In the run-up to this year's election, which saw the appearance of Nicky Hager's book Dirty Politics, John Key made the observation that the book's source material was stolen information.

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Let's steer clear of any politics and take a closer look at the claim that information could be stolen.

WHAT KIND OF 'THING' IS INFORMATION?

And that's because of one crucial property that turns data into information: context.

Acquiring that information has the more grandiose labels of intelligence or market knowledge. The importance of intelligence when undertaking any sort of business has been recognised for thousands of years. In his 500 BC book The Art of War, Sun Tzu wrote, 'Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a thousand battles without disaster'. Those generals who still follow his teachings to the letter rarely or never lose.

Privacy issues have raised their head a number of times in recent years, yet even a cursory look at the legislation reveals that there is a wide gap between what many people consider to be private and the protection that the law provides. When in doubt, it's always worth going back to the source. Examining legislation is now much easier since its publication on the web.

Interestingly, the principles of the Privacy Act are more about ensuring that all practical steps have been taken to ensure accuracy and that the data isn't being misused, rather than protecting information that you as an individual might be sensitive about.

The principles of both publishing and broadcasting have been established now for hundreds of years. Once you distribute a message or idea on the airwaves or in written form, such as in a book, you have authorised the receiver of that message to examine its contents, to make their own interpretation, to draw their own conclusions, and to make their own decisions. Once you have broadcast or published, you have also given away any control over who may hear or read your message or idea.

You may decide to limit who can access your message by adding a security layer, through encoding, or by writing your message in a language that only a segment of the population can read, but these measures do not change the underlying principles of broadcasting and publishing.

What you are reading now is intended to only be available to those who have subscribed to our newsletter, but once it is posted it is 'out there' to be intercepted, forwarded, cut and pasted, blogged and indexed by Google. Not only that, long before it was published in the newsletter, it was being broadcast over WiFi as it was being written, and saved to the cloud. That means it was readily accessible for anyone with the means to do so. This was a decision and a risk that we were prepared to take in creating this information.

And then there is all the data that we allow to be harvested every time we use a website, on any smartphone app where we have enabled location services, on call logs, in image galleries, etc. The big data approach to harvesting data, and the trends that can be inferred from that data, again challenge the idea that our activities, thoughts and conversations are private. Again, whether that's a problem or not comes down to how the harvesters use the data and the context within which it is used.

IT'S ALL ABOUT CONTEXT

Which brings us back to context. One definition of information is 'data in context'. So what is that context? To transform data into information, you need to have a problem that requires a solution. You also need an audience to receive the information, and someone who is going to make a decision based on the information to address the problem.

The final element of context is the difference it will make within its context. Information should represent the difference between the situation that exists and the outcome that is desired. It should also represent the difference that it will make (to society, to the environment, to the bottom line, to product quality, to efficiency. etc.) when decisions are made based upon the information to address the problem that has been identified.

THE IMPLICATIONS FOR GIS

As geospatial professionals, that's where we come in. When we get asked to make a map, or undertake some geospatial analysis, how often do we sit down and define the problem to be solved, identify who the decision maker is, or what decision is that they need to make? And how often do we ensure that our work is geared to making that difference in explicit terms? To do so at the early stages of every project ensures that our work is as effective as it can be, and gets the right results out the first time, without rework.

Formatting of the final data should be done in such a way that the decision appears obvious to the decision maker. This requires the geospatial professional to have produced the output reliably (i.e., so it is statistically beyond challenge), and ethically, so the decision maker is presented with objective information rather than with a preferred slant of the author. You can always tell when you have created good information because it is clear, simple and compelling.

The property of information that we love the best is that the world works far more effectively when information is shared. Great effort (not to mention government policy both here and abroad) is being directed at making data and information as accessible and shareable as possible. When we work effectively and collaboratively with common data to make the world a better place, we know that the context for how the data is being used is the right one.

Given this context, the idea that information could be stolen doesn't really seem to fit very well.

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A ' MOOC' report from Peter

As a Project Manager recently exposed to GIS, I decided to undertake a Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) on 'Maps and the Geospatial Revolution' offered by Pennsylvania State University as a quick introduction to geospatial technology and its terminology. The course covered maps, projections, geospatial data, spatial relationships, basic analysis techniques and map design.

Along with around 25,000 registered students, I embarked upon a 5-week course consisting of lecture videos, written content, assessed discussion, hands-on lab activity, quizzes and a final project

Student participation was encouraged with additional marks available for getting involved in discussion forums, as well penalty marks if a student did not peer review 5 of the submitted final projects!

There were some very interesting discussion threads, including location data and privacy, the use of drones to collect data, and how to handle tectonic plate movement. Although the final 2-hour exam covered the entire course, the questions were straightforward and I completed it in under 30 minutes.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the course was the final mapping assignment. Everyone who submitted an assignment had to peer review 5 other maps or concede a 15% penalty. It was up to the individual student what they wanted to depict, and many maps were of an extremely high quality.

I reviewed maps depicting radiation fallout from Chernobyl, the siting of nuclear power plants in France and areas of seismic activity, the urbanisation of Transylvania, flooding in Serbia, and a holiday tour of Newfoundland.

My project was on poverty in Bangladesh, and interestingly, I received both very good and critical reviews. The comments were subjective, with several comments stating how well the information was depicted, while others were critical of the data and colour schemes used!

