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GeoInformatics-7-2009
interview google's ed parson pleads for 'inspire plus' getting geospatial data to the community ed parsons is the geospatial technologist of google. at the gsdi (global spatial data infrastructures) conference in rotterdam last june he shared his opinions on inspire, open source gis and the role that google can play in getting geospatial data out into the community. 'if you want to get investments into gis data in the future, you have to prove its value by the citizens seeing that value, because it's the citizens that have the real political voice'. question: where does google stand between the consumer and the gis professional? answer: our focus is and will always be with the mass market and the consumer. and that's where we think we can have the biggest impact. our mission is about making information more accessible, more useful, and to try to impact as many people as we possibly can by making information available to them. of course, some of the things we develop happen within the enterprise, for instance google earth enterprise, which is in fact google earth (the system), but working on your own intranet. that's a byproduct, but we see that there is value in the enterprise. we also see an increasing role for national mapping agencies and large public sector lobbies to publish their information using google's infrastructure as a channel. so, there is a huge benefit for governments to make their information as open as possible, and that has been demonstrated in a number of european countries, and really clearly in the us. if we can help by providing an infrastructure that makes it easy for government organizations to publish their raw data then that's a great thing we can help to do. ed parsons, google s geospatial technologist q: how do you value the message of inspire, if at all? a: we're supportive of inspire and supportive of building sdi's, because in some ways, it makes our life easier: it's easier to get access to that information. it's also a great opportunity to talk to national mapping agencies and the public sector organizations in europe and to try and get the message across that sharing information is good. sharing information by inspire and national geoportals is a great way to share information within the public sector, but don t forget that actually there's a huge benefit to getting this information out to the community. that's something that inspire not necessarily addresses itself. so, i think it's important for us to say it needs to be inspire plus : recognizing the fact the information needs go out to the community. i'm genuinely impressed by what's going on in the netherlands actually: i think what geonovum do, in terms of their outreach and trying to make geospatial information visible to the community, is really significant, and certainly here people seem to have really grabbed inspire as an important thing to work towards. they are almost running ahead of where they actually need to be at this point, which is good. if you compare that to where i come from, i'm embarrassed by how much perhaps the uk has dragged its feet in european matters, particularly in sharing information. i still largely think there could be much more focus on doing things rather than talking about them. in general terms, sdi's are usually created by producers of information, and the terminology used and the direction followed comes from producers. there isn't really the focus on the user: what's the end user going to get from it? it's not very difficult to change your emphasis and to get into that user perspective. but it's really important and needed in this community. otherwise, you've built a really complex, very expensive infrastructure and nobody will use it. and that's always a concern. q: and how do you think this information can best reach the community? a: there's a range of solutions. one way to do it is by putting a public interface to a national sdi, but it's still relatively difficult and technical to use. another way of doing it is by making information available to organizations like google or microsoft, or yahoo, and for us to publish it parallel to our infrastructure. we're very happy to do that, and that takes the cost of hosting and distribution away from the public sector organizations. or, just build a website and you put the raw datasets there for people to download. our key message is that inspire on its own is not enough. you really have to get the information out to the citizens because ultimately, it's the citizens that have the real political voice. if you want to get investments into gis data in the future, you have to prove october/november 2009 q: how do you value north american data sets and sdi's as opposed to european ones, like inspire? a: although i don't think the quality is any higher in the us, i think that there's a different attitude and culture to sharing information: the culture is much more open in the us and more information is shared. i argue that the quality of data in europe is much higher because the european countries are smaller and there has been more investment on a more centralized level. but certainly the problem in most cases in europe is that it's much harder to get access to that information. 26
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