1. Open spatial data: sources
and tools
Stuart Macdonald
EDINA & Data Library
University of Edinburgh
stuart.macdonald@ed.ac.uk
School of Informatics Data Hack for
ILW – 18 Feb. 2012

2. EDINA & Data Library
EDINA and University Data Library (EDL)
together are a division within Information
Services of the University of Edinburgh.
EDINA is a JISC-funded National Data Centre
providing national online data resources for
education and research.
The Data Library assists Edinburgh University
users in the discovery, access, use and
management of research datasets.

3. Digimap started as a project under the eLib (Electronic Libraries)
Programme in 1996 offering Ordnance Survey maps to 6 trial
universities. The full service was launched in 2000
Scoping exercise finding: 80% of maps are used by non-
geographers
The UK’s National Geospatial Data Framework (NGDF) estimates
that approximately 80%* of information collected in the UK today
is geo-referenced.
* Reid, J., 2002. geoXwalk – A Gazetteer Server and Service for UK Academia. IASSIST Quarterly, Vol. 26, Issue 3 - http://iassistdata.org/publications/iq/iq26/iqvol263reid.pdf

4. Slide courtesy of James Reid (EDINA, 2010) - http://prezi.com/n8ui3umrjxfh/survive-or-thrive/

5. “Open data is the idea that certain data
should be freely available to everyone
to use and republish as they wish,
without restrictions from copyright,
patents or other mechanisms of
control. The goals of the open data
movement are similar to those of other
"Open" movements such as open
source, open hardware, open content,
and open access.” – Wikipedia
(13/2/13)
“Open knowledge’ is any content, This file is made available under the Creative Commons
information or data that people are free
CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication
to use, re-use and redistribute —
without any legal, technological or
social restriction.” – Open Knowledge
Foundation (15/2/13)

6. Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF)
(OKF) is an internationally
reknowned non-profit organisation
(2004) dedicated to promoting open
data and open content – including
government data, publicly funded
research and public domain cultural
content.
OKF build tools, projects and
communities with a network of
international partners each focused
on different aspects of open
knowledge, but united by common
concerns & goals

7. The Comprehensive Knowledge Archive
Network (CKAN) project is a web-based
system for the storage and distribution of
data, such as spreadsheets and the
contents of databases.
The system is used both as a public
platform on thedatahub.org and in various
government / regional data catalogues,
such as the UK's data.gov.uk, and the
European Commission Open Data Portal
CKAN source code is available from
github: https://github.com
URL: http://ckan.org/

9. CKAN provides a rich RESTful JSON API for querying and
accessing dataset information. The API provides:
• Full querying / searching
• Dataset listings by publisher, or by theme, etc
• Recent activity and additions (also available via
RSS/Atom feed)
• Statistics on dataset usage
• RDF version of the catalogue (via an rdf extension)
• CSV & JSON dumps of entire catalogue
The API is fully documented at http://docs.ckan.org/.

10. CKAN has advanced geospatial features:
Data Preview: Where structured data with location
information is loaded into CKAN’s DataStore, CKAN can
plot the data on an interactive map.
Data Search: CKAN can understand a location associated
with a dataset, and use this to offer geospatial search
capabilities via the API e.g. by specifying a bounding box.
Data Discovery: To facilitate interoperability CKAN
includes tools to import geo-coded metadata in a number
of formats and make it queriable (‘discoverable’)
according to the INSPIRE standard.
For further geospatial capabilities see:
http://docs.ckan.org/en/latest/geospatial.html

11. Data Licensing
When sharing data, it is important to consider how you want your data to
be reused. Applying an explicit licence removes any ambiguity over what
users can and cannot do with your data. Lawyers can craft licences to
meet specific criteria, but there are a number of open licences developed
for use on the web that anyone can apply.
Licenses designed for one type of subject matter aren’t always best suited
to licensing another type of subject matter because of differences in how
copyright law applies.
Creative Commons (CC) licences were designed for 'generic' digital
content and may not be best suited to licensing specific types of subject
matter which have different intellectual property rights.
Indeed Creative Commons themselves have recommended against using
their licences (other than CC Zero - CC0, or "no rights reserved") for data
and databases.

12. Open Data Commons
Open Data Commons (ODC) have prepared a set of licences suitable for
data that are conformant with the principles set forth in the Open
Knowledge Definition. Each licence is accompanied by a statement
which can be placed with your data on a webpage that points to your
data.

13. Research Data Repositories
http://databib.org/ - a searchable catalog / registry / directory of
research data repositories
http://www.re3data.org/ - a global registry of research data repositories
from different academic disciplines
http://datashare.is.ed.ac.uk/
An online digital repository of multi-
disciplinary research datasets
produced at the University of
Edinburgh, hosted by the Data
Library in on a DSpace platform

14. Map or spatial mash-up ‘resource
discovery tool’ - there are 2659 spatial
mashups that utilise a whole range of Web
services, and 459 mapping APIs (Feb. 2013)
-
http://www.programmableweb.com/tag/ma
pping
Open Mapping Utilities:
GeoCommons - http://geocommons.com/
OpenStreetMap -
http://www.openstreetmap.org/
Google MapMaker -
http://www.google.com/mapmaker
Platial - http://www.platial.com/
UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis - http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/
MapTube - http://www.maptube.org/ - a free resource for viewing,
sharing, mixing and mashing maps created with the GMapCreator
software, released by CASA.

15. EDINA & Open Spatial Data - APIs/Developer tools:
Unlock is a set of web services intended to help researchers
and developers unlock the ‘spatial’ potential in digital
resources:
Unlock Places - An API helps developers to find locations and
shapes of places, and re-use them in your application.
•Unique UK location database compiled from OS Gazetteers
•An open access, worldwide coverage location database based
on open data from geonames.org
Unlock Geocodes – Convert UK postcodes or grid references to
co-ordinates
Unlock Text – Extract place names from text or metadata to find
their location using a geo-parser
http://unlock.edina.ac.uk/home/

16. ShareGeo Open – A repository of free
and reusable data sets deposited by
researchers and research institutions
•Find – search for user-contributed
datasets
•Re-use – download datasets for research,
teaching and learning
•Share – contribute your own datasets for
others to use
•Open – there are Open and Digimap
licensed versions for datasets with different
origins
http://www.sharegeo.ac.uk/

17. The Digimap OpenStream service provides access to a Web Map
Service (WMS) offering Ordnance Survey OpenData products, including:
GB Overview
Miniscale
1:250000 Colour Raster
VectorMap District Raster
OS Streetview
Use the Digimap OpenStream API to do things like:
•Mashups, combining OS Opendata with maps and data from other
sources
•adding OS Opendata to Google Earth.
•Embed maps in your website.
•provide OS mapping in your own applications.
Free for academic use. Registration required.
See URL: http://openstream.edina.ac.uk/registration/

18. Third last slide…
Gogeo – an online resource discovery tool for geospatial data created by UK
researchers: http://www.gogeo.ac.uk/metadata/search/
Users can also create, publish and export metadata records using the Geodoc tool
AddressingHistory has an API onto historic Post Office Directory data from
Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen - see URL:
http://addressinghistory.edina.ac.uk/api/.
The code for the POD Parser, used to convert Post Office Directory OCR into
structured data for AddressingHistory is also available on Github here:
https://github.com/gmh04/podparser/.

19. Final comments
• There’s a generally accepted assertion that 80% of all
information has a spatial reference (implicit or otherwise) –
exploit!
• If you’re creating open data products then Licence it!
• EDINA is a great place to start looking for spatial data services
and tools including APIs!

20. FIN! - THANK YOU
Credits:
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