[Geodata] wiki-nature geodata aggregators

[Andrew Turner]

On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 11:57 AM, Martin Spott<Martin.Spott at mgras.net> wrote:
> Jo Walsh wrote:
>
>> "It would be nice" to see a data quality push - not in terms of
>> comparison to proprietary sources, but in terms of peer review and of
>> spreading, well, quality assurance, through the network back up to
>> original data providers. How to do this without bureaucratic overhead
>> (or while funding bureaucratic overhead)? Answers on a postcard...
>
> No idea, as the conceptual 'design' behind all these data providers
> requires their sources to be "authoritative" in some way - a criteria
> that is unlikely to be met by any effort which relies primarily on
> crowdsourcing  :-)

I disagree. You're seeing OSM and GeoNames powering the data systems
of more companies and organizations. They are leveraging scale,
development and communities that none of these individual groups could
begin to enable themselves.

There have been efforts to incorporate data back into original sources
- a problem that has social, legal, and technical hurdles. Yet the
onus can be on the receiving organization to incorporate this
potentially very valuable data instead of putting that burden on the
larger community itself to attempt to cater to each group.

What I think we'll see more of are organizations just embracing these
projects and data sources as their primary source itself and
enhancing. The problem here is the licensing for databases like OSM is
"viral", so any changes would have to be opened back up - so the goal
here would be to convince government and other agencies that their
value doesn't lie in their hoarding the data, but curating and
ensuring it's coverage and accuracy in their specific areas of
interest. This removes the technical burden of them developing tools
(their not tool shops) or pulling together various domains and
connecting with regions outside their own area. The added benefit is
it engages them directly with the community that also cares in using
the data through these aggregation hubs.

Andrew

>
> Cheers,
>        Martin.
> --
>  Unix _IS_ user friendly - it's just selective about who its friends are !
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-- 
Andrew Turner
mobile: 248.982.3609
andrew at fortiusone.com
http://highearthorbit.com

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