DOI: 10.3990/2.177

 

Jubilee Conference Proceedings, NCK-Days 2012

OpenEarth: using Google Earth as outreach for NCK’s data

Gerben J. de Boer1,2,4,*, Fedor Baart1,2, Ankie Bruens1,6, Thijs Damsma3,4, Pieter van Geer1, Bart Grasmeijer5, Kees den Heijer1,2, Mark van Koningsveld2,3,4, Giorgio Santinelli1, et al.

1 Deltares, P.O. Box 177, 2600 MH, Delft, the Netherlands.* Gerben.deBoer@deltares.nl 2 TU Delft, Hydraulics Engineering + Section of Environmental Fluid Mechanics. 3 Van Oord dreding and marine contractors. 4 Ecoshape, Building with Nature. 5 Alkyon, Arcadis. 6 Rijkswaterstaat Kustlijnzorg program.

ABSTRACT

In 2003 various projects at Deltares and the TU-Delft merged their toolboxes for marine and coastal science and engineering into one toolbox, culminating in 2008 in an open source release, known as OpenEarthTools (OET). OpenEarth adopts the wikipedia approach to growth: web 2.0 crowd sourcing. All users are given full write access to help improve the collection. Quality is assured by version control, tracking all changes. OpenEarth started as a social experiment to investigate whether crowd sourcing was possible in our community of marine and coastal researchers. The answer is yes: over 1000 users registered, now enjoying over 5000 contributions from over 100 contributors. The most important asset is a general toolbox to plot any data type in Google Earth. With this toolbox it has become very easy for marine and coastal experts to disseminate their data via Google Earth. It enables the NCK community to make its data available to end-users and the general public with only little effort. They can now consume our data as simple as watching YouTube: DataTube. In this paper it is shown that OpenEarth has added important value by analyzing a wide range of marine and coastal data types from NCK simultaneously in Google Earth. To match the traditional gap between specialist knowledge and end users, Google Earth is shown to be a very powerful tool. The possibilities for outreach by NCK are manifold.

INTRODUCTION

The Netherlands is one of the flattest, lowest and flood-prone countries around the world. Yet, the Netherlands has probably the best digital elevation model (DEM) of the world: 1m nation-wide coverage with the AHN DEM [AHN]. For the dynamic dune rows and foreshore a time dependent DEM is available between 1996 and present at 5 m resolution. This data is made openly available by Rijkswaterstaat, and allows for detailed study of marine and coastal dynamics, not only by analyzing trends in the wealth of data itself, but also as input or validation for a wide range of models. The cost of such mass gathering of data, Lidar in this case, will drop in the future, leading to an even bigger wealth of data. This trend is known as the Digital Data Deluge [e.g., e-IRG, 2010]. However, the scientific use of this abundance of data is still far from optimal. The main reason for this is that the dedicated, often self-made software used by of marine and coastal scientists and engineers cannot handle such large quantities of data and can hardly handle the wide variety. This applies even more to the use of this wealth of data by policy makers and the general public. These latter groups cannot use the dedicated software used by marine and coastal scientists. Instead, they have to rely on the condensed data products and visualizations produced by the experts. These products and visualizations are often produced by various experts, during various projects, over many years. This makes it difficult to keep track of all the information that is available. And is, amongst others, hampering quality improvement and knowledge sharing as outlined in Nature [Merali, 2010]. In an ideal world, scientists and end-users have easy access to all raw data (from various data sources) as well as all derived products

