municipality) it would return a single application schema for Municipality that combined the spatial information from one WFS and the attribute information from the other (Mortality, Birth Rate etc), by doing a “join” on the feature ID. To generate a map of Ontario showing the birth rate by county, a client would make a request to the Cascading WFS, which would in turn translate this request into queries to the other WFS’ and effect the required join operation on the returned data.

Such a specialized cascading or federated WFS can also deal with the issue of variant models for geographic features. Consider two spatial databases for roads as discussed earlier. Suppose we now deploy a Cascading WFS which exposes a different road model, namely one with a generic notion of a NavigablePath and with subtypes for Road, Railway, and FerryRoute. For the Roads subtype assume also a “type attribute” specifying the kinds of Roads, as an enumerated value, namely (Road, Street, Boulevard, Highway, Freeway, and Tollway. The Cascading WFS is then configured to map its feature types to the feature types of the cascaded WFS’. For example, (Road, type=”Road, Street, Boulevard” is mapped to the feature type “Street” of one database, and to (“RoadWay”, classification=”Street”), in the other. When a client issues a request to the Cascading WFS, the WFS uses its mapping rules to generate queries to the cascaded WFS’, and then transforms and integrates the responses. With this approach, different models for the road system can be handled using an extended Cascading WFS.

By now it should be apparent, that conflation is also something that “could” be handled by a suitably configured Cascading WFS. Of course this discussion has glossed over issues of performance, and the complexity of the mappings involved, some of which clearly will require numerical, string or even geometric transformations. Nonetheless, it makes sense to think of these three different issues as related to particular Cascading WFS implementations, each performing data translation in addition to cascading of requests, and then to explore the needed types of translations. This will come in a future blog.

Ron Lake, Chairman and CEO, Galdos Systems Inc.

What is an SDI?

Overview

The most often quoted definition of a Spatial Data Infrastructure (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_Data_Infrastructure) is that it is “a framework of spatial data, metadata, users and tools that are interactively connected in order to use spatial data in an efficient and flexible way. Another definition is the technology, policies, standards, human resources, and related activities necessary to acquire, process, distribute, use, maintain, and preserve spatial data “[1].

The difficulty with this definition is that it provides little insight as to what the software component of the infrastructure might amount to, or what the benefits and objectives of the infrastructure might be.

If one looks at most SDI’s today they heavily emphasize a librarian view of the software infrastructure part (metadata collection and discovery are the primary points of focus), and as a result are inappropriate to support many of the use cases for which such an infrastructure might be deployed.

Why an SDI?

To address “what is an SDI” we need to think more on the function – the “why” of an SDI. Only then can we think more correctly about what such a thing might entail. Without being to grandiose, I think there are a number of reasons why government and the private sector might think to invest and build an SDI.

These include:

It enables a local, regional, national or even a planetary accounting system on the state of the environment, by making visible the distribution and temporal variation in key environmental parameters from carbon emissions to deforestation.
It enables the local, regional, national or even planetary response to emergency events whether caused by people or natural forces.
It enables the more efficient interaction of corporations, government and citizens in the collaborative (and competitive) development of the built environment, from urban construction to mining, agriculture and energy production.
It provides a vehicle by which government can meaningfully interact with its citizens at all levels on planned projects, programs and policies; enabling both the presentation of what is planned, as well as enabling direct feedback from the citizenry.

For many of you, much of this will sound like e-Government, and in fact one can simply look at SDI as no more than spatially enabling or geographically enabling e-Government. I prefer to think of it as e-Society, since while Government has a key role, so does the private sector and the agents of civil society.

What do we build?

With the objectives as above, what does that imply we should be building? Are the national and pan-national initiatives to build SDI such as the Canadian CGDI, the European INSPIRE, or the US NSDI being designed to address these objectives? Furthermore, with the rise of big search engines as players in the geo-space, what aspects should government and the private sector focus on in developing an SDI?

