Leif has a thought-provoking post up that raises the idea of an ecosystem approach to data-dissemination. In other words, that we should be building a communities of standards-compliant data-providers who can all share each other’s data. Both the new Heritage Gateway, and Swish (representing Scotland and Wales) are planning to allow dissemination of data via web-services at some point, depending on the setup of the individual councils that are providing the data.

On Friday I attended a one-day conference at the e-Science Centre at Edinburgh University, entitled “Maintaining Long-term Access to Geospatial Data”. The quote above came from one of the speakers and, to me, it was the key point that came out of the day. Having said that, some interesting themes emerged that align nicely with ongoing discussions amongst the geospatial crowd. Firstly- the overwhelming trend in all the discussions was a move towards a service-based decentralised architecture for geospatial data storage and sharing.