[Qgis-user] wishing for accurate lattitude/longitude from a cell phone

Mon May 25 14:35:23 PDT 2020

Dear Jochen et al,

...thanks,
but it is 100% incorrect that Google Earth made satellite data available,
and/or for free, e.g. Landsat.
The opposite is the case (Landsat was made open by the Clinton
administration etc much before that, by law. It's widely paid by US tax
money btw) ;
so Google Earth just used a nice and shiny PUBLIC image set and copyrighted
it, value-added as a map background; more or less.
There are no 8 bands in the Google Earth Landsat set to use; just a flat
image file!
What's the progress other than the hype and them selling public stuff and
making it hard for GIS users etc ?
Who owns the space, the satellites ?

It's also incorrect to call Google Earth and its format a GIS; Google Earth
is just a visualizing tool, kmz is pretty awful for any serious GIS work
and database work (just like shapefiles are, even worse in Geodatabases;
all commercial btw
and based on dBASE style).

OpenStreetMaps cannot copyright words, as a product (an Open Street Map
that is, public common words found in any dictionary).
Apple does not own apples neither, nor snow leopards.

If somebody occupies, measures and uses public spaces, and then gets 'the
best' (hi res) data on the market, e.g. for roads,
that's clearly a monopoly, and should be treated as such, and with ethics.
It has many many implications in capitalism and worse, e.g.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-copyleft.en.html

So the easier,  and the better a format is described, the better for
everybody to use (if that's the purpose).
ISO comes to play, or VM, GNU etc .

We have seen very bad things last 40 years in the GIS world, and it's
little progress.
Certainly true for the EU and the German Katasteraemter, or EU Remote
Sensing or EU science (see Max Planck Institutes etc, Fisheries data,
cancer data).
What they call open access usually is not, and very clumsy at best; widely
underachieving for decades.

It is very important here to understand and perceive those things
correctly, because
otherwise we end up with more private and commercial intrusions.
Bad impacts can be seen world-wide already, all the time.
GARMIN is among them; just see COVID examples.

QGIS is a shining example and outlier, beyond R (not a GIS btw).

Any public librarian can tell you their stories about it (and consider many
libraries being short-handed most times, hardly afloat for money).

It's a very important subject, Just think of use of hi res data for drones,
the decaying public good, global society etc
An example here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone

That's my experience on the topic and why I shared it here in some detail;
thanks.

Keep me posted please; very best
   Falk Huettmann PhD, Professor
     University of Alaska Fairbanks

On Mon, May 25, 2020 at 12:28 PM <j.huber at post-ist-da.de> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> while I agree that there are lots of bad examples of proprietary formats,
> I want to say a few words to some of your examples:
> It is true that OpenStreetMap data is difficult to handle -  this is not
> because it is closed, but because it is open. When the project was started
> the goal was to make it as easy as possible for people to contribute to the
> dataset. Thus there are few restrictions which makes it difficult to render
> or process the data. But the alternative would probably have been to
> discuss the data format for years instead of building an amazing open
> dataset...
>
> While Garmin makes it difficult to upload custom maps to their units as
> Nicolas wrote, many of their devices can be accessed as a USB drive and
> waypoint/track data can simply be copied as .GPX-files. I have seen many
> devices needing special software to transfer data, so this is actually easy.
>
> When Google Earth first came to be, it was amazing - access to satellite
> or aerial imagery had been expensive and difficult before. So I don't have
> a problem with the fact that Google didn't make the data available for
> everyone to use (probably license restrictions prohibit this).
>
> Text files aren't often that simple - there are different encodings for
> example which aren't advertised in the files, so you often have to guess to
> get special characters right. They have no inbuilt validity checks, so
> errors can not be easily recognised. In most use cases, structured (XML)
> formats are preferable. And especially for large datasets, you get much
> better performance and functionality using other formats like Geopackage.
> The point in my opinion is that a format is open and well documented.
>
> Of course it is great if geodata is available to the public. In the EU,
> there has been a lot of movement in the last years with more and more data
> becoming available under open licenses, let's hope this continues.
>
> Regards,
> Jochen
>
> Am 25.05.20 um 20:55 schrieb Falk Huettmann:
>
> Dear Chris et al,
>
> ...by using certain specific/clumsy formats -poorly documented ones - you
> can virtually exclude
> people from data and from Remote Sensing data and GPS etc.
> Google Earth as a  classic example, and GARMIN as another, or ESRI files,
> certainly NetCDF or many R packages even.
>
> In reality, you will see that all what is shiny and new - in demand- is to
> be sold, and usually not well publically shared.
> It takes many steps to get around it, if even that.
>
> While I have used OpenStreet maps, it was very clumsy; more bad examples
> exist, e.g. lack of metadata.
> Whatever companies tell ya, they want to sell more stuff (sell PR, or
> might face bankruptcy otherwise).
>
> And it is my hope that with QGIS we get to open access and open source,
> of these data, and any other.
>
> My format of choice is plain and simple ASCII text files for those
> reasons, perhaps using the
> Virtual Machine as a platform forever (well, as long as that is
> reasonable, but not commercially driven).
>
> Keep me posted please; very best & thanks
>      Falk Huettmann
>
>
> On Mon, May 25, 2020 at 10:19 AM chris hermansen <clhermansen at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Falk and list;
>>
>> On Mon, May 25, 2020 at 10:48 AM Falk Huettmann <fhuettmann at alaska.edu>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Dear List,
>>> I think these GPS high resolution suggestions are great;
>>> thanks.
>>>
>>> But my real interest/question here is, how can we bring it home to QGIS ?
>>>
>>> I see GARMIN essentially trying to sell and impose on us their GIS
>>> system,
>>> same applies to OpenStreet Maps etc etc. So they try to privatize
>>> geography and public space and information,
>>> which I am mostly opposed to.
>>>
>>
>> How is OpenStreetMap (I assume when you say "OpenStreet Maps" you mean
>> "OpenStreetMap") trying "to privatize geography and public space and
>> information"?   Not trying to start an argument here; this just seems
>> completely contrary to what I know of OpenStreetMap, whose data is licensed
>> under https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1.0/
>>
>>
>>> Instead, I wonder how we can use QGIS and release the commercial
>>> data into Open Source and public use ?
>>> That's for HIGH RESOLUTION data discussed here.
>>>
>>> Thanks for such questions and solutions.
>>>
>>
>> [stuff deleted]
>>
>>
>> --
>> Chris Hermansen · clhermansen "at" gmail "dot" com
>>
>> C'est ma façon de parler.
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Qgis-user mailing listQgis-user at lists.osgeo.org
> List info: https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-user
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-user
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Qgis-user mailing list
> Qgis-user at lists.osgeo.org
> List info: https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-user
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-user
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/qgis-user/attachments/20200525/b3fa5067/attachment.html>