If we look at the “accounting system” view of SDI, we see that the key thing is to make the state of the environment locally, regionally, nationally, and globally, visible to all of us. This means it applies to a very wide range of data types over a wide range of scales. Most of this information is in some way spatially related, but this spatial relationship may be very implicit and not part of the actual data itself. So SDI must be concerned with access to all kinds of data that are only nominally spatial. Since much of this sort of data is to be found in government and private sector databases, an SDI must deal with data access for a wide range of databases and not just the nominally spatial ones. Furthermore, if we are to do the sort of “roll up” of information that is required in any sort of accounting system, we need access to the actual data, and not portrayals or presentations. Visualizations are important of course, but only if driven directly from the data, and only if available at various levels of the society and government. Finally, to make any sort of “accounting system” feasible, we will need appropriate models of the parameters that we are to report and measure – meaning we need public, shared schemas that deal with everything from forest cover, to floods, carbon emissions and water pollutants. This is a major undertaking, but so was the construction of a national highway system, a national broadcasting system or a national air transportation system.

If we look at the SDI as supporting the emergency response, we encounter similar issues, but with the additional requirements of tighter information security, and temporal responsiveness. Even more than in the case of the SDI as “accounting system”, we must see SDI as enabling the pushing of data change events to data consumers. A forest fire manager will of course want to request information, but that is of little use if first responders on the ground or in the air cannot supply new information “as it happens”. An SDI focused primarily on metadata and discovery cannot hope to support such activities.

SDI, as supporting emergency response, also entails the interaction of many levels of government and the private sector, including both national and international agencies. Recent events in Myranmar and Indonesia highlighted the need for quick and effective integration of information. This implies that information must be sourced in real time from a wide variety of locations, at a wide variety of scales, from citizens as well as professionals, and integrated on as needs basis. Again this cries out for common data models that are shareable across regions, provinces/states and nations. Some regions such as in the European INSPIRE are making encouraging moves in this direction. After all the parameters of a forest fire, flood or earthquake of interest to responders can readily be generalized over regions or nations. This is again not a small problem, but with costs for natural disasters in the hundreds of billions, and yearly losses in human life exceeding 100,000 people, the amount of money currently expended on SDI is still vanishingly small.

SDI, as supporting efficient collaboration of government, the private sector and civil society in the constructing the built environment, also calls for a re-thinking of traditional SDI initiatives. Fortunately, we are starting to see movement in this direction through the emergence and gradual adoption of Building Information Models (BIM). While nominally a “standard”, the key thing about BIM is a process that encourages early and continuous collaboration amongst all of the “actors” that contribute to the development of the built environment, including ordinary citizen, investors, construction companies, developers, owners, engineers (of many kinds), and architects. While most of these efforts have been focused on building design, there is no reason to draw such an artificial barrier. One can equally apply these ideas to the development of a highway, a mine, an airport or an entire city. SDI, as collaboration, again implies dealing with a wide range of information scales, spatial and non-spatial information, the need to support information push as well as information pull, and the development of common models for buildings, transportation systems, and entire cities. Big strides have been made in these areas by groups like the Smart Building Alliance, the German cityGML consortium and others. We need to see these initiatives as simply a part of the broader notion of SDI, and to think of how we provide direct support for things like projects, collaboration “spaces” and the integration of design information (buildings, transportation infrastructure etc) and what we nominally call “geography”. Governments and the private sector will spend close to $ 5 trillion dollars on construction in 2008. Even ignoring the immense soft benefits of spending this money in more environmentally sustainable and human friendly fashion, any improvements in efficiency must be measured in the billions of dollars annually.

SDI, as supporting communication with and amongst our citizens in relation to the actions of government, also requires a re-think of what SDI means. Many of the issues raised above are equally true for this use case. The notion of collaboration cannot be stressed enough. Government can use SDI to communicate new policies, new laws (e.g. changes in zoning or construction), and new projects to its citizens, and citizens can use that same SDI to make counterproposals, comments and suggestions. Again only some of this information need be explicitly spatial, but the spatial component is often the key to understanding how this information relates to you as an individual.

