GIS In the Cloud

Cloud computing has been the hot topic in many GIS circle for the last year or so, largely for the same reason it is building steam more recently in most IT circles in general - datacenters and bandwidth speeds are nearing the point where the promise of mass cloud computing is feasible for corporate users (which is where the money is). For anyone previously not versed in this topic, cloud computing is basically the movement of applications, services, and data from local storage to massive datacenters run by people like Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and Microsoft. You probably use it already - say if you use GMail rather than a local application like Outlook or Windows Mail. Maps have obviously moved there too. If you own a computer you probably use some kind of online map for directions. It doesn't necessarily need to be in a browser either - Google Earth and NASA's WorldWind might be local applications, but all of the data and services are running off of datacenters somewhere else. It is believed this somewhat slow progression is going to accelerate as activities typically preformed by local IT departments for small and medium-sized businesses are increasingly replaced by cloud apps offered for basically free by the above organizations. It might seem foolish to marry yourself to a particular platform or business in this fashion but (1) a lot of these things are built on open standards like LAMP anyway and can be transferred around and (2) companies marry themselves to a vendor all the time (see SAP). Traditional desktop software vendors are shifting to do their stuff at least partially as a service (and thus online). Windows 7 isn't going to have a mail program, it is going to fill that functionality with Live Mail. ESRI, the biggest GIS software vendor, has made it a point to make it extremely easy to put online data services into map documents just as you would add in layers on a local computer. A great number of GIS data providers, largely governmental, are not by and large going to venture into the cloud all that soon, not without intervention by legislators. Why? Liability, tradition, data sensitivity. What data public exists is often of variable quality, especially when overlaid with other information from other sources. Throw some bad data out there, even if you include metadata that includes a hefty disclaimer, morons will still use it to hike into a blizzard and and sue you for having to eat their children. Even with good data, there is the problem of interpretation. Take a parcel layer from any given city/county government in the United States and throw it on Google Earth. GE does a pretty good job, but I would wager good money the satellite imagery isn't accurate to a quarter of an inch. The parcel layer is, by law. The number of people who will go on to Google Earth and stir up property disputes without this knowledge is probably substantial enough to be a factor in deciding to release it. And of course there is the security issue. Knowing what substation can black out a particular city block, what water main is feeding that block, communication lines, emergency vehicle GPS locations - this stuff could be used not just by some existential terrorism threat but by normal criminals to cause all sorts of mischief and evade capture.

The artificial barrier of licensing, a GIS/Surveying example

There was news recently of a feature story pulled from a professional survey magazine because the work in question was, according to the State Licensing Board, depicting activities that should only be done by licensed surveyors rather than GIS professionals or anyone else. James Fee doesn't know what part of this mess is the worst, but I'd like to take an amateur stab at it. The artificial barrier that government licenses produce can in fact be a good thing when the occupation is such that a minimum standard is required to avoid large-scale fraud, but in so many cases could probably be done by private organizations. Many are put in place by a vocal and monied minority in an attempt to create what amounts to a cartel. I believe one example involved a manicure license that costed thousands of dollars. Professional survey licensing may fall under this, but my limited knowledge of that industry compels me to limit such rhetoric. This isn't the biggest problem with what occurred. Actually, the biggest problem wasn't even the suggestion GIS professionals - or for that matter, simply knowledgable members of the public with increasingly cheap GPS devices - are not competent to do location based field work. For so much geographic data, a 10m resolution is a godsend where previously no one was collecting data. And as more nations put up satellites it will likely become even finer resolution for smaller and more casual devices. This is not to suggest there isn't a place for professional surveyors - both for ultimate liability responsibility and expertise with the more effective tools and procedures. But the percieved elitism is somewhat disconserting. As a GIS/programming guy, I don't find anything I do so absurdly difficult that it would pain my eyes to read an article about an amatuer trying it. The biggest problem is that a state licensing board can effectively kill an article. There isn't any way in which this is a good thing, and I hope whoever has their hands on it leaks it to the internet.