Overall, I found the course interesting, but would describe it as one aimed for the 'hobbyist'. It's a great way for someone to obtain an introduction to what geospatial is all about, and I would highly recommend it for this reason. It would appear many people participated in discussion forums and watched video lectures, without necessarily undertaking the quizzes or completing the final assignment, and this was reflected in the number of people completing the course - just 1,352 out of the 15,000 or so registered students who were active at some point in the course.

-Peter Moore

Many organisations use land parcels in their Geographic Information Systems and Web Mapping displays. On the their own, they aren't particularly useful, but they do make for a great backdrop for contextual purposes. Everybody knows where they live, and the extent of ownership is a good surrogate for location in the absence of other data. It is also the basis of lots of other data that is captured relative to it, for example planning zones or buildings.

Land parcels are a data set that is rather taken for granted. It's just there. It's always been there - well, ever since the first spatial data was captured. Surveyors create them for us and LINZ makes them freely available. So far, so good.

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SEISMIC COMPLICATIONS

The trouble is, we've never gotten our heads around the fact that in a tectonically active country, land parcels are constantly on the move, either gradually (a few millimetres per year), or suddenly, such as in a magnitude 7 shunt.

I guess we always knew there was a problem, but imagined it would somehow be at least 10 years away. At 50mm per year, it would take 10 years to accumulate a 0.5m shift, which was the approximate accuracy of a GPS receiver 10 years ago. In the meantime, the accuracy of GPS receivers has increased ten-fold, there are more satellites enabling greater precision, and a huge proliferation of smart phones and tablets to capture data.

This data is being captured, of course, where it occurs relative to the GPS satellites, not where the land parcel was at the time it was surveyed. In addition, the annual rate of land deformation is now close to GPS receiver accuracy.

New Zealand is a long diagonal country halfway between the equator and the South Pole, making it a difficult country to map using conventional projections. NZMG, implemented in 1973, was a great response to this challenge, but by 2000 it was becoming increasingly obvious that it had served its useful purpose and needed to be replaced. NZGD2000 was created in response to the needs of changing technology.

HOW NZGD2000 WORKS

At this year's ALGIM GIS Conference in Auckland, Dr Chris Crooks from LINZ gave great insight into the detail and thinking behind the NZGD2000 coordinate system, and in particular, how the effects of the Canterbury earthquakes have beeb subsequently incorporated.

In selecting NZGD2000, LINZ opted for a semi-static coordinate system that places NZ at a location for the year 2000 with a velocity model included. The theory was that any data collected could be shifted back to where it would have been in 2000 by shifting it in the direction of the annual correction, multiplied by the number of years since 2000.

By taking this approach, LINZ had effectively implemented an untested system, and brought several problems along for the ride.

• The commercial GIS tools weren't (and still aren't) equipped to handle the solution

• The parcels data model didn't support the management of the data using this approach

• There was no plan or process in place to manage the data

LINZ had committed to periodically releasing updated velocity models, but not one release had occurred, signalling that the above issues continued to be a problem.

Additionally, the solution was based on gradual shifts of a uniform nature in a predictable direction, and could not account for the chaotic changes created by the September 2010 earthquake. The 2009 7.8 Fiordland earthquake also caused significant deformation throughout Southland, but this had been tolerated due to the largely rural nature of the area.

Christchurch, being urban and in need of immediate redevelopment, created an urgent need for a solution to be found.

POST-QUAKE UPDATES

LINZ recently adjusted all those land parcels that had been deformed by more than 5 mm. Presumably they were able to exclude the normal drift that applies to the rest of the country, as this is a stepwise correction related to seismic events, rather than a global correction. The net effect is that the land parcels have changed to where they would have been, had the earthquakes happened prior to 2000.

LINZ still hasn't released an adjustment nationally for gradual shift, but the fact that they have successfully dealt with the Canterbury issue, signals that they are prepared to deal with this issue as well. Chris reported that they now have much better data on what the actual velocity is around the country, whereas when the system was implemented, it was much more of a guess.

HOW DOES THIS AFFECT YOU? WHAT ISSUES SHOULD YOU CONSIDER?

If your data is coincident or relative to data in the South Island, then you need to think about adjusting it soon. You'll also need to think about metadata.

Have you recorded whether your datasets are subject to tectonic shift at a dataset level? You'll also need to think about whether you should be recording tectonic shift at a record level - has this record been adjusted? Which velocity model was it adjusted to? And if you are not in the South Island, you'll need to deal with this issue eventually - do you have a plan to do so?

With LINZ embarking on upgrades to existing or new data sets, including Addresses, ASaTs (Automated Survey and Titles system), the Property Data Management Framework, and 'scaleless' topographic data, it is a timely reminder that you should be providing input and feedback that ensures that sufficient record level metadata exists to effectively manage the sharing of data with a temporal tectonic component.

It's also a reminder that such systems should be tested end-to-end for integration before being put into production. As users of the data you can offer to be involved in the testing.

With the New Zealand Cricket team, the Black Caps, having recently won the Third Test in Barbados, against the West Indies, it reminded me of my own playing days and what goes to making a great team.

One of the things I noticed was that good fielding is infectious. If someone takes responsibility to lift their game, put in 110%, and pull off brilliant saves and catches, suddenly you notice everyone around you lifts their game to the same level.

Of course if people start doing the opposite, everybody's level seems to subconsciously drop accordingly. When I noticed this, I made it my job to be the person who takes the lead and infect the team with good fielding.

The same applies in the workplace. You can be the person that turns up and lifts everybody's performance with your enthusiasm and excellence, or you can be the person who subconsciously allows a gloomy Eeyore to slow you down.

CHAMPION OR EEYORE? YOUR CHOICE!

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