Many of you may look at this discussion and realize that these objectives are being better met today by the likes of Google Earth, Facebook and wide area games like Second Life. You may think that there is really no role, or only a diminishing role for government in the process, and I have had that view expressed to me by several members of national government agencies. I think this is not the case. Governments, the private sector and agencies of civil society have it their interest to work together to build information infrastructures that work for the betterment of the world. This cannot be left to just information companies as their ultimate interests must inevitably lie elsewhere. At the same time, we must recognize the immense contribution of these companies, and build them and their technologies into the SDI process itself.

Spatial information Infrastructures can make an important contribution to the security of our nations and the environment. We need to start thinking in the right direction.

Ron Lake, Chairman and CEO, Galdos Systems Inc.

Looking ahead to GeoWeb 2009

While GeoWeb 2008 is not yet here, you might be interested to know that the thinking and planning has already started for GeoWeb 2009. The good news is that it will again be in Vancouver, and likely in mid July. Stay tuned to this blog for additional information.

As we have already noted, GeoWeb 2009 will focus on the Cityscape – its construction, its maintenance, simulation, and evolution. These are of course all key GeoWeb themes – building and sharing geospatial information across diverse organizations for their mutual benefit. GeoWeb 2009 will also retain core concerns like 3D measurement (imaging, lidar etc), security and defense, and environmental protection.

One special component planned for GeoWeb 2009 will be an academic track within the main conference focused on 3D Modeling and Measurement. This will not be a separate conference, but a special track with peer reviewed papers managed by a separate, academic program committee. This will run as part of the main conference and users will be able to move freely from one track to another. Unlike the main conference which consists mainly of presentations, panel sessions and technical workshops, the academic track will be published as conference proceedings and some of the papers from this track may be published in leading academic journals.

Taking this route will enable GeoWeb 2009 to be a little larger without losing the intimacy and networking opportunities that have made the conference so successful. It will also allow presentation of more technical research than would fit comfortably within the main conference. Hopefully it will also stimulate interaction between the vendor/government driven main conference and the academic/research driven interests of the 3D Modeling and Measurement track.

Dr. Thomas Kolbe of the Technical University of Berlin, a world leader in cityGML, in particular, and city modeling in general, has agreed to chair the program committee for the academic track.

I view this as a very exciting development. If you are working for an academic or research institution and would like to get involved – I strongly suggest you attend GeoWeb 2008 and start thinking now about how to contribute for GeoWeb 2009 Cityscapes.

Ron Lake, Chairman and CEO, Galdos Systems Inc.

BIM/CAD/GIS Integration

The above phrase is getting a lot of attention these days. At the same time, this is not so much driven by technology integration as it is by a growing realization that our current approach to the design and development of the built environment is woefully inadequate, and that with a different and more unified approach we could do things faster and much more efficiently.

The design and development of the built environment is inherently a collaborative and competitive enterprise. Adding new structures will drive new requirements for transportation systems and hence new supporting structures. New structures impact the environment in terms of noise levels, thermal loading, security, and demand for a wide variety of services of which transportation is just one. The phrase BIM/CAD/GIS integration is really about a holistic look at designing and developing the built environment in which we are all cognizant of the inherent dynamics (e.g. feedback loops, process dynamics) of that process.

The phrase also implies the management of information about the built environment on an ongoing basis spanning the life cycle not only of one project (the typical case today), but of all projects and of all structures – in effect to have a complete and continuously evolving information model about the entire built environment.

To do this will require new approaches to information management both from a business and a technical perspective.

From a business perspective we need to determine who will be the custodian of such information systems. Traditionally this has been the role of government and certainly such systems do exist on a smaller scale at more senior levels of government. However, now we require that urban governments or regional governments take on the task of hosting information systems that are likely more complex than what they have been used to in the past. Perhaps this can be supported also in the private sector by engineering, development and architectural companies, by search engines or a new variety of “information utility” which currently does not exist today. In any event, there is the clear need to manage complex urban information on a permanent and on-going basis for today, the future and effectively forever.

From a technical perspective we will need a new generation of information systems that combines precise geometric models referenced to the earth, with support for temporal evolution and support for project management and execution. This will demand support for long transactions so that co-operating and competing interests can operate with one another concurrently. We can also anticipate registries of physical objects coming into being that assign unique identifiers to all physical objects of importance in the built environment from buildings to culverts to railway switches. Such things exist in a limited way today, so this is simply a matter of scaling in complexity and geographic coverage.

