Data Mash-Ups and the Future of Mapping By
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Technology & Standards Watch (TechWatch) www.jisc.ac.uk/techwatch Horizon Scanning report 10_01 First published: Sept. 2010 Data mash-ups and the future of mapping by University College London University of Nottingham Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) Centre for Geospatial Science (CGS) Michael Batty Suchith Anand Andrew Crooks Mike Jackson Andrew Hudson-Smith Jeremy Morley Richard Milton Reviewed by: James Reid Team Leader and Business Development Manager, Geoservices EDINA Andrew Turner Deputy Director, Centre for Computational Geography University of Leeds To ensure you are reading the latest version of this report you should always download it from the original source. Original source http://www.jisc.ac.uk/techwatch Version 1.0 This version published Sept. 2010 Publisher JISC: Bristol, UK Copyright owner Suchith Anand, Michael Batty, Andrew Crooks, Andrew Hudson-Smith, Mike Jackson, Richard Milton, Jeremy Morley JISC TechWatch: Data mash‐ups… (Sept. 2010) Executive Summary The term 'mash-up' refers to websites that weave data from different sources into new Web services. The key to a successful Web service is to gather and use large datasets and harness the scale of the Internet through what is known as network effects. This means that data sources are just as important as the software that 'mashes' them, and one of the most profound pieces of data that a user has at any one time is his or her location. In the past this was a somewhat fuzzy concept, perhaps as vague as a verbal reference to being in a particular shop or café or an actual street address. Recent events, however, have changed this. In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton's policy decision to open up military GPS satellite technology for 'dual- use' (military and civilian) resulted in a whole new generation of location-aware devices. Around the same time, cartography and GIScience were also undergoing dramatic, Internet- induced changes. Traditional, resource intensive processes and established organizations, in both the public and private sectors, were being challenged by new, lightweight methods. The upshot has been that map making, geospatial analysis and related activities are undergoing a process of profound change. New players have entered established markets and disrupted routes to knowledge and, as we have already seen with Web 2.0, newly empowered amateurs are part of these processes. Volunteers are quite literally grabbing a GPS unit and hitting the streets of their local town to help create crowdsourced datasets that are uploaded to both open source and proprietary databases. The upshot is an evolving landscape which Tim O'Reilly, proponent of Web 2.0 and always ready with a handy moniker, has labelled Where 2.0. Others prefer the GeoWeb, Spatial Data Infrastructure, Location Infrastructure, or perhaps just location-based services. Whatever one might call it, there are a number of reasons why its development should be of interest to those in higher and further education. Firstly, since a person's location is such a profound unit of information and of such value to, for example, the process of targeting advertising, there has been considerable investment in Web 2.0-style services that make use of it. Understanding these developments may provide useful insights for how other forms of data might be used. Secondly, education, particularly research, is beginning to realize the huge potential of the data mash-up concept. As Government, too, begins to get involved, it is likely that education will be expected to take advantage of, and indeed come to relish, the new opportunities for working with data. Since, as this report makes clear, data mash-ups that make use of geospatial data in some form or other are by far the most common mash-ups to date, then they are likely to provide useful lessons for other forms of data. In particular, the education community needs to understand the issues around how to open up data, how to allow data to be added to in ways that do not compromise accuracy and quality and how to deal with issues such as privacy and working with commercial and non-profit third parties—and the GeoWeb is a test ground for much of this. Thirdly, new location-based systems are likely to have educational uses by, for example, facilitating new forms of fieldwork. Understanding the technology behind such systems and the way it is developing is likely to be of benefit to teachers and lecturers who are thinking about new ways to engage with learners. And finally, there is a future watching aspect. Data mash-ups in education and research are part of an emerging, richer information environment with greater integration of mobile applications, sensor platforms, e-science, mixed