The systems discusssed above have the potential to strip away locational privacy from individuals, making it possible for others to ask (and answer) the following sorts of questions by consulting the location databases:

• Did you go to an anti-war rally on Tuesday?
• A small meeting to plan the rally the week before?
• At the house of one “Bob Jackson”?
• Did you walk into an abortion clinic?
• Did you see an AIDS counselor?
• Have you been checking into a motel at lunchtimes?
• Why was your secretary with you?

This article on “Locational Privacy” does a terrific job of laying out the potential uses and abuses of computer systems tracking where you have been. It also suggests solutions, but it does less of a good job explaining the complex cryptography that could alleviate many people’s concerns.

We need more of this kind of work, so I’m doing my little bit to publicize it. I hope it reaches the ears of legislators, or at least their staff. And I also hope our governments recognize the need to pay attention to these issues and handle them the right way.

There’s a big societal worry, in general, about the safety and privacy of personal information in the Internet age. In some cases, like banking and medical records, that worry is well-founded. But for the most part, people should just act like they and their data are in public, and exposed. That should usually be OK, because the benefits outweigh the costs, or as Tom Yager recently put it:

You can’t live in a cloud and expect the safety and isolation of an underground bunker. Information that I care to keep secret travels by Federal Express or is accompanied by a handshake. I take for granted that my electronic correspondence, including phone calls, is up for grabs, so the sum of my nonsecrets is not that interesting.

I was going to write a long blog entry about this event, but Adena does the job nicely here:
OGC Geospatial Rights Management Summit: Moving the Discussion Forward

A recent discussion provoked by this SOA Post Mortem article got me thinking about Service-Oriented Architectures and Web Services in the context of our geospatial industry. The general argument in that article is Web services is just the latest buzzword to justify a big round of IT funding if you don’t do the business transformation work to actually redesign your enterprise around the idea of providing information services.

Sounds like it makes sense, but what does that actually mean? To put it in the context of OGC Web services, I’d phrase it as, WMS, WFS, WCS, etc. represent the SOA concept that needs to die. Just because you put a Web Feature Service API on your roads data doesn’t mean you’ve service-enabled anything. You may have taken the first required step towards a service, but the business transformation work isn’t done.

However, let’s say you figure out that what your end users actually need is a service that reports the pavement quality and last maintenance date of all roads in a certain jurisdiction for long-term strategic planning on infrastructure upkeep. Then you build that “service” using your WFS and its ability to handle sophisticated queries. Now you have what I’d call a real service providing real identifiable business value.

So the OGC suite of data delivering Web services is more of a meta-service architecture, or spatial data infrastructure, upon which real value-oriented services can be built. But don’t think you’ve created much value in your organization by simply standing up out-of-the-box OGC services without going the next step and figuring out what applications your data users actually need.

I have to admit I haven’t kept up with INSPIRE as well as I should, but today I had a chance to catch up on this major European SDI (spatial data infrastructure) initiative. Like all major government programs, you can easily get lost in the documents, so if you’d like to get up to speed quickly, try this nice 3-page status document from 2008-11-18.

After reading that, you’ll be ready to dig into some of the technical documents in this archive. I was pleased to see that OGC’s perspective on spatial data services and interoperability is at the heart of these documents. However, since I love to throw at least one provocative thought in every blog post, I will take issue with the rationale for the recommendation to standardize on SOAP services, which is found in version 3.0 of the Network Services Architecture. On page 13 the authors say SOAP web services are: the standard information technology for SOA; ensure smooth and complete integration in development environments; and yield a direct and seamless integration with other system environments. If you’ve had to implement a SOAP service, has this been your experience? Mine has been that I can eventually make it work, but it’s never smooth or seamless, especially when, for example, integrating between two different development platforms like Java and .NET. RPC web services are much smoother.