This evolution to unified design and development of the built environment will not happen overnight; however, there is evidence that we are nearing an inflection point that will rapidly accelerate things in the next 2-3 years. It promises to be an exciting time.

Ron Lake, Chairman and CEO, Galdos Systems, Inc.

Building the GeoWeb in your own backyard

Many approaches have been proposed to create geographic information and to share it with others. One novel approach, taken by Google, is to provide users with their own tools and let them do it themselves. Thus far this has been directed not so much at the data collection professionals, but rather at the end user, the “man in the street” so to speak. This has been used by individuals to share their vacations, favourite hiking trails, interesting walks in the downtown and most loved restaurants. People quite willing devoted their own time and resources to capturing and posting this information simply because they want to share their experiences with one another.

A new phase of this approach was introduced with Google’s acquisition of Sketchup and the wide deployment of these tools for capturing a 3D model of the world around you, complete with textured 3D buildings, walkways, signs, shrubs, and roadways. Many cities have “gotten” on the map with this approach and there are now literally millions of building models. Google is pushing this further this year with their second annual Model Your Campus student competition (see http://contest.sketchup.com/intl/en/).

In the previous year this contest was restricted to US entrants only, but is now open to registered students throughout the world.I had a look at some of the 2007 entries and they are pretty cool. It is not hard to see the future of “earth browsing”!

Students interested in the Model Your Campus competition may also be interested in the GeoWeb 2008 Student Competition (see http://geowebconference.org/students-academia/contest-information).

Ron Lake, Chairman and CEO, Galdos Systems, Inc.

Davos of Geo in Vancouver

GeoWeb 2008 is coming soon! This year is shaping up as a kind of Davos of Geo; a meeting of the leaders in geographic information systems and in particular the GeoWeb.

Such a meeting of leaders is essential to forge new business alliances, to focus attention on the concept of the GeoWeb, and to work together for its realization. The GeoWeb – the global and local integration of spatial information systems is an emerging reality.

GeoWeb has of course many interpretations to many people. For some, it is a specialization of the semantic web. For others, it is the aggregation of data for search engines and regional or national governments. For still others, the GeoWeb is a kind of accounting system for the planet, providing visibility into the state of the all things connected with the earth. GeoWeb is all of these things, and the GeoWeb conference is an opportunity to move these ideas forward, to forge new business relationships, and to network with your colleagues.

This years GeoWeb will host a $22,500 Student Contest (see http://geowebconference.org/students
-academia/contest-information) to stimulate GeoWeb software and theoretical developments that lead to the evolution of the GeoWeb. The contest is sponsored by Galdos Systems, Inc., Google, OSGEO and the FGDC. Other sponsors are welcome to participate. Students interested in this contest may also be interested in the Model Your Campus contest at Google (see http://contest.sketchup.com/intl/en/index.php).

This years GeoWeb also features three guest speakers, namely Michael Goodchild (University of Santa Barbara), Kimon Onuma, FAIA (Onuma, Inc.) and Michael Kay (Saxonica). These speakers will also be providing three of the dozen or more workshops that will be featured at the event.

This years GeoWeb also has keynotes from Michael Jones (Google) and Alex Miller (ESRI).

Excellent technical presentations have been a hallmark of GeoWeb, and this year will be no different based on the abstracts already submitted. There is still time to get your abstract in (submissions close on March 7th, 2008) – see http://geowebconference.org/papers-workshops/call-for-papers).

GeoWeb 2008 will have 3D/BIM/CAD/GIS integration as a major theme as we build toward Geoweb 2009 Cityscapes!

If you are leader in Geo or want to become a leader – come and make your voice heard at GeoWeb 2008! More about that Davos idea – like in Davos we will have an onsite film crew that will interview people on the issue of the day announced each morning. Interviews will be posted each evening on a GeoWeb YouTube channel.

The fireworks are back – the venue is fantastic – it is Vancouver after all!! See you there, July 21-25, 2008.

