Author Archives: Ian

Summer reading list! Or not…but required reading at UMI. Why these three books?

• The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch – This is a seminal work of urban planning. Hard to believe it is 50+ years old, but still very relevant. However, wouldn’t it be nice to pen The Image of the Megapolis, a c.2013 follow up?
• The Elements of Style, Strunk & White – Nobody who communicates in English should be without this reference. It is indispensable and makes the decent writer a great writer. It encapsulates the economy of language.
• Innumeracy, John Allen Paulos – What is worse than not knowing how to read a newspaper? Not knowing how to understand a statistic. Too many people accept facts at face value without posing any questions. Blind acceptance is dangerous! As we say in Mapland…maps are not true for all purposes!

Sometimes the information economy ushers in fantastic opportunities for government to more with less. Efficiencies derived through smart use of IT practices, crowdsourcing, transparency and social media are areas that have ‘injected’ dynamism into government operations. Unfortunately, the opposite holds true: sometimes the information economy ushers in stupid opportunities for private parties to take advantage of government.

Exhibit A is the Department of Homeland Security’s recent solicitation for Airline Industry Flight Data. Seems odd, given that the FAA, which oversees air travel in the US, um, has this information*. But not completely– all aircraft have to file a flight plan with the FAA before take off, and this is public. However, for a variety of reasons, the plan filed may not be the actual route flown.

This RFP seeks information that is known by a small group of companies active in the airline ticketing and scheduling industry. GDS acts as a sort of back office for airline ticketing (the history of the GDS alone is a fascinating one, but that for another time), and schedule aggregators (like Innovata) work with IATA to provide schedule data in a standardized format. Getting to the details, the solicitation seeks detailed information relating to US originating or terminating flights in the industry-standard SSIM format. Specifically, it seeks:

• Airline names
• Flight numbers
• Itinerary variation
• Identifiers
• Leg sequence numbers
• Service types
• Departure/arrival stations
• Discontinued dates
• and more! (consult the solicitation if you dare: Scope of Work, Page 2)

Additionally, “…[t]he flight data file shall not contain the following Data Element Identifier (DEI) Type 4 line items:

a. 501 – On-Time Performance
b. 502 – In-Flight service (meals for sale, movies, smoking, non-smoking, etc)
c. 503 - Electronic Ticketing Information”

Seems odd to specifically identify three attributes that you do not want. What is weird about this solicitation (apart from the FAA already having this data) is that DHS already has it– under the Secure Flight program, the TSA collects traveller information from airlines. This includes a unique ID (PNR) that can be used to associate with the aircraft, and therefore capture info the TSA seeks!

*Ok, we lied. The FAA actually doesn’t have this data. Of course you would think they create this data, but they don’t–it’s licensed from a private party, giving more opportunities to license public resources to additional government agencies, like DHS!

The formal PR if you choose, but great stuff in store at the Tableau Customer Conference this week in sunny San Diego.  The short version:

Tableau customers can now access enhanced mapping services through Mapfluence. Check out HackYourMap for all things Tableau mapping-related.

What can you do with enhanced mapping in Tableau? Here’s a sampling:

• Overlay high resolution satellite and aerial imagery
• Access 10,000 variables to overlay from the Mapfluence On-demand Data Catalog
• Host proprietary customer data in Mapfluence for easy visualization in Tableau
• Create additional map styles including heat maps, raster data, great arcs
• Address-level geocoding
• Custom-styled base maps
• Sales territory definition and management
• Custom data sourcing
• Advanced spatial queries and geographic operations

Some kind words from Tableau:

“Our customers have stringent requirements for mapping needs, and partnering with Urban Mapping allows us to leverage their experience in cartography and data sourcing,” commented Dan Jewett, Vice President Product at Tableau. “We’re thrilled to have Urban Mapping deliver value-added capabilities to our customer base, as they share our vision for delighting users and satisfying customer needs.”

We’re at the conference all week and running a few mapping sessions, co come on by!

Urban Mapping spends a great deal of time and money to access data. Much of our process is part of a special sauce that no ETL tool can replicate–it means a lot of time spent in schema development, custom parsing, data validation, ingestion and maintenance. So when we run across areas where government can improve, we aim to help. Sometimes our practices aren’t universally loved, but when you don’t have a lobbying office with 100+ employees, entrepreneurial tactics are all you have.

Since the wave of open government has taken hold, much of what we’ve been saying/doing over the past six years has been spot on. So when we stumble across the good and bad, we want to share.

So when learning about some recently declassified CIA maps, I stumbled across their FOIA Electronic Reading Room. I feel like I should write this last sentence again for emphasis, but I’ll presume the point is understood. Granted the CIA is subject to numerous national security laws, so you may have no chance of obtaining what you seek (classified material, polygraphs, personnel records, sources and methods, etc…) but for what is released under FOIA, this is a model other agencies should understand. It’s called re-using assets. It’s smart, economical and allows the CIA to say, despite what else you think, it has increased transparency.

In a talk at a conference produced by The Economist in 2011, I bemoaned the state of FOIA legislation in the US. In short, a few key points:

• What should be released? Current practice is for each agency to make a determination, but often government fails to see the value in what they have. Actual FOIA requests are a very practical measure of what the public sees as desirable and requests could serve as a measure of what to release.
• FOIA.gov is embarrassing – all the information is presented in a way that says “we are sucking less” but this doesn’t offer anything prescriptive. Seeing the actual FOIA requests would be an insightful way of seeing what researchers, historians, conspiracy theorists and others are seeking. Further, creating public archives of already FOIAed documents would cut down on an administrative burden in FOIA compliance–duplicate requests would not need to be filled, and released info would be archived, making it easily accessible to all. An example of the London Underground following this approach of FOIA disclosure logs.
• Modernize FOIA to be more in line with the information age. The last substantive change to FOIA that described ‘records’ was in 1996 and included a provision for electronic records. However, fees are still assessed in an antiquated manner and often translate to a $0.10 per page fee and on mainframe compute time. Often government systems aren’t as current as those in the private sector, which has the impact of imposing sometimes onerous fees based on technology limitations.
• Related to modernizing FOIA, lean on industry to help with the backlog. Establish a group of trusted parties who can act as stewards of sensitive data, allowing these parties to follow policy guidelines and more quickly and efficiently release data to the public. Since so much of government systems are managed by private parties anyway, this is a natural means of being more responsive.

Hello government agencies–take note!