Data Sharing for Geo Nerds and the Cyber Nun
Choosing the right format is a topic which has been covered before on this blog. In recent weeks Andrew Turner has written an excellent series of blog posts exploring this issue from the perspective of the GeoWeb. The posts were written as a follow up to Turner’s GeoWeb presentation on standards for the GeoWeb. Go ahead and read his posts, all three are insightful looks at where the geospatial world sits today, and how it is evolving into a more mainstream technology.
Turner is the CTO at GeoCommons and the founder of Mapufacture. These are both spatial tools that have been written for non-spatial people. His graphs of “market share” of formats on both GeoCommons and Mapufacture tell an interesting story of where non-professional users get data. While the majority of uploads to GeoCommons are shapefiles (though this may be an artifact of organizations using the zipped shapefiles on an ftp-site approach to public data), a very close second is CSV. The formats we generally think of as “GeoWeb” formats, such as KML, GeoJSON and GeoRSS barely register.
One point where I’m not sure if I agree is that a middle ground of complexity is necessary. Most people who visit a data sharing service will be confused if they are only able to use shapefiles or GML. These formats are fine for us geo nerds, but provide way too much information for someone who just wants to see local bus routes. It would certainly be much easier for everyone if we could all use the same format, but how can we find a single format that can be used by James Fee’s cyber nun (below) to add a map of a bus route to a flyer, while also allowing people to do serious analysis of transit networks?
For now the only option is to offer data in multiple formats. Give the cyber nun a kml file she can use in Google Earth (or better yet, show the KML file in Google Maps right on the download page) and allow her to upload a CSV file with X and Y columns, but make the same data with additional metadata available in shapefile or spatialite for those of us who need it.
