Re: Decision required: BP 17 "How to work with crowd sourced observations"

Jeremy,

The experience of several OGC activities has been that it is valuable and perhaps not widely enough recognized to treat crowd-sourced “spatial data” as observations. This allows the input to be utilized, but recognizes there may be ambiguities in the the sensor capabilities and measurement quality, as well as just what the features of interest and sampling features really are.

A case could be made for a best practice that recommends this, even if a validation procedure subsequently builds feature data from those social observations.

Josh

> On Aug 31, 2016, at 8:59 AM, Jeremy Tandy <jeremy.tandy@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi -
> 
> BP 17 "How to work with crowd sourced observations" [1] is an 'orphaned' best practice that is not well aligned with DWBP.
> 
> In the BP sub-group call on 24-Aug (minutes [2]), we were unable to decide whether this candidate best practice is appropriate.
> 
> Concerns were raised that there is not anything inherently "spatial" about crowd sourced data - and, moreover, that introducing crowd sourcing as a topic is a "can of worms" (particularly relating to governance of that information etc.).
> 
> The feeling on the call was that we should remove the BP and use crowd sourced observations as an example of spatial data within the Nieuwhaven flooding scenario.
> 
> I took an action to consider if there was anything "special" that we needed to capture ... 
> 
> Having thought about this further, I conclude that the governance arrangements associated with Volunteer Geographic Information (VGI) and other crowd sourced spatial data are out of scope. However, we should examine how aggregators of such information, such as social media platforms, may choose to expose this data on the web.
> 
> In particular, users of social media do not routinely use URIs to identify spatial things; relying instead on addresses or geocodes (e.g. What3Words).
> Address, geocode, geographic position (e.g. latitude and longitude) must all be considered attributes of some spatial thing. If, for example, an address is provided without an explicitly relationship to a spatial thing then we must infer that a spatial thing exists, and the (social media) platform provider should mint an identifier for it and relate it to the address. 
> 
> Such inferred spatial things may be reconciled with other spatial things if one can be sure that they are indeed the same; either immediately by the data curator or later by any sufficiently knowledgeable party. However, such reconciliation is complex ( a long time ago, @eparsons said "there be dragons").
> 
> We may even be able to help individuals using social media platforms improve their spatial data by select a particular spatial thing … e.g. twitter provides choice of location based on geocoding and sometimes a specific spatial thing (based on foursquare).
> 
> So ... 
> 
> PROPOSAL: we remove BP 17, cover spatial data in social media as an example and treat social media / crowd source data platform providers as a source of spatial data on the web that should follow our BPs. (more or less).
> 
> Voting:
> 
> +1
> 
> 
> 
> Your thoughts please.
> 
> Jeremy
> 
> 
> 
> 
> [1]: http://w3c.github.io/sdw/bp/#crowd-obs <http://w3c.github.io/sdw/bp/#crowd-obs> 
> [2]: http://www.w3.org/2016/08/24-sdwbp-minutes.html <http://www.w3.org/2016/08/24-sdwbp-minutes.html> 
>