Geoinformation perspectives on innovation and economic growth

1
Geoinformation perspectives on innovation and
economic growth

• Antony Cooper
• Operating Unit Fellow
• Built Environment Unit, CSIR
• South Africa

2
Geoinformation perspectives on innovation and
economic growth

• Scientific development, innovation and the
  knowledge economy
• Geoinformation, innovation and economic growth
• User generated content
• The nature of geoinformation
• Spatial data infrastructures (SDIs)
• Addresses
• Location-based services
• Business geographics
• Intellectual property rights, standards and
  curation
• Conclusions and acknowledgements

3
Innovation

• Innovation does not come from organisations, but
  from individuals
• Innovation will happen whatever the circumstances
• Governments can stifle innovation
• Through excessive bureaucratic procedures (red
  tape)
• Banning access to certain data, services or
  products
• Often done to protect State corporations
• Or governments can encourage and facilitate
  innovation
• Innovative entrepreneurs can threaten the
  viability of protected State corporations

4
Innovation

• The Internet facilitates distributing services
  and data across national boundaries
• Eg the virtual globe Google Earth (released in
  2005)
• Poses a threat to national mapping agencies
• Creates opportunities by stimulating public
  awareness of geoinformation
• Creates opportunities for mapping agencies that
  encourage innovation
• CODIST is essentially a political gathering
• Needs to leverage its authority and networks to
  source funding
• For projects and to implement its recommendations
• UN ECA CODIST need to encourage African
  governments to provide
• Legislative frameworks, policies and service
  delivery that enable innovation and hence
  economic growth
• Sed fugit interea, fugit inreparabile tempus.
• But meanwhile it is flying, irretrievable time
  is flying Virgil 29 BCE

5
Google Earth image of the Ghion Hotels garden
6
User generated content

• A geobrowser is the desk-top interface to a
  virtual globe
• A markup language lets one customise a virtual
  globe/geobrowser
• Eg the Keyhole Markup Language (KML),
• Drape geoinformation over the virtual globe
• Attach content to a location
• Eg photographs, video or sound recordings
• Share geoinformation or content with others
• Virtual globes and geobrowsers
• Promote awareness of geoinformation
• Facilitate production of user-generated content
  and open data archives
• Can be of uncertain quality
• Facilitate folksonomies or collaborative tagging
• Classification and identification of content by
  general public, not domain experts
• Often linked to virtual social networks
• But tend to lack metadata
• Many users think that the virtual globes display
  real-time satellite imagery!
• Pose threats to those who
• Try to restrict access to information
• Dont understand the impact on their business
  models

7
User generated content in Google Earth How
good are the data?
8
The nature of geoinformation

• Info about all objects or phenomena
• Directly or indirectly associated with a location
• On, above or below the Earths surface
• Real and imaginary objects and phenomena
• Exist, existed or might have existed, and that
  are planned, proposed or simulated
• Agricultural research (Clause 25)
• Precision farming
• Arable land exploration for high-value crops
• Crop health monitoring
• Assessing how agriculture practices will need to
  be adapted to counteract climate change
• Supporting SMMEs
• Exploiting micro-payments to deliver specialist
  services

9
Spatial data infrastructures (SDIs)

• SDIs can drive economic growth
• Recognised by European Directive for INSPIRE
• SDI can stimulate development of added-value
  services by third parties
• For the benefit of both public authorities and
  the public
• Access to information often prevented by
  legislation or government control of the
  information source
• Eg mapping being controlled by the military
• Yet there are virtual globes providing masses of
  high resolution data for free
• Though perhaps of unknown quality and without
  adequate metadata
• Limiting access to information inhibits economic
  growth
• European Directive on reuse of public sector
  information
• Digital content production has created many jobs
  in recent years
• Particularly in small emerging companies
• PSI important primary material for digital
  content products and services
• Facilitating re-use of PSI should help economic
  growth and job creation

