In June 2009, the United States became the first country in the world to make all of its government data “open by default,” except for personal information and information related to national security. To date, nearly 190,000 datasets have been posted on the Data.gov website (Figure 1). Over 50 other nations around the world—such as Tunisia and Ukraine—have followed the example of Data.gov and made a wide variety of their government data openly accessible to its citizens and businesses (U.S. General Services Administration 2015). The list of open-access datasets goes on and on. Take, for instance, the Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center. It holds the world’s largest civilian archive of images of the Earth’s surface (Figure 2). The archive spans from 1937 to present-day satellite images of the Earth (U.S. Geological Survey 2015). Or, the Geospatial Data Gateway, a “one-stop” source for all environmental and natural resources data—a service made available through a partnership of three U.S. Department of Agriculture agencies: the Natural Resources Conservation Service, the Farm Service Agency, and Rural Development (U.S. Department of Agriculture 2015). Or, the National Historical Geographic Information System, which provides open access to summary statistics and geographic information system (GIS) boundary files for the U.S. censuses and other nationwide surveys from 1790 to the present day (Minnesota Population Center 2011). All of this is very commendable. However, given the huge volume of data that is currently available, it is reasonable to ask why more scientific and social progress has not been made with this information. Certainly there is not a lack of open-access tools to handle the data. In the public domain, the “R” statistical package is often used to handle numerical and statistical analyses, and open-source mapping programs like MapWindow GIS (available at http://www.mapwindow.org/; Figure 3) and GRASS 7

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开放获取地理空间数据：前景和潜力

2009年6月，美国成为世界上第一个“默认开放”所有政府数据的国家，个人信息和与国家安全有关的信息除外。迄今为止，已经在Data.gov网站上发布了近190,000个数据集（图1）。世界上其他50多个国家（例如突尼斯和乌克兰）也效仿了Data.gov，并向其公民和企业开放了各种政府数据（US General Services Administration，2015）。开放访问数据集的列表不停地出现。以地球资源观测与科学（EROS）中心为例。它保存着世界上最大的地球表面图像平民档案（图2）。该档案的时间跨度从1937年到今天的地球卫星图像（美国地质调查局2015年）。或者，地理空间数据网关，它是所有环境和自然资源数据的“一站式”来源，该服务是通过美国三部农业部门的合作伙伴关系提供的：自然资源保护局，农场服务局和农村发展（美国农业部，2015年）。或者，国家历史地理信息系统，从1790年至今，可为美国人口普查和其他全国范围的普查提供对摘要统计数据和地理信息系统（GIS）边界文件的开放访问（明尼苏达州人口中心，2011年）。所有这些都是值得称赞的。但是，鉴于当前可用的海量数据，有理由提出疑问，为什么没有利用此信息取得更多的科学和社会进步。当然，不缺少用于处理数据的开放访问工具。在公共领域，“ R”统计软件包通常用于处理数值和统计分析以及诸如MapWindow GIS（可从http://www.mapwindow.org/获得；图3）和GRASS 7等开源映射程序。