The Victorian Government's refusal to provide data for Google's bushfire map mashup limited its scope and highlighted glaring problems with Crown copyright provisions, the search giant's top Australian engineer said yesterday.
The Victorian Government's refusal to provide data for Google's bushfire map mashup limited its scope and highlighted glaring problems with Crown copyright provisions, the search giant's top Australian engineer said yesterday.
Google Australia engineering director Alan
Noble told the Broadband and Beyond conference in Melbourne yesterday that he became involved with the bushfire mapping effort after
Google engineers woke in shock Sunday morning to read about the
horrific fires unfolding east of Melbourne, which have claimed
nearly 200 lives.
Noticing the Country Fire Authority (CFA) website was
already struggling to keep up with demand for its online list of
bushfire updates, Noble's team had the idea of overlaying the data onto
Google Maps to produce a real-time map of the fires' locations and
intensities. The CFA, which manages fires on private lands and has
therefore remained at the front line of the devastating fires,
consented — and within four hours, the new map was live.
The search giant's search for data to plot fires on public lands — which are managed
by the Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE)
— produced an entirely different result. With no public feed of the
fires' location and an explicit denial of permission to access its
own internal data, the engineers were ultimately unable to plot
that data on the map as well.
It's ironic that I can download detailed NASA satellite imagery [of Australia] more readily than I can get satellite imagery from the Australian government
Google's Alan Noble
The culprit, according to Noble: legally established Crown copyright provisions,
which assign copyright over all government-produced information to
the government and prevent its use without explicit consent. Crown
copyright is well established in Commonwealth law, but runs
contrary to data protection provisions in countries like the US,
where data produced by government agencies is held to be in the public
domain.
Noble said the engineers' experience this week was an example of
why Commonwealth data protection provisions must be relaxed to
promote open access to publicly relevant information. "It's
ironic that I can download detailed NASA satellite imagery [of
Australia] more readily than I can get satellite imagery from the
Australian government," he told the conference.
The bushfire situation wasn't the first time Google has crossed
swords with Crown copyright. The company had similar problems
recently when it asked the Commonwealth Department of Health and
Aging for access to the data in the National
Public Toilet Map, which it sought to offer as an overlay to
Google Maps.
However, Google Loo was not to be: citing protection of the data
under Crown copyright, the government refused to provide that
information. Google's fight to open up government information
sources follows on from earlier advice, in reviews like the
Copyright Law Review Committee's 2005 inquiry, that
government-produced data be made more freely available.
In a
formal submission (PDF) to the Victorian Government last year, Google
Australia argued that "there are considerable benefits that would
flow to the Victorian Government and the wider Victorian community
from the unfettered availability of publicly funded,
non-confidential government information ... By making public sector
information available to all organisations on the same terms, there
would be an equal playing field for the creation of innovative
products."
Google's Alan Noble (Credit: Google)
Many private enterprises have been similarly reluctant to
provide information: the recently launched Google PowerMeter
initiative, for example, is all about surfacing relevant usage
information to drive smarter energy usage. "We've been very
disappointed with the amount of information utilities generally
provide to customers," Noble explained. "Where people can
efficiently and easily monitor their power consumption, just having
visibility into their usage is enough to cut power usage by as much
as 15 per cent."
The need for open data has become even more pressing with the
rise of geospatial mapping, Noble said. Google Maps has become an
immensely popular way of representing geographically-linked data in
everything from scientific endeavour to real estate. With the
platform's application programming interfaces (APIs) open to all
developers, Noble said the company's goal is to let any developer
add mapping capabilities to represent information in new ways.
Fully 60 per cent of the hits to Google Maps, he revealed, come
through the APIs — indicating that they were from third-party
sites. "When you open up all this information," Noble said, "it
fuels innovation in ways we can't predict. APIs allow developers
to build new products from existing components very, very
quickly." Sites like Google Maps Mania
track interesting uses of Google Maps to display specific data
sets.
Noble sees the widespread availability of APIs as one of two
critical engines for growth in online applications. The other,
gadgets, "are doing for applications what RSS is doing for
content," he said, by allowing websites to integrate
fully-featured capabilities from other sites and create
"third-party mashups" that combine best-of-breed functionality in
new ways.
"We're seeing billions and billions of page views every
week," he explained. "No one company could achieve that kind of
scale. And the thing that makes this possible is the openness and
innovation that open APIs and open data sets enable."