Geowanking

October 9, 2008 2:17 PM

"We can have all the applications and Internet connectivity [...] but that still won't get at issues of lack of electricity and cartographic literacy and suppression of geospatial information by the state and their complicit corporations" reads a recent post on Geowanking, a mailing list for GIS nerds. [SLMLP]

As there isn't a description on the list's website, the article "Geowankers Anonymous" from 2006 is probably the best place to go to get an idea of what it's all about. Or, just peruse their archives.

The quote is from this message by Dr R E Sieber.

posted by finite (13 comments total)

Oh, if I had a nickel for every anonymous email I've received inviting me to 'Peruse My Geowanking'.
posted by mannequito at 2:25 PM on October 9, 2008 [1 favorite]

I am not a real GIS nerd though I keep telling myself I'm going to start playing with PostGIS any day now. But I am a little bit of an open-records nerd and I've always wondered about the "suppression of geospatial information by the state and their complicit corporations." Many open records laws specifically exempt GIS data in some or all circumstances from disclosure. Why is there so much resistance on the part of public officials to releasing this data? Contracts with third parties to resell it? Is there really so substantial a geospatial-data-purveyor lobby? Shapefiles hardly seem likely to be politically compromising.
posted by enn at 2:36 PM on October 9, 2008

Good maps are absolutely essential for war, enn; though these days I have a hard time imagining that it would be hard to get maps of most places (what with satellites and all), fifty years ago that was (AIUI) much less true, and maps of some countries were hard to come by.
posted by hattifattener at 3:08 PM on October 9, 2008

Without knowing what "state" is doing the repressing, the argument falls a bit flat. Look, here's the U.S. Census GIS data.
posted by exogenous at 3:10 PM on October 9, 2008

The situation in the United States is much better than in many countries, largely due to the copyright status of work by the U.S. government.
posted by finite at 3:24 PM on October 9, 2008

I am not a real GIS nerd though I keep telling myself I'm going to start playing with PostGIS any day now.

Oh man, I'm a PostGIS convert. In the past, I've mainly used ArcGIS, but I'm currently working on a project that involves a huge series of health, environmental and meteorological datasets, with research spread across a continent. We decided to look into using a central database server for our needs, discovered ArcGIS doesn't really play nicely with any open source database for spatial data, so we've gone down the Postgres + PostGIS + Quantum GIS route.

And so far, I'm loving it. The slightly greater learning curve is quickly overcome by how efficient it is to set up spatial analyses in the form of SQL views. Modify one bit of data at the top, everything cascades down. Beautiful

Without knowing what "state" is doing the repressing, the argument falls a bit flat. Look, here's the U.S. Census GIS data.

Very true. I think it's actually the result of the American "OMG taxes and government are evil" attitude that makes spatial data in the US much more available. If the government collects the data, there is a very strong expectation that the taxpayers will have access to it. Whereas in Australia, Britain etc. the government gets to collect data because that's its job, and the public have to pay if they want to see it.

It is frustrating. I can't even get my hands on a shapefile of Australian postcodes without paying. Or a high quality DEM. Bastards.
posted by Jimbob at 3:27 PM on October 9, 2008

Many open records laws specifically exempt GIS data in some or all circumstances from disclosure.

Cite? The City of Milwaukee, as one example, has detailed property files available for download that have owners' names, addresses, and assessed property values, amongst other database fields.
posted by desjardins at 3:29 PM on October 9, 2008

And closer to home, here's the download page for the City of Chicago.
posted by desjardins at 3:34 PM on October 9, 2008

Also also - (sorry for the third post) as an urban planning/GIS student I had no problem whatsoever walking into a village/town office and just asking for their GIS data files. Sometimes I paid a nominal fee for the clerk's time and the cost of the CD.
posted by desjardins at 3:36 PM on October 9, 2008

Also also - (sorry for the third post) as an urban planning/GIS student I had no problem whatsoever walking into a village/town office and just asking for their GIS data files.

As a research associate on a publically funded project in which the local government's land information department was an in-kind-contribution project partner, I spent 3 months negotiating for access to about 10 square kilometers of 1m-contours. Once I had access, I had to sign forms indicating I would allow no-one else involved in the project to see the data.

What a difference a country makes.
posted by Jimbob at 3:56 PM on October 9, 2008

There is unavailable data in the US, depending on where you are and what level of government you are attempting to get data from. In NJ, all state created data is available free of charge, unless it is environmentally sensitive or deemed to be sensitive on security grounds. Data collected by counties and municipalities, however, runs the gamut from freely downloadable to prohibitively expensive to unavailable even to researchers who swear in blood to store it on machines that can't even see the internet let alone connect to it.

The fractured nature of government in the US leads to situations where one county has high quality freely available land parcel data sets while adjacent counties in the same state have nothing. And forget working between states, there's even less standardization. So the data situation is better in the US in general, but it varies greatly from state to state and within each state as well.
posted by mollweide at 5:39 PM on October 9, 2008

Cite? The City of Milwaukee, as one example, has detailed property files available for download that have owners' names, addresses, and assessed property values, amongst other database fields.

I'm thinking of the following bit in the Illinois FOIA:

(i) [These materials are exempt:] Valuable formulae, computer geographic systems, designs, drawings and research data obtained or produced by any public body when disclosure could reasonably be expected to produce private gain or public loss. The exemption for "computer geographic systems" provided in this paragraph (i) does not extend to requests made by news media as defined in Section 2 of this Act when the requested information is not otherwise exempt and the only purpose of the request is to access and disseminate information regarding the health, safety, welfare, or legal rights of the general public.

Of course it's not a blanket exemption but it's vague enough to be used that way by officials who are not feeling helpful. But maybe Illinois's is the only law with such an exemption.

There is a good deal of City of Chicago data online, but it varies from department to department — in particular I've been trying to get my hands on zoning data with no luck.
posted by enn at 6:14 PM on October 9, 2008

in particular I've been trying to get my hands on zoning data with no luck.

wow, you weren't kidding. mea culpa. I thought for sure I could find it online and the best I came up with was their interactive map.
posted by desjardins at 9:30 AM on October 10, 2008