Open Data – a Collaboration framework with OpenStreetMap

We have been working with Nottingham Geospatial Institute (led by Jeremy Morley) over the last 2 years standing up a British National Grid version of OpenStreetMap (OSM-GB, see: http://www.osmgb.org.uk/). This project has captured imagination and fans well beyond our initial vision.

The 1Spatial role has been to provide automated tools that find errors and report them to the community. With our commercial customers we would fix these errors (digitising errors, buildings in roads etc.) automatically. In the community we feel unable to do this and didn’t want an OSM-GB that was different from the main OSM database. At a recent project review attended by around a dozen people, including Muki Haklay we had some interesting feedback.  This feedback is summarised in the table below:

Topic	Result
Will automated business rules improve quality?	Yes
Will formal QA processes increase the confidence in the product?	No
Will confidence increase the contribution and maintenance of the product?	No clear result
Will proactive messages of the need to update increase the community refresh activity?	Not yet examined
Are there benefits from conflating with OS free products e.g. VectorMapDistrict	Complementary, but see discussion below

The most interesting features of OSM-GB are around the collaboration opportunities it provides. A group of councils in Surrey have made OSM-GB their platform of choice for street naming and numbering of new developments. The local authorities in England and Wales have long felt aggrieved that having initiated the street naming they end up with data about the properties they have a vested interest in managing being subject to copyright. With OSM-GB this does not happen.

The graphic shows a new estate in Bagshot image provided by James Rutter). The whole community then has access to this mapping data even before the stuff has been finished being built! Displayed over the top is waste collection points data. The environmental health team has access to set up the new waste collection points now (these new properties are not available on any other map), so they can start planning wheely-bin deliveries.

Additionally the planners like having access to this data as there are planning enquiries as residents are in the process of moving in.  The next step in this process is to go beyond the simple tag referencing in OSM and introduce master data management based on URIs. This will give the opportunity to bring in other datasets into the conflation process – such as Geonames and the data that Ordnance Survey has made available through the open data initiative being driven by data.gov.uk, such as boundaries. There is no point in conflating for the sake of being able to say this data is better than that – all data is costly to collect and maintain and the maintenance function is something that the UN GGIM (see section 2.2.3 at: http://ggim.un.org/2nd%20Session/Future%20Trends%20Background%20Document.pdf) report highlights as being of major significance.

So there still remains much to do and 1Spatial will be at SOTM (see: http://2013.stateofthemap.org/ in Birmingham, supporting Jeremy Morley as he discusses the project and potential next steps.

My summer work placement at 1Spatial

 

By Stephen Penson

As a 3^rd year Physical Geography student at the University of Sheffield, I started my four week placement at 1Spatial with a slight background in GIS and hoping to gain some experience in the GeoSpatial industry.  The GIS section of my course seems to be one of the most useful skills gained from university and this placement has given me the opportunity to enhance my skills further.

I have learnt how to use Radius Studio and have applied rules and actions to a variety of datasets.  This has enabled me to remove errors such as spikes, overlaps and duplicates which are often present in datasets.  I have also been introduced to a variety of software products such as FME and MapInfo and also the extremely powerful Oracle Database Server.  One significant lesson I have learnt during my time at 1Spatial is that the GIS and GeoSpatial software can do far more than is taught at university.  Serious issues that have been raised in university lectures can more often than not be removed through the software I have been using.

I have also undertaken a variety of other smaller tasks including creating Radius Studio tutorial videos and enabling the live tracking of a seven day charity cycle marathon in aid of Taylan’s Project brain tumour research.  Details of the event can be found at www.1spatial.com/taylans-project 

The placement has given me a valuable insight into the workings of the GeoSpatial Data Industry and I hope my time here will help my future career prospects once I graduate in a year’s time!

Click here to see the Radius Studio tutorial videos I created during my time at 1Spatial.

Using ArcGIS Online to track our bears

For those of you that attended this year’s Esri International User  Conference, you may already be familiar with this character!

For those of you that didn’t get to the event …let me explain! 

This is Socium Bear and he, along with all his brothers and sisters, joined us on the 1Spatial stand to help promote the new business applications that will be launched on the 1Spatial Cloud Platform in the coming months. These will integrate with and extend the capabilities of Esri’s ArcGIS Online, offering users apps for data validation, correction, integration, inference and generalisation.


Lucky event attendees, who adopted one of our small bears, were encouraged to join in our fun campaign and download the free Esri ArcGIS app so that they could add photos of their bear to our map and also put a pin in their home location so that we could see where in the world the bears travelled to. This created a lot of fun on the stand for attendees to the event but we are also really delighted to see that the world map is already starting to see an invasion of the bears being tagged in their new home locations.

So far bears have touched down in Canada, Australia, Poland, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK. There is even a photo posted by Esri themselves of two of the bears with the Olympic Torch near London in the UK!  There are also lots of photos across the United States and a number of them were posted in San Diego during the event. One bear even took a trip up to Hollywood after the conference finished as there are photos of him hanging out with the stars!If you attended the event and have one of the bears, you can still get involved and post your photos or home location. Full instructions are on the website along with the map that shows where in the world the bears have already appeared http://www.socium.co.uk/sociumbear/