Ron Lake, Chairman and CEO, Galdos Systems, Inc.

KML as Observations: (KML to GML and back again!)

KML as a mapping language is clearly gaining momentum around the world. It is used as the means for map display in both web sites like Google Maps and Virtual Earth, but also in a range of more conventional mapping and GIS products. Web Map Servers (OGC) can now provide maps in KML as well as more traditional image formats like GIF or JPG. This posting, looks at the use of KML in a slightly different context, namely that of creating observations.

We motivate the discussion by considering the use of probe cars to digitize highway and road infrastructure. An increasing number of vehicles are equipped today with navigation devices – so called “GPS” units that provide on board map displays and guide you from one destination to another. Of course such units can also be used to capture the vehicles position for an external data collector and in doing so capture aspects of the geometry of the road, or the current speed of the traffic where the vehicle is located. This raises the obvious question. What is the relationship between the track recorded by the GPS unit in the vehicle, and the road features that populate the database on which the navigation unit’s map display is based?

We assert that the GPS track, however recorded, is an observation and that such observations can be used to generate or update the feature model of the road network. Furthermore we propose that KML can be used as a means to capture such observations.

Observations (see GML specification) model the “act of observing or measuring”. As a result an observation has specific properties like the time of the observing, possibly the location of the observer (this is the result in this case), the result of the observing (e.g. vehicle speed, vehicle location), the target or subject of the observing, and the instrument or procedure that is employed. Now we should be clear that no such construct currently exists in KML. There is no supported means to distinguish an observation from the styling of a feature (e.g. the road) for presentation. Nonetheless, the idea of using KML to capture this information is attractive, since we can anticipate the use of KML for map display in future navigation devices. How to do it?

Assuming that we do not make any extensions to KML (more about that in a future blog), how should we represent an observation. One approach is to use KML Extended Data and add some elements from GML. Specifically we add elements in the Extended Data from GML Observation, namely Observation, target, and using. Note that an application schema extending observation could have been created if additional user properties were desired such as observer name, description etc. To simplify matters we will stick to the use of core elements of GML. Note that we do not include in the observation the gml:validTime or gml:location as these are captured in this case by the KML encoding of the track as a PlaceMark. We also do not include gml:resultOf in this specific case as only location information is being acquired. We could include a gml:resultOf if we were to include other parameters in the observation such as vehicle direction and speed.

Detection of the gml:Observation in the PlaceMark designates this PlaceMark as an Observation.

So how do we get from Observations to “authorized” features.

A feature is a model of some aspect of the world. Features are named typed entities with properties specific to their type (e.g. a Road has a number of lanes, driving directions for the lanes, lane width, surface type and so forth). Features arise from some form of community agreement. This may be formal or even legal (e.g. the boundary of a land parcel), or it may be quite informal. For roads it is both formal and legal, however this formal and legal agreement is a function of jurisdiction and varies from one part of the world to another.

We can thus create a particular road model (list of properties (fields) and their types) that represents the community understanding of road for a particular jurisdiction. This road model can be expressed in a GML application schema. The tracks encoded in KML can then be used quite directly to construct GML observations about the road network which are then forwarded back to the road network custodian for integration into the road network model. Accumulation and analysis of multiple such tracks then leads to modifications to the road network which may then be propagated by OGC WFS transactions to the network of road databases and to the in vehicle navigation devices themselves. In the navigation device the updated data can be styled into KML for presentation to the driver, with styling appropriate to the driver’s locale.

Note that this process of presentation => content (capture observation content) => presentation (style updated content for presentation) is a basic part of the separation of presentation and content and exploits the power of both KML and GML.

Ron Lake, Chairman and CEO, Galdos Systems, Inc.

Virtual Globes as Essential Services?

Virtually all of us use search engines several times a day. While not quite extensions of our brains, clearly lots of information is now accessed by “googling” rather than remembering. I think most of us would think of these search engines as more or less essential services in the sense that governments use that term – i.e. they must be available for the public good.

