This summer my first peer-reviewed article, “The Open Geospatial Data Ecosystem”, was published in “Kart og plan”. Unfortunately, the journal is not that digital, and they decided to withhold the issue from the web for a year, “in order to protect the printed version”. What?!

However, I was provided a link to a pdf of my article, and told I could distribute it. I interpret this as an approval of me publishing the article on my blog, so that is exactly what I’ll do.

The full article can be downloaded here: http://docs.atlefren.net/ogde.pdf, and the abstract is provided here:

Open Governmental Data, Linked Open Data, Open Government, Volunteered Geographic Information, Participatory GIS, and Free and Open Source Software are all parts of The Open Geospatial Data Ecosystem. How do these data types shape what we define as Open Geospatial Data; Open Data of a geospatial nature? While all these areas are well described in the literature, there is a lack of a formal definition and exploration of the concept of Open Geospatial Data as a whole. A review of current research, case-studies, and real-world examples, such as OpenStreetMap, reveal some common features; governments are a large source of open data due to their historical role and as a result of political pressure on making data public, and the large role volunteers play both in collecting and managing open data and in developing open source tools. This article provides a common base for discussion. Open Geospatial data will be even more important as it matures and more governments and corporations release and use open data.