We hinted at it in August and now it's here; today we're releasing a licensed version of the database that sits behind GeoSeer, creatively called: GeoSeer Licensed.

GeoSeer Licensed content allows organisations and businesses to host and integrate their own local copy of GeoSeer's industry leading database of spatial web services directly into their own applications, products, or services. We figure this can improve end-user workflows, make discovery of third-party data and services much easier, and help organisations realise some of vast economic benefits Open Data presents - estimated at €75 billion across the EU in 2020 alone. Also, you can build cool things with it.

This nicely compliments the GeoSeer API which was released back in April. Where the API allows organisations to easily build GeoSeer's search into web applications by making calls to our servers (like the GeoSeer WebGIS demo does), GeoSeer Licensed allows organisations to host the database locally, or release it in a product, meaning any sort of application can be built around it, not just search.

The Value Add

Lets be honest, there's nothing stopping you from building your own spider, finding 550+ dataportals to use as seeds, scraping half a million web-pages a month, and building your own database of geospatial web services. So why use GeoSeer Licensed?

• Industry Leading Database - At the time of writing we're not aware of any database of geospatial web services anywhere near as large as this (and we've looked).
• Current - We run regular crawls to make sure everything in GeoSeer Licensed is current. We provide monthly updates so you always have the latest data.
• Pre-Cleaned - despite these being standards, everyone likes to do things differently. We've pre-cleaned the fields and tried to standardise them to make them consistent. For example we've found no less than 55 ways to say "No license fees" across 12 languages and turned that into a simple: "No".
• XML Free - it's 2019 and fewer people want to deal with the hassle of namespaces, esoteric data models, and the other complexities XML brings. We've extracted the data from the XML documents and put it into a database, with some JSON sprinkled in where necessary.
• Spatial Extents - For GeoSeer Datasets we include the extents bounding boxes in WGS84 format, along with scale-appropriate textual representations of the locations, potentially down to county level (like you see in GeoSeer Search).
• Quick start - Because we've done all the hard work, written up documentation about what each field means (so you don't have to read the standards), and packaged it in an SQLite database, it's super easy to get started with. Simply open your favourite database admin tool (it probably supports SQLite), and get querying with good old fashioned SQL.

The Products

GeoSeer Services is a database with all of the current geospatial web services that GeoSeer knows about in it, as well as information about their endpoints, hosts, and more. At the time of writing it has over 215,000 services in it from across 4,930 different hosts. This information is good for investigating who is hosting services, what sorts of services exist, INSPIRE deployment patterns/conformity, etc.

GeoSeer Datasets builds on GeoSeer Services, including not only all of the service information, but all of the dataset metadata as well. This includes: dataset extent bounding boxes, dataset keywords, declared projections, scale-appropriate textual location, metadata urls, and more. GeoSeer Datasets is well suited to building search engines (surprise!), GIS, web-GIS, academic research, and much more.

Both products are available with a number of different license types, from a research license through to commercial licenses. We can also provide subsets of the database if you don't want everything.

We like to think we've built a great search engine around this data, so now it's your turn - what can you build with it? Find out more about GeoSeer licensing.

Back at the start of September we released some historical statistics and, almost as an afterthought, mentioned the new extents plots. In this post we explore those dataset extents plots in more detail.

Extent Plots; What Are They?

Put simply, every dataset that GeoSeer indexes follows various standards which say that the datasets should declare a rectangular bounding box which represents its spatial extent, i.e., where does the dataset cover? So if it's a dataset covering Germany, it should declare a box covering Germany, but because Germany isn't a rectangle, the box will overlap with surrounding countries to various degrees, including all of tiny Luxembourg.

What we've done is taken all of those extents boxes and stacked them all up, overlapping them to create what we call extent plots which show how many datasets cover a given area. As you can imagine there are a lot of caveats to this process (as well as to the dataset extents themselves, like the Luxembourg example above), these are covered in detail on the datasets extent plots page.

What do they show?

One important caveat to remember is that the plots only show dataset extents that are entirely within the plot extent. The exception to this is the Global plot where we're also excluding the 191,052 global datasets (about 10% of all datasets) as they add nothing to the plot. It's interesting to note that ~10% of all datasets are global though.

So the plots show where in the world there are lots of spatial datasets available via WMS (Web Map Service), WFS (Web Feature Service), WCS (Web Coverage Service), and/or WMTS (Web Map Tile Service). There are two colour schemes, we're mostly using the spectral one here because it brings out more detail even if it's not very aesthetically pleasing.

