Mapping Hacks

I hear from Tracey P. Lauriault of the launch of the Civic Access project. This is a Canadian effort whose full title is Citizens for Open Access to Civic Information and Data. I like the pragmatic nature of their mission:

Encourage institutions to share data, start a working group to build technologies that make data accessible, support local groups trying to acquire data, develop an education campaign.

A lot of the resources they provide references to are geographic data sets. Tracey herself is involved in ’spatial data infrastructure’ work from a ‘participatory planning’ perspective. A more general , positive open access to datacampaign follows from efforts to free state-collected geodata from monopoly pricing.

There are some groups of people at the Open Source Geospatial Foundation thinking about this sort of thing too, about educational and data availability tools and services can be usefully provided on top of public domain geodata and other related data that’s in some way spatial.

Mike Frumin sent a link to a web site using version 2 of the Google Maps API, showing how development plans for sporting facilities in New York, affect the local area. This is something I would love to see for the Lea Valley area of London where the 2012 Olympics are planned to be; a service to allow the people who are doing the planning monitoring, building-level access to the spatial model that describes what is there and what’s being planned. As Mike writes, this is really something that Open Source GIS should be doing, though in components it has the capacity to do. Interaction through the GMaps API would be a start, but so much extra can be possible.

Posted in Uncategorized, planning, public geodata |

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