reality, and semantic, machine-computable data. This report starts to speculate on forms that these might take, in the context of map-based data. 1 JISC TechWatch: Data mash‐ups… (Sept. 2010) Table of Contents Executive Summary 1 1. Introduction 3 1.1 Background and context 4 1.2 Summary and rationale 10 2. State of Play: Maps, mash-ups and the GeoWeb 11 2.1 Harnessing the power of the crowd 12 2.2 Individual production and user-generated content 12 2.3 Openness 16 2.4 Network effects and the architecture of participation 18 2.5 Data on an epic scale 19 3. Technologies and Standards 21 3.1 The role of Ajax and other advances in Web technology 21 3.2 Map mash-up basics 21 3.3 Specific technologies for map mash-ups 23 3.4 Standards and infrastructure 24 4. The future of data mash-ups and mapping 28 4.1 Semantic mash-ups 28 4.2 Mobile mash-ups 29 4.3 Geo-location on the social Web 30 4.4 Augmented Reality 30 4.5 Sensors 32 4.6 3-D and immersive worlds 34 4.7 HTML5 36 4.8 Policy, standards and the wider context 37 Conclusions and recommendations 40 About the Authors 41 References 42 2 JISC TechWatch: Data mash‐ups… (Sept. 2010) 1. Introduction What they are all seeing is nothing less than the future of the World Wide Web. Suddenly hordes of volunteer programmers are taking it upon themselves to combine and remix the data and services of unrelated, even competing sites. The result: entirely new offerings they call ‘mash-ups’. Hof, 2005 (online) Originally the term mash-up was used to describe the mixing or blending together of musical tracks. The term now refers to websites that weave data from different sources into new Web services (also known simply as 'services'), as first noted by Hof (2005). Although 'mash-up' can refer to fusing disparate data on any particular topic the focus in this report is on mash- ups with some spatial or geographic element. In fact, most map mash-ups blend software and data, using one or more APIs1 provided by different content sites to aggregate and reuse data, as well as adding a little personalized code or scripting to create either a new and distinct Web service or an individualized, custom map. The Traffic Injury Map2 illustrates a typical example of a map mash-up. Using data from the UK Data Archive and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (US), injuries resulting from traffic accidents are presented on a Google Maps cartographic base (see Figure 1). The mash-up enables users to identify areas with frequently occurring accidents and allows specification of categories to distinguish between accident victims such as cyclists or children. Figure 1: Traffic Injury Map showing incidents in the Nottingham area Map mash-ups are the most commonly developed type of mash-up application. According to statistics from ProgrammableWeb,3 a website detailing APIs and mash-up news, mapping APIs (e.g. Google Maps, Microsoft Virtual Earth [now Bing Maps] and Yahoo! Maps) constituted 52% of the most popular APIs in July 2009 (see Figure 2a) – although by October 2009 this was down to 42% (see Figure 2b), and with a different mix of APIs (Google Maps, GeoNames and Google Maps for Flash). This shows the dynamism of this area, albeit with Google dominating the mapping APIs. In this case, the reduction in the total percentage of APIs that are map based is mostly due to the rapid rise in mash-ups involving the social micro-blogging site Twitter (from 5% in July to 20% in October 2009). 1 Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), are defined here as software programs that interact with other software to reduce the barriers to developing new applications. For map mash-ups, applications can be created with nothing more than a simple text editor, with the API providing customizable map 'tiles'. 2 http://www.road-injuries.info/map.html 3 http://www.programmableweb.com/ 3 JISC TechWatch: Data mash‐ups… (Sept. 2010) Figure 2: Most popular APIs for mash-ups as listed by ProgrammableWeb (a) in July 2009 (b) in October 2009 1.1 Background and context Data mash-ups utilize the ideas of Web 2.0 (e.g. data on an epic scale), but because Web 2.0 as a term is starting to fall out of favour it is important to be clear about how it is used in this report. For some, talking simply about technology developments, 'Web 3.0' may seem to be somehow more current, describing 'the next phase' of the Web's progression, perhaps the semantic Web. However, it is often forgotten that O'Reilly's original description of Web 2.0 (2005) is as much about the ideas behind technology developments as it is about the technologies themselves. These ideas are still current – they have not yet changed in response to new technology developments – and are therefore still valid as an analytical framework for understanding data mash-ups and speculating on how they will progress.