Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Conference 2009

Public Sector meets Science and Industry

The eleventh edition of the annual Global Spatial Data Infrastructure (GSDI) conference was held in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, from June 15 to 19. At this conference the GSDI Association, an inclusive body of organizations, agencies, firms, and individuals from around the world, promotes international co-operation and collaboration in support of local, national and international spatial data infrastructure developments. That was not all: this GSDI conference was jointly organized with the 3rd INSPIRE Conference and a Dutch national SDI conference on ‘Public Sector meets Science and Industry'.

By Eric van Rees

The theme for this year's edition of the GSDI Conference was ‘Building SDI Bridges to Address Global Challenges'. The conference explored the convergence towards best standards, practices and processes among nations while at the same time addressing ever-evolving and exciting new approaches to the offering of geographic data and services in meeting real world needs. An example of this convergence is the INSPIRE program. In May 2009 the INSPIRE legislation came into force, and since then all European countries have started to share their data. At the INSPIRE conference sessions, visitors were able to get an up-to-date picture of the implementation of the INSPIRE Directive.

Every conference day had a specific topic: after a day of pre-conference workshops, Tuesday June 16 was the GSDI World Conference, on Wednesday June 17 there was the 3rd INSPIRE Conference, and Thursday June 18 was aimed at ‘the public sector meets science and industry'. On Friday June 19 the corporate sector gave its visions and perspectives on collaboration and participation in SDIs. On this last conference day, there was also a special student program with master classes. As if all this was not enough, visitors could also enjoy a large exhibition, several press conferences, and diverse social, technical and cultural programs to complete the event.

Over the five days, visitors could choose from a huge number of sessions and create their own program. This was not an easy task since sometimes there were no fewer than ten parallel sessions, which meant that even those who attended the conference for the whole week missed a lot. It was wise to have made a plan of action before visiting the conference to focus on one's own topics of interest. To help fully digest the conference, visitors were given a free CD containing all three conference proceedings and a book on SDI convergence, as well as a substantial program and a book of abstracts.

Volunteered Geographic Information

On Wednesday June 17 I visited two afternoon sessions. The first one was called ‘Volunteered Geographic Information'. In this session, contributors from all over the world presented papers on the phenomenon of user-based content on websites such as Open Street Map. One very interesting paper was called ‘Volunteered Geographic Information: the nature and motivation of produsers'. This last word is not a spelling error: produsers are users of user-generated content who also share it with others. A lot of effort is being made to study the phenomenon of users sharing content through communities and applications via the web. Who are these users, how many of them are there and what is the motivation behind their efforts?

The authors of the papers presented explained that it's no secret that user groups as well as money-making organizations benefit a great deal from user-generated content. It seems everyone benefits, so it pays to investigate the motives behind these actions, even more when large government agencies are also discovering the power of user-generated content and can use it for change detection and geospatial data updates. But in order to get users to share their content with other users and keep on doing it, a number of requirements need to be fulfilled. One of the requirements is that users want to see their changes take effect immediately on the screen. If this doesn't happen there is no more need for sharing user-generated content. Also, the authors mention that not all user-generated content is harmless: it can be produced and shared in order to harm other users by misleading them with incorrect data. By taking a closer look at contributors, a classification can be made of different users and their motivations in contributing data to a community: for instance, some contributors are more competent than others. Last but not least, the contributions themselves can be assigned values like high-quality, constructive or damaging.

What government agencies can learn from all these kinds of users, intentions and types of contributions is that they have to take into account the rules of each community for generating and sharing user-based content. Also, it's important to take into account that these communities decide what to share, how to share it, and whom to share it with. It's not for a government agency to decide what the community shares. Even more difficult may be dealing with user-based content that is not yet a definitive, perfect piece of information and creating new rules/rights/legislation for both mapping organizations and ‘produsers' outside these organizations so that both have the right to contribute. As difficult as this is, commercial organizations have overcome the challenge of meeting the needs of user communities while also making money from their efforts. As another contributor asked in a paper, why shouldn't this be possible for government agencies, particularly when it involves SDIs?

Energy Efficient Smart Grids

The other session I visited was about energy efficient smart grids. I chose this session since I wondered what the link was between INSPIRE and smart grids, a topic largely ignored in the public debate on green energy but very high on the agenda elsewhere. In this session, visitors were shown a segment of a documentary on renewable energy that was aired on Dutch television earlier this year. The message was clear: investing in current energy networks was not the way ahead, but looking for alternatives, such as solar energy and smart grids, was the way to go. A presentation on the use of smart grids followed. By using digital technology a household can make use of electricity more efficiently than before and save money on electricity bills.

This technology posed some interesting questions for the round table discussion that followed: in giving people the power to share and distribute their own energy, who should be in a position to share information on the energy consumption of individuals, and what should be the role of national government agencies in deciding who is the owner and distributor of energy reserves, especially when we see cross-border energy distribution networks? In a way, these questions address the same fundamentals as the ones on volunteered geographical information: they are both about bottom-up consumer initiatives and sharing information. The topic of smart grids seems far away from the INSPIRE program, but actually the opposite is true: one workshop visitor spoke of policy measures on creating wind turbine parks, a direct result of reports based on INSPIRE data sets of energy shortages, that would not be in place if the data was not there.   

Verdict

In terms of quantity, this was by far the biggest geo-event I have visited in the Netherlands. The event was well-organized, the venue was a perfect fit for the number of visitors, and the list of keynote speakers was very impressive. Much time was spent at the exhibition where many new international business contacts were made. As mentioned before, the number of presentations was huge: choosing one presentation could mean missing nine others. Getting an overall view of the proceedings was therefore quite impossible. I can only say that the sessions I was able to attend were very interesting and offered new and intriguing opinions on a lot of topics, and not necessarily limited to SDIs or the INSPIRE program. One thing that struck me was the long-term view of INSPIRE: many sessions were not only about the creation of INSPIRE, but already looked ahead to the use and potential for better sharing of cross-border data, for new energy sharing initiatives, for example. It was clear that people want to act and use the data, seeing INSPIRE more as a starting point than a conclusion. There were also some comments on this, mainly from the industry, which is more focused on acting now rather than looking at solutions tomorrow. Politics is slow to respond to market initiatives, some say. And they add that INSPIRE alone is not enough. Public accessibility and an awareness of the use and necessity of data portals are as important as the creation of the portals themselves. Also, what the public can do with the data should be clear. There's clearly still a lot of work to be done in the field of Global Spatial Data Infrastructures.

Eric van Rees evanrees@geoinformatics.com is editor in chief of GeoInformatics. For more information on GSDI 11, papers etc. have a look at www.gsdi.org/gsdi11.