10
Addresses

• Geographical identifiers (such as addresses)
  enable data integration
• Computers might prefer coordinates humans
  prefer identifiers and context
• Even with global positioning (GPS) devices and
  virtual globes
• Eg hierarchy of names such as street, suburb,
  town, province and country
• Addresses facilitate service delivery not just
  for mail
• Eg open a bank account, buy on credit, obtain a
  passport, vote
• Provide citizens with a social status, a sense of
  identity
• Maintaining customer data bases
• Send out invoices, ordered goods and promotional
  material
• Retail outlet planning
• Spatial analysis of customer addresses and
  shopping patterns
• Routing delivery vehicles and managing their
  loads (ie combining part loads)
• Save costs and make deliveries more predictable
• CODI-Geo workshop on addresses
• Functional addressing system generates downstream
  economic activities
• Unfortunately, many African countries do not have
  comprehensive addressing systems

11
Location-based services (LBSs)

• Use location of a device to provide personalised
  services to the user of the device based on their
  location
• Exploit availability of dynamic geoinformation
  and trackable mobile devices
• Eg real-time traffic conditions, weather data
  and CCTV surveillance
• LBS applications
• Find the nearest pizza outlet when a stranger in
  town
• Determine which nearby hotels have vacancies
• Turn-by-turn in-car navigation systems (often
  with spoken directions)
• Traffic congestion avoidance
• Finding a person (such as ones child).
• Some countries require mobile phone operators to
  support LBS for enhanced 911
• Enables response to emergency calls from mobile
  phone without the caller having to give their
  location
• Enables reverse 911 to send alerts about a hazard
  in an area to those there
• Services related to a remote device being tracked
• Real-time estimates of bus arrivals for display
  panels at bus stops
• Managing vehicle fleets
• Tracking containers or parcels during shipment

12
Business geographics

• Integrating customer data and operational data
• Customer relationship management (CRM)
• Customer segmentation
• Target marketing
• Analysing market penetration
• Clean and manage customer data
• Insurance
• Assessing and managing risk
• Precision underwriting
• Identifying and avoiding accumulation of risk
• Detecting insurance fraud
• Hazards modelling and the spatial distribution of
  risks
• Motor insurance based on driving patterns
• Real estate
• Link photographs and video footage to properties
  for sale
• Mapping property transactions
• Inherent value of a neighbourhood embedded in
  property prices
• Value properties more accurately

13
Standards

• More value investing in standards rather than in
  patents
• Get early access to current technologies and
  thinking
• Can assert ones interests in the standardization
  process
• Lower economic risk and costs of ones own RD
• Promote competition and facilitate
  interoperability
• Africans should not just be passive recipients of
  standards
• Africans need to be active in planning and
  developing standards
• Ensure standards are appropriate for African
  conditions and meet African needs
• Local standards need a massive investment for
  implementation
• Small local market available to support the
  standard
• International vendors tend to implement
  international standards
• International standards development can be done
  via email
• Can gain access through international
  organisations if ones country is not a member
• Eg UN ECA is a Class A Liaison to ISO/TC 211,
  Geographic information/Geomatics

14
Digital curation

• Issues of African academic journals and books not
  yet available digitally
• They don't get picked up by search engines such
  as Google Scholar
• Reducing the likelihood of African research being
  cited and used by others
• Diminishing the value of research done in Africa
• Some defunct journals have valuable material but
  no custodian
• Proceedings of African conferences
• Might only exist in the private collections of
  conference attendees
• Project reports and data sets unlikely to form
  part of national archives
• Collections of photographs, films, videos and
  audio recordings
• More vulnerable to degradation than paper
  documents
• Crucial records of oral histories
• Tangible objects of scientific or cultural value
  worth preservation
• Eg historic scientific equipment, cultural
  artefacts and original manuscripts
• Digital archives are far less robust than
  paper-based archives
• Digitizing them is a decidedly complex issue!
• Probably wise to retain the analogue archives for
  the foreseeable future
• Use the digital archives to provide easy access
  to the content
• Insufficient attention paid to preserving
  archives that are already digital
• Rapid changes in hardware and software and data
  formats

15
Acknowledgements

• UN ECA, for the invitation to make this
  presentation and for the financial support
• CSIR, for the financial support
• Sives Govender, for helping me with this
  presentation
• ?

16
Thank you!

• Antony Cooper
• Operating Unit Fellow
• Built Environment Unit, CSIR
• PO Box 395, 0001 Pretoria, South Africa
• Email acooper_at_csir.co.za

Sed fugit interea, fugit inreparabile tempus But
meanwhile it is flying, irretrievable time is
flying