–Chris Holmes

Geospatial Collaboration:

Working together spatially at Internet Scale

Internet Scale?

“Architectures of Participation”

– Coined by Tim O’Reilly

An “Architecture of Participation” is both social and technical, leveraging the skills and energy of users as

much as possible to cooperate in building

something bigger than any single person or organization

could alone.

Architectures of Participation

Software: The first domain to see benefits

The process can be applied to other fields

Geospatial?

Collaboration EvolutionOpen Source Software vs Geospatial

True Believers

Acceleration

Company Involvement

Explosion

Maturity

Geospatial Collaboration Status

On the verge of explosion

Geospatial Data

Creation Sharing

Sharing Layers

OpenStreetMap

Geo Data Creation:

MapShare™

Current Issues in Geospatial Collaboration The ‘gotchas’

Current Issues:

Licensing?

vs ODbL

Current Issues:

The ‘open’ seduction

vs

http://brainoff.com for more info

Current Issues:

Community monoculture

vs

or ?

Current Issues:

Raster Collaboration

vs

?

?

?

?

?

Current Issues:

Tool Bifurcation

vsPotlatch

VS

The FutureSteps towards Geospatial Collaboration Maturity

Towards Maturity:

Licensing

• Flesh out a range of licenses for geospatial data

• From MIT style to GPL style

• Form a foundation to promote, educate and market

• Could be pushing/funding Open Data Commons

• Establish more norms around the licensing edge cases

Towards Maturity:

Workflow

vs

Towards Maturity:

Scope

vs

Towards Maturity:

OpenAerialMap!

vs

Towards Maturity:

Geospatial Patch

vs

• Format that encapsulates an ‘edit’ on any system that can be reviewed by a human

• Interoperable between different editing systems

• OSM, MapMaker, OpenGeo, ESRI

• Easy visualizations and conflict resolution

Towards Maturity:

Collaboration Hubs

vs

• Logical extension of GeoCommons, ArcGIS.com, GeoNode, WorldMap

• But interoperable with one another

• But not just styling, but also handle editing and versioned editing

• Community tools like issue trackers, mailing lists, etc.

• Github/sourceforge for geospatial

Towards Maturity:

Tools• Editing tools that are accessible and also good enough for experts

• Advanced workflow management

Sandboxes, approval before acceptance

Automatic validation (topology, required fields)

Branches and merging with Conflict Resolution

Automatic change notification email / rss

• Integrated metadata, automatic tracking of all inputs and outputs

• Hosted Services

Geocoding, Route finding, Custom Tiles

• Guarantee of accuracy / indemnity

• Enable private collaboration around additional layers, like github (open is free, private is paid)

• Value add packaging - formats, documentation, software

• Subscription to latest updates

• On demand custom gathering of data, but in to an open collaborative map

Towards Maturity:

Open Geospatial Business Models

Towards Maturity:

Government role

• Step back from collecting all data

• Encourage citizens and agency collaboration around common base maps

• Perform Quality Assurance and gathering of data where there is none

• Provide stamp of ‘authoritative’ data that can be trusted

Towards Maturity:

Cooperation

• Align efforts so that amateur, commercial, NGO and governmental creators all naturally collaborate

• Figure out workflows, tools and licenses that work for everyone

• Interoperability between various efforts, though diverse communities make a healthy ecosystem

• Towards living data, constantly evolving - authoritative and always up to date

My Geospatial Collaboration Goal

Let’s build a Geospatial Web that’s so compelling and easy-to-use that

everyone: Citizens, Governments, NGO’s and Companies all naturally

collaborate towards the same infrastructure for public good.

Thank you

These slides are available at http://presentations.opengeo.org/2011_Harvard

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Share Alike Attribution License. Please attribute Chris Holmes, and keep the OpenGeo.org logo on all slides, unless alternate permission is given. Contact cholmes@opengeo.org for more information