The viable solution to internet piracy

The sad fact of the matter is piracy as it is currently defined cannot be stopped without enormous breaches of privacy. Absent the restriction of tools to even create programs that can effortlessly defeat protection methods, you can't stop people from copying digital information. Mostly because the mere act of being on the internet means you are required to copy things just to view/listen to them. This is a sample of some of the points of a paper I recently read at Cato called The Future of Copyright. My personal favorite part:

When American troops liberated the city of Luxembourg in 1944, they made a strange capture: a machine capable of recording sound on magnetic tapes. Shortly after the war, this German military invention made its appearance in private homes. Tape recorders integrated listening and reproduction in one device, but as separate functions. That’s no longer the case with digital technology. Today, to use digital information is to copy it.

Computers operate by copying. They couldn’t care less whether the physical distance between original and copy is measured in micrometers or in miles; both work equally well for them. Copyright law, on the other hand, must somehow draw a line between use and distribution. That means putting an imaginary grid over the chaotic myriad of network nodes, delineating clusters of devices that can be attributed to individuals or households.

Every person reading this article is actually copying it illegally. You can't help but do it. As you surf the internet your computer is constantly caching (saving locally) data that you are viewing. Anyone who has ever used the internet for anything is almost certainly a pirate. I'll let you all off with a warning this time. Humor aside, the problem is one that the music industry found itself in a long while ago with the invention and mass adoption of radio. John Philip Sousa was convinced anything but live shows would completely destroy music. The solution, after much complaining, was to just license the distributor. Now of course the distributor and consumer and creator is anyone and everyone on the internet. The compromise is an idea that is not new and is even talked about by both sides of the issue with increasing interest: mass public electronic media licensing. If everyone on the internet is a pirate, license everyone. Everyone who wants to buy in at least. You've solved 99% of your piracy problems by facing the reality of a system, the internet, that requires copying. You also don't even have to host the files themselves, users are more than willing to do so. The idea has merit but the problem is the pie to be divided. We need an organization as trusted as the Nielsen statistics are for downloaded media content to correctly award creators and their labels/studios/whatever. The only alternatives are to entire restrict piracy with the kind of locking down that would destroy the internet and privacy in general (people could still just rip stuff from friends/renters) OR to see an attempt to destroy internet and privacy while the major content holders die a slow and painful (for everyone involved) death at the hands of unrelenting technological innovation. Edit: Hahaha. Bonus quote from a Guardian article linked from the Cato piece:

"For somebody who has spent 30 years in the music industry, you instinctively know this stuff is going on. But when you actually sit looking at your computer and see a number that says 95% of people are copying music at home, you suddenly go, 'Bloody hell'," he said.

Turns out you could nuke the internet from orbit and the current copyright model is doomed. Note: Copying this work is no longer actually illegal in any sense, since I have licensed everything with Creative Commons.

Google Earth locations now editable.

It was only a matter of time really. You can now edit points on Google Earth. To prevent people from trashing what is a pretty decent database of locations, you can also immediately view the original location as an option. I'll probably have a lot to say about this when I get done with work, but my immediate thought is how much more open will it get (user uploaded polygons? lines?), what will be the synergy with Android (mobile computing will no doubt integrate GPS technology), and if you can add points/lines/polygons willy-nilly, when is the government going to take a keen interest in semi-anonymous, amateur members of the general public plopping down points on things they'd prefer wasn't easily searched for? Update: My comments above are probably premature. You cannot, as far as I can tell, add points to Google Earth (in the sense those points are immediately and automatically shared with everyone else). Though I will admit I haven't played with GE for a while. If you could add points like that, you would likely start having the Wikipedia effect - vandalism and advertisement would become quite rampant without dedicated administrators and probably a secondary staff of trusted volunteers. Since Wikipedia hasn't and quite honestly are unlikely to solve that problem, it becomes a question of the costs vs. the benefits. I would say it would be worthwhile if such user-created features were implemented such that the whole of them would be turned off as default. Some basic/super popular layer categories could be created ("good neighborhoods", "pleasant views", "hiking trails"). Anyone entering it of course could add dynamic tags that you could search for in another search tool. Update II: From CNET

To curb potential abuse, users aren't able to edit the location of a business that has already verified its location via Google's Local Business Center. There's also an official review system that has to double check your edit if it's more than 200 meters away from the original location.

Update III: Well check out how ridiculously behind the times I am. http://wikimapia.org/ This is pretty neat. Although a lot of the entries are clearly advertisements and and some vandalism, but that is the double edged sword of public created data.