In the realm of geographic information this issue will arise in the not very distant future in a much more pointed fashion. Today, individuals, governments, and private corporations are increasingly relying on the information infrastructure provided by Google and Microsoft (and others) for a very wide range of activities from 911 to regional security, urban planning and disaster response. For some this might be a reason for concern, just as is already the case for the control of the production of oil, or the transmission of telephone calls. In fact, given the direct privacy and security concerns associated with geographic information, some may see this as more than just an item of concern – perhaps even a threat!

The first issue is of course the availability and accuracy of the service itself. While the job has been done rather remarkably, a quick look at the south of France over the past few weeks in Google Earth, will show it is far from infallible. The view is given by the KML file (http://www.galdosinc.com/ImageError.kmz ). This may be corrected before this goes to press – so the image did/does look like:

You will notice that there are errors of several hundred meters, and a section of highway is duplicated.

Of course this is a rare event and only impacts a small area of France – but for some this would be an issue.

In addition to the issues of data quality and availability some will have issues about such an infrastructure being located in the United States where it is subject to US law and in times of uncertainty to the whims of US politicians. Will Europeans sleep well knowing that the bulk of the geographic information about their nations is located in California or at least on the West Coast of the U.S. While presenting a benign face, all of these search engines are “for profit” organizations, and their win scenario is not necessarily in common with that of national governments or their citizens. This is not to say there are any untoward motives – it is just to state the obvious.

The French government has made a great deal of noise about having a national Google Earth replacement, inspired in part by jealousy and national pride, and in part by the concerns raised above. GeoPortail (http://www.geoportail.fr/) is, however, unlikely to attract the number of viewers comparable to GE/GM (even in France), and in spite of its government support, risks falling into the abyss already inhabited by the “magnetoscope” of years ago.

The French are not alone in expressing these concerns.

Furthermore there is clearly a tension between the development of major search engine “globes” and the mission of cross border/jurisdiction initiatives like the European INSPIRE, and any number of National SDI programs in nation states around the world. At least some of the original objectives of these programs have already been realized by the global maps that the search engines have deployed. Of course the national governments played a major role in collecting or funding the collection of much of this data (and continue to do so) on which such maps depend. In many cases this does mean that the national or regional mapping agencies do need to rethink their role and mission in life. At the same time, the search engines may think to pass on some of the revenue generated (if even indirectly) through the use of government financed data. I cannot say that I know the right way forward here, but this is a tension that will not go away, and will likely intensify as the search engines drive to more large scale models of the world.

One might also wonder, why we need more than one of these globes? At least why would one need more than one from a user perspective? There is only one world after all. It may make perfect sense from a competitive standpoint to have as many globes as the market will bear, but does it make sense in terms of modeling, understanding, monitoring and observing our planet. Does it not represent a tremendous waste of energy to have this duplication?

Looked at through the lens of environmental degradation, this proliferation of globes driven predominantly by advertising, might be seen to be seriously out of place. Are we fiddling while Rome burns? At the same time one could very much argue that it is the ad driven globes and not INPSIRE that have taken us closer to regional and global understanding. The question now is whether or not this the right way forward into the future? This is not a question with a simple answer. Multiple search engines might be equally an argument to ensure the viability of the capability rather than just waste through duplication.

One wonders if we might somehow strike another sort of bargain between governments and the major search engines; one that supports a common earth model for government and its citizenry, while still enabling ad-based competition amongst the search engines?

Embracing standards is a start. Both Microsoft and Google now support KML. This has enabled MS Virtual Earth Imagery to be displayed on Google Earth, and will enable the live visualization of all sorts of geographic and geographically related information in these globes in the near future. Perhaps the search engines could extend this further to open up their tile structures so that anyone could directly access their imagery and other data layers?

Of course standards alone are not sufficient. Cloud computing, especially geographic cloud computing demands huge server farms and large amounts of electrical energy. Someone has to pay for this. Could this be a shared responsibility, perhaps not unlike the “international” space station? While Google and Microsoft doubtless have considerable experience and expertise in the operation and deployment of large server farms this expertise could be distributed amongst other organizations as well. Could we create a distributed geographic computing infrastructure (e.g. image servers, map servers etc) onto which Microsoft and Google (and others) layer their advertising and other value adds? This could then be fed by the government information departments and private sector organizations that have it as their business mission to create and update geographic information (e.g. land registries, building permits etc). Such a platform could then support access control as required by nation states (like it or not these still regulate corporations), deal with issues of privacy (these also vary considerably from one country to another), and recognize the true input of governments in the cost side of data generation.

