GeoSpatial Systems

1
GeoSpatial Systems Metaknowledge Mashup

• Dan Rickman
• GeoSpatial SG

2
Agenda

• What are GIS
• What is GeoSpatial Data
• Data management issues
• Neo-Geography
• Standards
• Current and future developments

3
What are GeoSpatial Systems?

• Known as Geographic Information Systems, Spatial
  Information Systems
• Enables capture, modelling, storage, retrieval,
  sharing, manipulation and analysis of
  geographically referenced data
• Not CAD! Database is at the heart as is
  attribute data
• Model developing perhaps GeoSpatial data better
  seen as attribute of alphanumeric business
  information
• Presentation does not have to be map-based in all
  cases
• Key element is spatial indexing uses different
  techniques to alphanumeric indexing

4
What is Geospatial Information? - 1

• Spatial data which relates to the surface of the
  Earth
• Geodetic reference system as base e.g. WGS84 used
  for Global Positioning System (Earth as an
  ellipsoid), Latitude and Longitude (Earth as a
  sphere)
• Ordnance Survey (GB) define National Grid
  projection onto flat surface NB OS(NI) use
  Irish grid
• Spatial relationships defined around concept of
  neighbourhood relates to two laws of
  geography
• Most things influence most other things in some
  way
• Nearby things are usually more similar than
  things which are far apart

5
What is Geospatial Information? - 2

• Unstructured spaghetti data
• Topology information structured as networks,
  polygons
• GeoSpatial information requires metadata e.g.
  minimal information such as map projection used
• GeoSpatial information may also temporal
  modelling e.g. farm subsidies vary as
  utilisation and legislation change
• Field-based model versus object-based model of
  space, e.g. rainfall versus buildings on which
  rain falls
• GeoSpatial information requires ontology
• What is the real world, how classified
• Relates to semantics

6
Where used? Examples

• Central government DEFRA, ODPM, Land Registry,
  ONS
• Local government planning, highways authorities
• Utilities physical and logical network
• Insurance flood plains
• Health epidemiology
• Travel, multi-modal route planning
• More widespread use addresses, postcode based
  data against regional boundaries, infrastructure
  (geographies used to divide country, catchment
  area)
• Fiat boundaries verus bona fide boundaries
  what is real world how do we structure it?

7
Structured geo-databaseParadigm shift?
Relational Database (Attribute data)
Spatial Data (proprietary format)
Real Time/Engineering Systems
CRM
ERP

• Spatially extended RDBMS
• Complex data types for spatial data
• Computational geometry
• Spatial indexing
• DDL and DML extensions

8
Networks and Topology

• Routing
• Connectivity
• Explicit spatial relationships
• Can be complex - one way,
• - restricted turn
• - average speed

9
Terrain and 3D

• Line of sight
• Radio Propagation
• Flood
• Water Pressure

10
Temporal

• Time as a dimension
• or measure
• How things change
• over time

11
GIS
12
Geospatial data modelling

• Field-based model versus object-based model
• Geographic Information Systems are object-based
  in practice
• Most common field based information, e.g. Digital
  Elevation Model (line of sight applications),
  attached to objects
• Objects rely on field-based model, i.e. spatial
  co-ordinates
• Initiatives such as Digital National Framework
  encourage organisations to structure data on
  references to objects, not re-capture and
  duplicate data
• GeoSpatial equivalent of referential integrity
• Nevertheless duplication, lack of (referential)
  integrity is common place and hard to eradicate

13
Digital National Framework

• Capture information once and use many times
• Benefits
• avoid cost of duplicate data capture
• benefit through 3rd party data maintenance (i.e.
  avoid cost of maintaining one's own data)
• benefit of improved data management especially
  where COU is used to identify area of change
  (which can then be used to focus and improve
  maintenance of non-spatial business object data,
  as appropriate)
• Capture at the highest resolution possible
• Benefit
• avoid re-capture later on
• improve potential for data interoperability
• Publish lower resolutions from this data - if
  required
• avoids data recapture
• Use existing proven standards
• provides framework, avoids costs of "re-inventing
  the wheel" NB sort of benefit one would expect
  from a strategy!

