Boek 5/Blog: Ed Parsons - Amplyfying your spatial data on the web

As a student I spent what little spare cash I had on hi-fi equipment to play what was the technological marvel of the time Compact Disks. As a hi-fi nerd I was always advised to spend most of my money on one component, my systems amplifier. The hifi amplifier served two roles really; to amplify or boost the relatively weak signal coming out of the other components of your system and to provide a mechnansion for lining those components together.

When it comes to the web the ‘amplifier’ is web search, the mechanism we all use to find information online, and spatial data like much other scientific data published on the web is not getting amplified and is not reaching the widest possible audience. The joint W3C/OGC Spatial Data on the Web (SDW) working group is later this year publishing some Best Practice Guidelines to improve the situation.

Building upon the earlier work of the W3C Data on the Web Best Practices Group the aim is to provide a set of recommendations that are applicable to the publication of spatial or data about places on the Web.

Existing attempts to publish using approaches often termed Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) meet only limited success outside of expert communities, as catalog services intended to allow for discovering spatial data cannot make use of the amplifying effect of general purpose search engines of the Web.

The catalog services only provide access to metadata - and in general metadata that is focused on the needs of expert users - not the data itself, in hi-fi terms we have collated and organised our CD cases but the CD’s themselves are elsewhere !

In the draft version of the SDW Best Practice a few recommendations have been made to address these problems and improve ability for data published via SDI’s to be discovered and accessed. These include:

• Best Practice 4: Make your spatial data indexable by search engines
• Best Practice 7: Use globally unique persistent HTTP URIs for spatial things
• Best Practice 11: Expose spatial data through ‘convenience APIs’

The collection of Spatial Data around the world to help build transport infrastructure, monitor agriculture, plan cities and provide health care represent a massive investment economically and socially. By taking a ‘web friendly’ approach we can maximise this investment by turning up the volume and finally reaching the ears of both decision makers and the citizens who ultimately benefit from its collection.

Ed Parsons
Geospatial Technologist at Google
(www.edparsons.com + www.google.com)

Het World Wide Web Consortium is een organisatie die de webstandaarden voor het wereldwijde web ontwerpt, zoals HTML, XHTML, XML, CSS en de Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Het wordt geleid door Tim Berners-Lee, de originele bedenker van het HTTP-protocol en HTML, waar het web oorspronkelijk en nog steeds grotendeels op gebaseerd is.

Een Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), is een internet-protocolelement, gebaseerd op eerdere voorstellen van Tim Berners-Lee. Het is een unieke benaming van een bron, een stuk informatie, data of dergelijke.