Pros and Cons of Open Geo-Information

Juwita Nirmala Sari

Wageningen University and Research Centre, Wageningen, The Netherlands

Keywords: GIS, Open Geo-Information, Open Geo-Data, Open Geo-Source Tools

For the past few decades, it has been perceived that there is a major shift in our environment.
As global organization, the United Nations (UN) listed several global acute issues, such as
climate change, exploitation, food security, and health concerns. To reduce the impact of those
problems, Geo-Information System plays a pivotal role through Open Geo-Information. Open
geo-data and geo-source tools are included as open geo-information in this discussion. Both of
them are accessible to the public for people, companies, and organisations. According to
(Gurin, 2014), Open data includes federal, state, and local data; scientific data released by
researchers; data that companies release about their own operations; user reviews and tweets
written by ordinary people; and any kind of data that can be found through Google or scraped
from websites. In the U.S., the website data.gov has been set as an open data initiative since
the Obama administration. It became the figurehead in announcing the governments
transparency by making 47 data sets to hundreds of thousands available now. The U.K., Kenya,
Brazil, India and more than 30 other countries were followed to do the same way thereafter
(Lab, 2013). As with most important role in taking part in worldwide issues, there are both
advantages and disadvantages of open geo-information. Whether or not the open geo-
information is the effective way is still debatable.

On the one hand, it is important to involve society in the policy making. The more society
involved, the better the quality of the policy as more things and interests are taken into account.
It is particularly important in a democratic country as the society have the right to evaluate
every policy made by the government. Open data policies allow freedom in society to see what
government have been done for them. For instance, study of (Welle Donker, Donker, van
Loenen, & Bregt, 2016) found that Liander, Dutch utility company, that coordinate with
government, believed that open data engaged the citizens to contribute in the Smart City
projects and other energy projects after it is launched. In 2014, Liander took part in Dutch open
data community, the interface of open source tools was not convenient, they involved peoples
feedback to increase the quality of open data platform afterwards. And, now the service is user-
friendly and accessible for society. Thus, open geo-information plays important role in
improving cooperation between government and citizens in policy making.

Not only government, some other institutions also utilizes the open geo-information to develop
innovation in their scientific research by sharing data and collaboration between the research
lab (open-platform) who has the same research purposes. Over the past four years, three
reputable universities, which are Wageningen UR, TU Delft, and MIT, are working together in
establishing the institute (The Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions
(AMS) regards to the urban technology and design to attain sustainable city with a good life
quality (M&C, 2013). They predict that approximately 70% of number citizens will live in the
city centre and leads to the negative impacts, such as increasing the number of waste, health
effects, land degradation, flood, etc. This open-platform accelerates the development of the
quality of scientific research over the world since usually they tend to not share their data and
kept them secret.
Another advantage of open geo-information in developers point of view is attracting new
investment for companies. They are able to create the data-driven products and service from
geo-information data published by the government and generate the economic value from it.
By capitalizing the concept of open data, the climate corporation, for instance, has been able
to provide a good quality data driven service based on a thorough analysis of agronomic data
and accurate farm decision management evaluation from different time (past, present, future)
to help farmer increase crop yields and efficiency of natural resources utilization which in turn
improve their profit. Therefore, open data and open source tools are worthwhile for private
sector to improve societys prosperity.

On the other hand, there are several drawbacks of open geo-information policy. Firstly, it has
been known that open-data need the Big Data to be delivered. To construct them, it was
collected and hosted the dataset from the third-party. It needs huge server capacity as a high
number of users would download the data so that it requires high fee to implement the open
geo-information in one area. Dutch government, for example, applied free geo-information
data and hosted them from various partners, such as Kadaster (cadastre, Land Registry,
Mapping Agency of NL), Waterboard, Ministry of Infrastructure & Environment, Department
of Waterways and Public Works, Ministry of Economic Affairs, Agriculture & Innovation,
Prorail, and KvK (Chamber of Commerce). Therefore, high cost is pivotal to serve the Big
Data so that it is reachable to the user in different sectors.

Furthermore, since data is often complex and time consuming, several developing countries
have not been ready yet to implement open geo-information. For instance, the government,
institution, OSM (Open Street Map) provider as the geo-information experts in Indonesia are
working in preparation of open data through one same standardization by collecting data from
volunteer. insufficient data to provide the paramount information (Martin et al., 2013) and
uneasiness of data quality (Deloitte, 2012) are causes to have a closed-data preference. The
data has not completed and the spatial data policy has not discussed among Indonesian
ministries deeply, in particular spatial data compiled in 1:5000 scale (Yudono, 2016).

In addition, another disadvantage of having an open geo-data and open source policies is
lacking of data security and privacy. Private companies are usually not transparent regarding
the use of the data that they collected from farmers. This has become farmers concern as they
do not know exactly what the companies do with their data. For instance, Open Ag Data
Alliance in the United States for the past few years has been intensively cooperate with
government and private companies to ensure the protection of farmers data (The Climate
Corporation, 2014). However, the fact of lacking protection has frequently been used to oppose
the open data policies.

Adoption of open data concept is also determined by the culture of a community. Hofstede
(2003) showed the dimension of culture, namely power distance, uncertainty avoidance,
individualism versus collectivism, and masculinity versus femininity. Each country has their
own unique culture which most of the time influences their policy making process. For
instance, United Kingdom, has high level of individualism at 89 out of 100 (score) compared
to other countries in the world (Peterson & Hofstede, 2003), thus they ought to alter their
culture to apply the open geo-information.

In conclusion, arguments to both support and oppose the open geo-information are equally
valid. In general, although it might be challenging to be applied, the benefits of open geo-
information for all stakeholders (company, government, and research institutions) would
possibly worth the hard work spent. However, on a case by case basis, we have to be aware
that to whether implement open geo-information or not would really depend on the capability
and willingness of the policymaker. Difference on the capability of each country in providing
essential infrastructure and collecting adequate data, also difference on the preferences in
policy making based on the characteristics of the people would determine whether open geo-
information will be adopted or not. Furthermore, assuming democratic political system, civil
society demand for transparency in the future, would possibly push for more adoption of open
geo-information science, while non-democratic, particularly monarchy or dictator shaped,
tends to not involved in civil society argumentation to take part in governmental project to
solve the national problem. Therefore, pro and cons always appear in the open geo-information
implementation, but it is back on to the state preferences.

REFERENCES

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