14
In search of the BLPU

• Basic Land and Property Unit
• Holy grail of industry no Da Vinci code
  produced yet!
• Example of Ordnance Survey Master Map (OSMM)
• "St Mary's football stadium, Southampton" is one
  object
• Typical detached house and its plot of land,
  likewise
• Complex entities such as "Southampton railway
  station" are defined in terms multiple objects
  one for the main building, several for the
  platforms, one more for pedestrian bridge over
  the tracks. (NB See Wikipedia article on TOID)
• Defining the candidate BLPU, their lifecycles and
  their attribute data and verifying that these are
  meaningful/practicable from the wide variety of
  business processes which apply to the BLPU and
  the aggregate entities which are created from
  them
• Dependencies so that data sets are based on the
  BLPU wherever possible limited by business use,
  e.g. field use change quite different from a
  tenant/owner perspective

15
Evolution of geographic information
1950
2010
16
Raster map data

• Scanned ortho-rectified map or map-based data
  metadata is co-ordinates, projection, extent
• For example Google Maps/Google Earth, Microsoft
  Virtual Earth
• Traditionally stored outside the database as
  external files, analogous to vector data storage,
  e.g. Oracle 10g GeoRaster
• Data stored as BLOBs, metadata required regarding
  number of bytes per pixel, compression algorithms
  and so on
• Benefits limited as intelligence in map
  requires interpretation
• Still limited progress on map-based pattern
  recognition there are semi-automated solutions
  from companies such as Laser-Scan

17
Benefits of integration

• Geo-spatial data mining
• Spatial links
• Shipman example
• Visualisation
• Provide new ways of linking data
• Avoid capturing data e.g. DNF
• Maintenance of data
• Lower costs of integration and delivery at
  front-end
• Back-end integration still an issue data
• Reduce endless data cleaning as part of
  information management strategy
• Reduce data maintenance costs
• Improve data in business does this matter?

18
Geospatial - Drivers

• Awareness
• Current use of data
• Front end integration Mashups
• Back end Database
• Data providers
• Ordnance Survey
• Developing middle/large scale market
• Open source data
• Free our data

19
EDRM

• Electronic document and records management
• Increase usage in local/central government due to
  Freedom of Information act
• Contain potentially significant geospatial data
• Most common example is address
• Requires capture of appropriate metadata or
  appropriate pattern recognition to identify
  addresses
• Requires gazetteers to provide reference to
  spatial co-ordinates
• NB most familiar gazetteer list of streets in
  AtoZ maps

20
DfES Web Mashup
21
www.schoolmap.org.uk
22
Costs

• Hardware no special hardware required
• Network bandwidth generally adequate
• Software Increasingly delivered through thin
  clients
• SOA promise of mashups (WMS/WFS, Google, Yahoo,
  Microsoft), GeoRSS
• Development skills limited specialist skills
  required
• Data
• Still expensive
• Complex
• Requires re-engineering/data management
• Boring issue drivers often hidden in BAU

23
Standards

• GeoSpatial widely used in database technology,
  web-based systems and developing IS architecture.
• Organisations already exist -BCS must be relevant
• Open GeoSpatial Consortium - http//www.opengeospa
  tial.org/
• ISO TC211 (GI/Geomatics) - http//www.isotc211.org
  /
• BSI Committee for GI (http//www.gistandards.org.u
  k/)
• Association for Geographic Information
  (http//www.agi.org.uk)
• A topic for parliamentarians (EU e.g. INSPIRE
  http//inspire.jrc.it/ Westminster e.g. GI
  Panel http//www.gipanel.org.uk/gipanel/ Already
  an issue for business significant investment
• Needs to be a credible BCS specialist group
• Provide voice for BCS in GeoSpatial issues
• Public policy - Free our data?

24
Web 2.0 interactive integrated information
25
GSG WHY

• Benefits for BCS
• Embracing part of cultural change within IS/IT/IM
  
• Microsoft, Google and Oracle significant
  investment and developments
• Prominence in Web 2.0 sites, e.g.
  www.platial.com (Collaborative atlas)
• Enabling technologies/architecture such as SOA
• Seen as being relevant
• BCS recovering lost ground
• GIS SG previously existed
• No vendor tie in no conflict of interest
• BCS recruitment mechanism for potential BCS
  members

26
GSG WHY

• How we address GeoSpatial issues?
• Vendor, academic, end user/ business experience
• Survey and consensus of Group Members
• How do we convey this message ?
• Meetings minimum once a quarter, but ideally
  every 6 weeks.
• A positive effort to hold meetings in the nations
  regions.
• Contribution to discussions, events
  (representation).
• Web site communication
• Email bulletins
• Press

27
Summary

• Geospatial now becoming mainstream
• Significant developments in market, e.g. Pitney
  Bowes purchase of MapInfo, increasing demand for
  linking BI with GIS
• Neo-Geography and wider awareness drive use of
  geospatial data
• However data availability and quality are key
  issues, implications of this not always well
  understood
• Metadata and catalogue standards exist not always
  integrated with wider standards and not always
  well implemented or implemented at all