Mapping Hacks

At the recent World Summit on Free Information Infrastructures i organised a series of Open Geodata activities. We held some small workshops on practical implementations and standards. I’d hoped to do something on a bigger scale with more EU attendees, but i was very happy with what we ended up with. There was also a long panel and discussion session at the weekend.

Schuyler did a lot of work on setting up the Free Map System which CRIT are using for the Mumbai Free Map. It’s going to become a public hosted service for nonprofit, free of copyright mapping applications. Chris Holmes talked him into replacing the demo with mapbuilder, which is now being redistributed with geoserver.

I did some work on the spatial modelling inside nodel, my sort of meta-application framework. This is the aggregation based local information service that i’ve been trying to sync up with Ile Sans Fil’s WifiDog, the captive portal / community network service, which i talked over with its designer Benoit Gregoire. With nodel and bbox on the free map system, i’d like to extend the openguides and other RDF models onto the geospatial web.

The sessions on location portals and what to build on them, kindly shepherded by Mike Lenczner of Ile sans Fil, produced an interesting technical wishlist/roadmap and on the second day a more user-oriented look at systems.

We talked with Steve Coast and Ben Gimpert about their progress on OpenStreetmap’s new RESTful interface
which is running into things that the
GPX format won’t currently
express. A better transport, preferably (from my point of view) RDF
compatible, simpler than GML for basic expressions, is needed.

On the Sunday we held a panel and discussion session as part of the main
Wsfii weekend; there is an mp3 recording of
the open maps panel available. (warning, 18mb and choppy at the beginning)

It features: Ben Gimpert talking about OpenStreetmap’s plans, Nick
Whitelegg talking about his hobbyist approach to digital map
storytelling with free-map.org.uk , Schuyler, standing in for Shekhar
Krishnan on the Mumbai Free Map and Free Map System; Chris Corbin on
the re-use of public sector information and the constraints on it; and
Chris Holmes on spatial data exchange, ad-hoc common standards development
and the ‘geospatial web‘ compared to ‘spatial data infrastructure‘.
I found Chris’s rallying cry to open and transform spatial data access
(around 73:30 in the recording) particularly moving:

“A vision for the geospatial web: an explosion of geospatial data to
rival the internet, as we all become map-makers; citizens and
governments collaborating to maintain base layers in a commons of
information; this is especially relevant in places of market
failure…

Geospatial data should be an infrastructure, something that is taken for
granted as a base for further free information infrastructures:
open source traffic modelling, open source environmentalism, natural
open source resource management. The geospatial web should be a texture, just like
the internet is the basis of many other infrastructures on top of it.

We’re only going to only get there together, we need to build this,
we need to free the spatial data infrastructures from the powers that be,
tailor them to our uses and build something better than they could
even possibly imagine.”

Francois Proulx put some very nice photos of our workshop at Wsfii on flickr, it looks like we are having a good time.

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