Many (including the author) are doubtful of the ability of governments to deliver on such a mission. Clearly this would require that such a system be built and maintained by private sector corporations and that at least a part of their motivation will need to be profit. So how would that be any different from the situation today? The differences are subtle but important. There would be one, common, base infrastructure of servers and data that would be publically maintained and would be provided to the world at large, subject to national and other access control policies. Governments would pay for the creation and maintenance of this infrastructure through the private sector. Search engines and advertisers like Google and Microsoft would build on this government funded, but privately provided infrastructure. They may even host parts of it.

In a world of increasing global integration, this is not a totally crazy idea. Microsoft already co-operates with the US Census Bureau’s Data Modernization program. Google is building increasingly deep connections with NOAA, NASA and other similar organizations for its Google Ocean initiative. Deeper cooperation, combined with greater internationalization, could give rise to a new level of private-public partnership on a planetary scale. For some this prospect will seem utopian, while for others it is likely their worst nightmare. I have mixed feelings, however, this develops in the future.

What is clear is that these issues are not going to go away. At their base, these issues are about key societal concerns such as the limits to personal freedom, the role of government in our society, and the tradeoffs between individual liberty and preservation of the planet. There is much more going on here than just cool technology!

Ron Lake, Chairman and CEO, Galdos Systems Inc.

GeoWeb and the State of the World

One of the most pressing issues facing our planet is of course climate change and its close sister ecological decline. In order to act on these issues we need to come (more or less globally) to an agreement on the “state” of the world. Is global warming a reality or not? Is it significantly induced by the activities of human beings or is it a consequence of some larger cycle which we simply do not yet understand? I do not intend to comment on any of these specific questions in this blog, as that is not my purpose. The important issue for me is simply that we are seeking in this discussion to express something akin to the “state” of a system, in this case the state of the world climate or world ecosystem, although many other system states are of interest. What is most interesting about this quest is the use of word “we” in the sentence “we need to come to an agreement on the state of the world”. This word “we” can be understood to mean all of humanity, and the state can be seen as something between what “we” all agree to and the unknowable truth.

The most interesting aspect of this train of thought is that it reveals what may become a significant difference between the GeoWeb and the conventional Web of documents, this difference being an expression of the “state” of some aspect of the world. When we do a document search on Google or MSN, there is no integration of that information, and the state of things is in no way accessible. We are simply presented with a large amount of data. What to make of that data is up to each searcher.

While this can also be the case for the GeoWeb, my thinking is that it will evolve in a different direction – one guided by the desire to abstract in the direction of answering some question of state. I say this for a variety of reasons. The data must be organized with respect to space and time. We have begun to augment the world obtained from data by constructing 3D models, models which are necessarily abstractions from the real world – meaning we make decisions about what to include and what to leave out. These actions are the basis of model construction.

Another line of thought to be considered is what one might call “GeoPresence”. In the conventional web we all have a web site. No company, almost no matter how small could think not to have a web site. It would be as if the company did not exist. This is not yet true in the world of the GeoWeb, but it will be. At the same time, I think it will be different. There is something narrative about the GeoWeb (back to that idea of abstraction again), and that narrative aspect will seek expression in a person or organization’s GeoPresence; something which tells a story in time and space about that person or organization’s activities. It is not clear what that might mean today, but the StreetView is I suppose a harbinger of the future – not flying into a picture of a streetscape only, but flying into a story of an organization or a person. I think this has already started through the use of 3D models for buildings and other structures, but will grow into real models of business and individual activities.

GeoWeb is not just a fusion of the Web and Geo-technology. It is response to an unmet need in our society to know and express the state of the world. This part of the journey has hardly started.

Ron Lake, Chairman and CEO, Galdos Systems Inc.

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