Gothos

This past weekend I had the privilege of attending the Open Geoportal (OGP) National Summit in Boston, hosted by Tufts University and funded by the Sloan Foundation. The Open Geoportal (OGP) is a map-based search engine that allows users to discover and retrieve geospatial data from many repositories. The OGP serves as the front-end of a three-tiered system that includes a spatial database (like PostGIS) at the back and some middleware (Like OpenLayers) to communicate between the two.

Users navigate via a web map (Google by default but you can choose other options), and as they change the extent by panning or zooming a list of available spatial layers appears in a table of contents beside the map. Hovering over a layer in the contents reveals a bounding box that indicates its spatial extent. Several algorithms determine the ranking order of the results based on the spatial intersection of bounding boxes with the current map view. For instance, layers that are completely contained in the map view have priority over those that aren’t, and layers that have their geographic center in the view are also pushed higher in the results. Non-spatial search filters for date, data type, institution, and keywords help narrow down a search. Of course, the quality of the results is completely dependent on the underlying metadata for the layers, which is stored in the various repositories.

The project was pioneered by Tufts, Harvard, and MIT , and now about a dozen other large research universities are actively working with it, and others are starting to experiment. The purpose of the summit was to begin creating a cohesive community to manage and govern the project, and to increase and outline the possibilities for collaborating across institutions. At the back end, librarians and metadata experts are loading layers and metadata into their repositories; metadata creation is an exacting and time-consuming process, but the OGP will allow institutions to share their metadata records in the hope of avoiding duplicated effort. The OGP also allows for the export of detailed spatial metadata from FGDC and ISO to MODS and MARC, so that records for the spatial layers can be exported to other content management systems and library catalogs.

The summit gave metadata experts the opportunity to discuss best practices for metadata creation and maintenance, in the hopes of providing a consistent pool of records that can be shared; it also gave software developers the chance to lay out their road map for how they’ll function as an open source project (the OGP community could look towards the GeoNetwork opensource project, a forerunner in spatial metadata and search that’s used in Europe and by many international organizations). Series of five-minute talks called Ignite sessions gave librarians and developers the ability to share the work they were doing at their institutions, either with OGP in particular or with metadata and spatial search in general, which sparked further discussion.

The outcome of all the governance, resource sharing, and best practices discussions are available on a series of pages dedicated to the summit, on the opengeoportal.org project website. You can also experiment with the OGP via http://geodata.tufts.edu/, Tuft’s gateway to their repository. As you search for data you can identify which repository the data is coming from (Tufts, Harvard, or MIT) based on the little icon that appears beside each layer name. Public datasets (like US census layers) can be downloaded by anyone, while copyrighted sets that the schools’ purchased for their users require authentication.

OGP is a simple yet elegant open source project that operates under OGC standards and is awesome for spatial search, but the real gem here is the community of people that are forming around it. I was blown away by the level of expertise, dedication, and over all professionalism that each of the librarians, information specialists, and software developers exuded, via the discussions and particularly by the examples of the work they were doing at their institutions. Beyond just creating software, this project is poised to enhance the quality and compatibility of spatial metadata to keep our growing pile of geospatial stuff find-able.

As the US government shutdown continues (thanks to a handful of ideological nutcases in congress) those of us who work with and rely on government data are re-learning the lesson of why it’s important to keep copies of things. This includes having alternate sources of information floating around on the web and in the cloud, as well as the tried and true approach of downloading and saving datasets locally. There have been a number of good posts (like this succinct one) to point users to alternatives to the federal sources that many of us rely on. I’ll go into more detail here with my suggestions on where to access US Census data, based on user-level and need.

• The Social Explorer: this web-mapping resource for depicting and accessing US Census data from 1790 to present (including the 2010 Census and the latest American Community Survey data) is intuitive and user-friendly. Many academic and public libraries subscribe to the premium edition that provides full access to all features and datasets (so check with yours to see if you have access), while a basic free version is available online. Given the current circumstances the Social Explorer team has announced that it will open the hatch and provide free access to users who request it.
• The NHGIS (National Historic GIS): this project is managed by the Minnesota Population Center and also provides access to all US Census data from 1790 to present. While it’s a little more complex than the Social Exlorer, the NHGIS is the better option for downloading lots of data en-masse, and is the go-to place if you need access to all datasets in their entirety, including all the detail from the American Community Survey (as the Social Explorer does not include margins of error for any of the ACS estimates) or if you need access to other datasets like the County Business Patterns. Lastly – it is the alternative to the TIGER site for GIS users who need shapefiles of census geography. You have to register to use NHGIS, but it’s free. For users who need microdata (decennial census, ACS, Current Population Survey), you can visit a related MPC project to the NHGIS: IPUMS.
• The Missouri Census Data Center (MCDC): I’ve mentioned a number of their tools in the past; they provide easy-to-access profiles from the 2010 Census and American Community Survey, as well as historical trend reports for the ACS. For intermediate users they provide extract applications for the 2010 Census and ACS for creating spreadsheets and SAS files for download, and for advanced users the Dexter tool for downloading data en-masse from 1980 to present. Unlike the other resources no registration or sign-up is required. I also recommend the MCDC’s ACS and 2010 Census profiles to web designers and web mappers; if you’ve created online resources that tapped directly into the American Factfinder via deep links (like I did), you can use the MCDC’s profiles as an alternative. The links to their profiles are persistent and use a logical syntax (as it looks like there’s no end in site to this shutdown I may make the change-over this week). Lastly, the MCDC is a great resource for technical documentation about geography and datasets.
• State and local government: thankfully many state and local governments have taken subsets of census data of interest to people in their areas and have recompiled and republished it on the web. These past few weeks I’ve been constantly sending students to the NYC Department of City Planning’s population resources. Take a look at your state data center’s resources, as well as local county or city planning departments, transportation agencies, or economic development offices to see what they provide.