Open Spatial DataProgress towards a reusable gazetteer

Open Data Group – 16th April 2012@ianibbo

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Overview

Original Problem

How to transition a central gov't funded aggregation of childcare and positive activities with a budget of >2m / year to an open data* model running on £60/month hardwareRetaining security (Of a certain level)

Retaining functionality

(See http://www.madwdata.org.uk/blog/id/394)

2 Major Costs To Mitigate

Large cluster of proprietary OS hosts, ~12 front end web servers, hot backup sql server

Migrated to 1*Pound Host server ~£60/month, server has 2 hard drives, hot backup, off site rsync

Data costs – BPH Address-Point data – Used for geocoding incoming records and lookups on search terms. OS Boundary Line

???

Some Noise

Open Spatial Data Consultation......

Open Spatial Data

Ordnance Survey Open Data

http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/products/os-locator/index.html

Code Point Open

Postcodes to Northing/Easting

OS Locator

Gazetteer of road names (And other features)

Obtained by registering on website, requesting, getting email, following link, …..

The reality of CodePoint Open

The core data is “Open”

Missing the one vital link between CodePoint Open and OS Locator – PostCode → Road Names / Identifiers.

If you're happy to display Postcodes without road names, it's ideal.

Last Mile Problem.

Finding an automated way to link the 2 is hard!

Licensed data is now open, but out of date

Address Point

Still Licensed

Expensive

Probably not that useful anyway for most projects

Problem with focus on “Open Data”

Everyone ends up implementing their own gazetteer

Large scale providers have rate limits and introduce external dependencies / Speed issues

People want local geo-coding (for lots of different reasons).

Having rolled your own gazetteer, you discover you need to handle updates (Full replacements)

It's not an end in itself

Vision

A stand-alone gazetteer web app designed for local network use with features for importing updates from OS, reconciling multiple data sources and performing geo-coding lookups.

Available Tools

Apache SOLR

Long-Standing stalwart of the open data and search community

Schemas slightly clunky

Several spatial options, all with different strengths / weaknesses. Multiple points a problem in some.

ElasticSearch

Schema Free, Apparently Solid Spatial, Multi Points

Good integration with Mongo via Rivers

Problems / Issues

ES Spatial search hard to do directly via a COOL URL

Spatial query syntax is expressive, but complex and needs JSON sub-documents

Need service wrappers

But thats easily done

Updates!

Missed Level of Abstraction(Common to many open data sets?)

Source

LocalCopy

Compare

Processing

NOSQL Like Mongo is ideal for this

ES Ideal for this

Progress

Starting to extract code from existing services into a generic spatial app

https://github.com/ianibo/AnOpenGazetteerFramework/

Work progressing under aegis of GIST Mobile group / Open Data group

Workable Gaz now, but command line interface for importing.

Questions / Comments?

Some supporting info

Original Project – FOI request to DfE

2008-09 2009-10 2010-110

1000000

2000000

3000000

4000000

5000000

6000000

7000000

Total costs - First 3 years

Local Authority RevenueLocal Authority Capi-talCentral Office of In-formationQi ConsultingRedhouseDfE Staff Costs

Consultation sem-inarsMethods Consulting

Engine Group

Digital PublicTribal Education

2008-09 2009-10 2010-110

500000

1000000

1500000

2000000

2500000

First 3 years - Non LA costs

Central Office of In-formationQi ConsultingRedhouseDfE Staff CostsConsultation sem-inarsMethods ConsultingEngine GroupDigital PublicTribal Education