IT and Geographic Information Project Progress Assignment
1. Open Source Geospatial Data Definition and Example
Open source software may be defined as software in which the source code used to create the program is freely available to the public to view, edit, and redistribute. Open source software is released under public licenses, such as the Microsoft Public License or the GNU General Public License, and may include any type of software program, like applications, databases, programming languages and operating systems. The open source approach encourages community to actively participate in improvement of software applications and databases. One of the examples of open source geospatial solutions is ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap (OSM), an add-on for ArcGIS Desktop that enables users to download data from the OSM server to a local database, create, modify, delete it, and upload back to the OSM servers if necessary. Another example is Esri Geoportal Service, a product that allows organizations manage and publish metadata that describes their geospatial resources. Geoportal Service supports metadata discovery applications and helps users share and exchange geospatial resources on the international level to improve collaboration between government and private agencies.
2. Volunteered Geographic Information Definition and Examples
Volunteered geographic information (VGI) represents an assertive method of collecting geospatial information as opposed to the authoritative method applied by government agencies and private industry. VGI is a part of user-generated content, since it consists of data provided by individuals on voluntary basis. Examples of VGI are Wikimapia that encourages participants to post comments about geo-referenced locations, Flickr where users upload photos of specific locations, and OpenStreetMap, a free map data source created by volunteers. Wikimapia, for example, provides a possibility to any Internet user to upload a description of any selected area on the Earth’s surface, add pictures and references, and edit entries of other participants. Development of VGI became possible due to technologies that allowed users generate content and apply geo-referencing. Web 2.0 provides a possibility for every user to make contribution to the websites’ content and edit the content created by others, as it may be seen in the examples of Wikis and Blogs. In addition, development of Global Positioning System made it easy to define location on the Earth’s surface (latitude and longitude), or create photos tagged with geographic coordinates. As pointed out by professor Goodchild, the most successful piece of VGI is place names that are widely used by local communities, but not recorded by gazetteers. At the same time, the major problem of VGI is lack of accuracy and therefore unreliability.
3. Dangers Arising from Having too Much Geospatial Data Freely Available
Freely available geospatial data is especially vulnerable to mistakes, inaccuracy and imprecision. The more geospatial data is available, the less valuable and reliable it might become. Freely available data not always has metadata that contains its description including its origin, area of coverage, scale, degree of accuracy, purposes, etc.. The data may be inaccurate and/or imprecise due to various reasons: improper use of scale, outdated data, errors in formatting, topological, qualitative …
