Friday, February 5, 2010


I hope some of you smart folks have been thinking about this for a while. I really hope you have some suggestions on how to make this a reality.

So I started thinking a bit which is always dangerous. How does a government agency integrate all of the rich data into a single location?

My simple definitions
Single location= a location that a user can go to get the data. Ideally, numerous locations would be feed data from an integrated source

Rich Data= data from city, county, state integrated with crowd-sourced data of various forms

The idea is data would flow from multiple sources to a library from which a single rich data set could be completed. The beauty of the system is that all of the data ‘feeders’ would not even have to know about one another. For example, the county official responsible for roads would not have to know about OSM but could leverage the data that is inserted into OSM and vice-versa. The illustration above is focused on roads, but if such a system existed; points of interest, hydro, pick a ‘layer’ could be easily created and shared.

I realize the idea above is a dream. Things like licensing, lawyers, bureaucracy and a host of other things immediately point to “This cannot be done.” What if those issues didn’t exist; what might we have? This is what I am interested in seeing happen. Arkansas is ready to give it a try. Anyone else out there done this?


3 comments:

  1. Use Case: (starts out familiar but gets better)

    I am data steward...I register my dataset or service with a clearinghouse site (take your pick). I provide a URL to data or page about data...I provide email address with which I can among other things:

    a) opt in to 2 way communication channel specific with data users...data issues, update announcements

    b) receive notification if link breaks (this is mandatory)

    c) have access to a service (based somewhere white and fluffy) that stores/retrieves geotagged notes about data issues made by users

    maybe this is available in a generic somebody.data.gov/com portal and its not just spatial data for which these services are available

    ReplyDelete
  2. After seeing mobile LIDAR/LADAR presentations...do we need to re-define rich data? Has the train left the station (at least in areas where people want a model of the real world to play games in and advertise on)?

    ReplyDelete
  3. What about grant policies that push the data to PDFs where it readily disappears on a shelf. The FEMA planning grants always bugged me while I was in AEMA. They collected all sorts of community data and it was effectively lost. Some data can be recovered from PDF, but not much. The solution seems to be correcting the grant language and requirements, but I think there other ways to get it done, volunteered.

    ReplyDelete

About Me

Little Rock, Arkansas, United States