Starting with the global plot (above) it's obvious that the EU's INSPIRE directive has had a considerable effect, particularly in central Europe. The USA and Brazil also have considerable coverage.

Looking closer at West Europe (below), it becomes apparent that the rectangular nature of the extents are causing lots of overlaps in the region of the Netherlands/Belgium/Germany tripoint (apparently called the Vaalserberg), hence the very high values there. That said, there's still a lot of datasets covering the region.

Zooming even closer to one specific country such as the UK (below), it's possible to see a lot of nuance that's swamped out at the smaller scales. It's now clear that Wales has excellent national coverage compared to England (which is mostly just the South East, not even London), and certainly Scotland (just Glasgow and Edinburgh).

Bad data

Do you notice anything odd about this plot of Africa (apart from it being green)?

Yep, there's a very large number of datasets covering a tiny area off the west coast of Africa. Why? As you've probably guessed it's because 6,527 datasets are wrongly declaring their extent as being entirely around 0, 0 (lat/lon). This floods out Africa which unfortunately doesn't have many datasets in the first place. So we filter these bad datasets out of the plot extents to get the below. Now we can see that east Africa has a respectable number of datasets covering it, as do the Canary Islands.

Technical; How We Make Them

We use Python to create these plots by reading in all of the WGS84 (coordinate system) bounding boxes from the GeoSeer index, stacking them together with NumPy as a two dimensional array, and then plotting them out via MatPlotLib. NumPy does the magic of summing the extents together remarkably quickly so we can rebuild them every month with the updates.

Closing Remarks

There are other interesting insights that can be gleaned from these, take a look at the Datasets Extent Plots page for more. This is a good case study of the sort of cool stuff you can do with Python, and GeoSeer Datasets, for example if you have a research itch you need to scratch.

Because we like to share, the plots are available for use under the CC-BY 4.0 license, which means you can do anything you want with them but please link back to GeoSeer.

Finally, if there's any particular area you think would make an interesting plot, let us know and we'll take a look.

The GeoSeer stats page went live just shy of a year ago and we've been meaning to update it with more stats ever since. Today we've done just that, with a few new stats, and a lot of cool plots.

The first statistic is the most simple: The number of countries that are hosting OGC services. A country for our purposes is simply defined as having a unique ccTLD (the last part of a domain: .pl, .us, .br, .au, etc.). At the time of writing this blog post, it's 87 of the 244 defined ccTLD's. (Note this does include .eu for the European Union which most people wouldn't actually consider a country).

Historical Data

GeoSeer has been live for almost 18 months now, and we've been crawling the WWW for OGC services for even longer. This means we have a trove of historical data about services, and the new stats expose some of that. If you look at the stats page now, you'll see the General Stats section has been tweaked slightly.

As well as continuing to show stats about the current state of OGC services "Now", we've added an extra column for "Ever" which shows the total numbers that we've ever found since we started doing this. Then with a little maths we show the percentage of the things we've ever found that are still alive now.

The Ephemeral Nature of Public Data

Datasets

The single most glaring statistic from this historical data is that we've found a total of 4,949,124 datasets since we started crawling, but only 1,865,660 are live and active in our index right now. Or put another way, just 37.7% of the datasets hosted by OGC services that were publically available at some point in the past 18 months are still online!

Services

And while that's the most stand-out statistic, the others also show how transient the OGC services that host these datasets are. Over the course of the past ~18 months we've found 291,779 different services, yet only 71.83% of them were online and responding on our last crawl.

Hosts

The final statistic of note here is the number of hosts. These are the domain names themselves, and different subdomains are counted as different hosts (so www.example.com is different from ogc.example.com). Even these have experienced considerable churn over what is a relatively short period of time, with only 85.5% of hosts remaining online. We should point out that we ignore the scheme (that's the http:// or https://) and ignore the port when we consider if something is a "host", so if a host changes from insecure to secure (and quite a few do), it won't make a difference to this statistic.

Thoughts

All of this change makes it harder for users to rely on this data even if they can find it. Especially for things like scientific research which relies on repeatability, including the ability for other scientists to go back and take a second look at the original data; a difficult thing to do when the datasets/services/hosts have gone offline.

This also highlights the importance of keeping data portals current. Link rot is a real thing and data curators need to ensure they maintain their portals otherwise the portals are worse than useless (because they're wasting everyone's time with bad links).

Extent Plots

The other part of this statistics update is a collection of extent map plots that show what parts of the world have datasets. We're going to do a separate blog post about them in the future.