(e.g. Coastal State Indicators). Why is it not possible for end users to ‘fly’ through all data and CSIs at once, comparing the development of different indicators, for different time-periods and for different areas? Could this not support the decision making by managers and the draw up of expert advise by scientists and engineers? Matching this gap between specialist knowledge and end users has been discussed in literature [e.g. Van Koningsveld, 2003]. By developing and/or applying existing state-of-the-art techniques to share and visualize data we attempt to contribute to bridge this gap. In this paper we describe a first exploration to what extent all marine and coastal data and data products from NCK can be combined into one simple viewer for non-specialists. To do this we made use of the [OpenEarth] approach to data, models and tools. OpenEarth is the data management solution in [Building with Nature] and [MICORE]. We here present the result to the NCK-community to open a discussion with coastal scientists and managers regarding the additional value, future possibilities and future demands. What we are in fact looking for is an analog of YouTube for viewing marine and coastal data: ‘DataTube’. The aim of this paper is to test whether such a ‘DataTube’ is already possible for a wide range of data, with existing technologies.

Web Services for graphics: OGC WxS and KML At national, EU and international level many initiatives and projects are trying to enable non-specialists to visualize all kinds of geospatial data [Percivall, 2010]. The INSPIRE directive aims to provide a top-down overall framework for dissemination of all geospatial data in the EU [INSPIRE]. In the Netherlands a national registry was launched to host the meta-data of all

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Jubilee Conference Proceedings, NCK-Days 2012 103

CONCLUSION: DATATUBE WORKS

The aim of this paper was to test whether it is possible to plot a wide range of data from the NCK community for easy viewing by end-users and the general public. The successful examples in section 3 have shown that the existing technologies, KML in combination with the OpenEarth community toolboxes, are capable of plotting almost any data type for ready viewing by non-specialist users. The opportunities for outreach by NCK are abundant. We can consider a ‘DateTube’ feasible.

DISCUSSION: DATA DELUGE SEARCH

We started this paper by stating that there is a gap between specialist knowledge and end-users. The difficulty to keep track of all information from experts was the main cause for this. Plotting of all data in KML has solved this issue. However, the gap between specialists and end-users does not appear to have ceased. In contrary, feed-back from end-users learned us that a new challenge has arisen. The supply of readily available data in Google Earth is now so huge, that end-users have difficulty in finding the correct data. They are basically overwhelmed and have expressed a need for filters to group data into manageable clusters for specific purposes. Our experiment has shown that giving away data has created more work for experts: only they have the knowledge to do this filtering. Some experts are still reluctant to open up their data though. They fear that their expert work might not be needed any more. Our pilot DataTube has showed the opposite. Anyone opening up his data will immediately be contacted by the overwhelmed end-users. In the past, control over data access was profitable, in the future only control of data filters will become valuable. The next challenge for marine and coastal scientists and engineers is therefore to create search options for end-users to find the correct KMLs. Top-down INSPIRE-like philosophies propose to make central inventories, catalogs, that allow to search data. There is a special OGC protocol for this: CSW: Catalogue Service for Web. However, we think it will become a challenge to keep such central catalogues up to date with the speed at which end-users can now generate new KML files. We believe that a different search option is worth investigating too: regular search enginers. We have shown that viewing data is now as simple as viewing YouTube. YouTube offers a similar deluge of information as a collection of KML files, and it is not subject to complaints from overwhelmed users. The reason is that YouTube offers a simple and powerful search box to search the movies. We therefore envision a future where KML should be as easy as to search as movies. Our next challenge to therefore to tag each KML with specific micro-information and user votes, so that general search engines can find them as easy as YouTube movies. Only then DataTube is complete: open data and simple searches.

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ACKNOWLEGDEMENTS

Part of this study have been carried out (i) by Deltares in the framework of the KPP-B&O Kust and KPP-Kustbeleid projects, both commissioned by Rijkswaterstaat Waterdienst, (ii) by Van Oord and Deltares in the data management case (DM) of Building with Nature, (iii) by TU Delft in the data management workpackage of the EU FP7 MICORE project, (iv) by Deltares in the Verbetertraject voor visualisatie en user interfaces of NMDC. Numerous other projects contributed parts as well. We are very grateful to the open marine and coastal data from Rijkswaterstaat and the Geological Survey of the Netherlands (TNO/Deltares).