Computing, GIS and Archaeology in the UK

I went to the Open Knowledge Foundation conference, OKCON in London a few weeks ago, and have been meaning do a review of it ever since. Whilst little of what I saw had a direct relevance to what I do, it was invigorating to be in a room with a whole bunch of people with imagination, who believe knowledge should be free to anyone, and who basically like to disrupt the status quo.

A few quotes:

[2009 was] the year open data went mainstream (Rufus Pollock)

The threat [to the record industry] is not piracy, but obscurity (Glynn Moody)

What would happen if every school had a reprap? (Ben O’Steen)

One paper that was quite relevant to me was “Dig the new breed” by Anthony Beck, about opening up archaeological data. There are related articles and mailing list posts here and here. I feel uneasy about some of the details (it’s not lethargy or ethics that dictates the data we do or don’t release, it’s money) but in general it’s a no-brainer. We’re doing our bit with our Eprints library, but we’re at an early stage with getting reports on there.

The only problem I see is figuring out who to lobby- I would add the developers and the county-level curators to the list as well as the actual archaeological units. I know of specific cases where developers would not provide the money for making the results of an excavation public access, and also where a regional Historic Environment Record would not allow “their” data to be shown on a web map.

Otherwise, I particularly enjoyed Glynn Moody’s paper on The Post-Analogue World- focussing on the “plight” of the record industry, struggling to cope with the transition from analogue to digital, and Ben O’Steen’s paper on Making the Physical from the Digital. Bookbinding, repraps, MP’s expenses and Cory Doctorow all in one talk. Can’t be bad!

Many of the talks are available to download here, and OKFN have working groups for both archaeology and geospatial data if you’re interested. I hope to have more involvement with both, and to investigate links between OKFN and OSGeo, now I have some time and mental space. More to come…

So, we Brits are getting all excited because the Prime Minister gave a big speech about how Britain is going to be all fab,  broadbandy, and “totally, like Web 2.0, man”  soon. And all this data is going to be given away- look here’s some of it now. We’re all going to have instant access to Government services, free Ordnance Survey data, and a shiny Institute of Web Science to stick all the bits together.

Now, of course it’s a total coincidence that this is a nice positive announcement, and there’s to be an election shortly, for which we don’t yet know the date. Let’s not go there, since this is not a political blog. Let’s also not contrast this with the Digital Economy Bill, fast-tracking it’s way through parliament on somewhat dodgy grounds as we speak, that threatens to take a lot of this nice shiny stuff away if you’re so much as caught within a mile of an mp3 that you didn’t buy from ITunes. Let’s not talk about carrots and sticks, or nice cops and nasty cops or other such comparisons.

Instead, let’s concentrate on the data.  They will, on April 1st, release “a substantial package of information held by ordnance survey freely available to the public, without restrictions on re-use”. The consultation only finished 5 days ago! How can they possibly have had time to analyse the consultation responses yet? Personally, while I look forward to the release of the data, and it is a massive win for the Free Our Data campaign, I would prefer that they gave the consultation responses some respect by analysing them in detail, or at least pretended to read them properly.  I told someone off for assuming that the decision had already been made, and that the consultation was a waste of time, but perhaps they were right.

The rest of it, I quite like, though I’m yet to see a Government IT project really work properly. We’ve got (amongst other things):

• “core reference datasets that contain the precise names and co-ordinates of all 350 thousand bus stops, railway stations and airports in Britain”
• “an inventory of all non-personal datasets held by departments and arms-length bodies – a “domesday book” for the 21st century”
• “information on each set of data including its size, source, format, content, timeliness, cost and quality”

All sounds good. I could get excited by this, but I just want to wait and see what happens, shall we, and not take our eye off the other balls?

A nice short guide on how to start making your data open from Open Data Commons. This shows how simple it really is.

Not wanting to miss out on the whole discussion about data formats, I was surprised to see people give up their control of their data quite so easily, as this comment and following post seem to suggest that we should. Imagine if we ceded so much control to the other people that sell us products. Software companies are only glorified shopkeepers, in the same way that people who sell us televisions and cars are. However (if we have any sense) we don’t allow car salesmen to dictate where we drive, or television salesmen to dictate what we watch. We have allowed software vendors to lull us into believing that they are allowed to dictate what we do with our data. Sorry, but no. That’s what the open approach is all about- remaining in control of our data. At the risk of seeming overly dramatic, anything else is apathy.