MSc Geomatics
Geomatics for the Built Environment provides vital spatial knowledge about the built environment. The science Geomatics is concerned with the acquisition, analysis, management and visualisation of geographic data with the aim of gaining knowledge and a better understanding of the built and natural environments. The programme at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment of TU Delft differs from other Geomatics programmes in its broad and interdisciplinary nature and technical depth and its close connection to the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment.
The remote sensing techniques that students will learn in this programme, give them the ability to measure and observe our environment and especially the features that are beyond the capability of the human eye. Data management and analysis techniques allow students to turn these measurements into useful information and knowledge, with which patterns can be identified, behaviour over time can be tracked and the future state can be predicted. Students will apply your skills in 3D modelling, GIS, mapping, serious gaming, simulation and visualisation to a wide range of fields, such as disaster management, geodesign, location-based services (LBS) and land administration. Also applications as real time mapping, promoting energy efficiency and investigating and analysing the movement of people belong to the possibilities.
GEO1009: Geo-information Organisation and Legislation (5ECTS)
In the information age, information has become of vital importance to the economic and social development of a country. Especially geographic information is of increasing importance for the successful execution of (public and private) tasks. Professors Onsrud and Rushton convincingly argue that “The value of information comes from its use”. Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) facilitate the collection, maintenance, dissemination, and use of geographic information. By reducing duplication, facilitating integration and developing new and innovative applications, and respecting user needs, SDIs can produce significant human and resource savings and returns and performance gains of both public task and private tasks.
The legal and organisational frameworks are important for the successful use of geographic information. Think about the intellectual property rights such as copyright and the database right, the right to access public data, and the need to respect the privacy frameworks in using data. Also one should bear in mind that the collection, and processing of geographic data requires significant human and financial resources. It is therefore imperative that the geo-processes are organised as efficient as possible: collect it once use it many times. Not only each single organisation is stimulated to adhere to this principle, also at a national, regional (European Union) and global level this would result in significant societal benefits.
However, the needs of communities change over time. While technology may fulfil the new needs, these are often not anticipated by outdated legislation and inflexible organisational structures. Also we have seen an increased role for citizens in the SDI processes. This volunteered geographic information adds a new dimension to traditional structures of cooperation and data exchange.
The Geo-information Organisation and Legislation course provides the key legislative frameworks applying to geographic information and addresses the organisational challenges practitioners may be confronted with when working with geo-information within and between organisations, countries and regions.
MSc GIMA
Geographical information is everywhere. Think of physical planning, risk management, navigation systems, location based services, movement analysis, augmented reality, increasing use of maps and volunteered geographical information. This is why Geographical Information Management and Applications (GIMA) is such a relevant and complete Master of Science programme; it focuses on the management and application of geographical information from a scientific perspective.
In addition, there are two aspects which make GIMA a unique programme: the blended learning concept and the co-operation between four renowned Dutch universities. GIMA is also an international programme. It does not only target Dutch bachelors, but also foreign bachelors and professionals with equivalent pre-education.
Module 3: Management in Organizations
This course tries to raise the awareness of how geo-information should be organized and promoted in the real world. It emphasizes on why geo-information should be used and how that is possible. The course relates to the GIMA module on project management, although in this case geo-information is embedded in an organization; it is business driven rather than project driven. The course comes with many deadlines and thus simulates real world business.
Internship
The internship allows the student to gain practical experience in a (geo-information) working environment. The internship contributes to the successful fullfillment of the needed knowledge and experience of an academic and professional GIMA graduate. It allows the student to expand his/her professional experience and creates a sound basis for graduation. The internship is carried out within geo-information companies, agencies and research institutes in the Netherlands or abroad.
MSc thesis topics
▶ Open geodata and national security
Geopolitical developments urge countries to reconsider their open data policies. Some countries seem to move towards more restrictive approaches to address national security concerns while others have chosen to liberalize their data policies towards more open data to protect their national security. India, for example, encourages open data, open standards and platforms since 2022 (see https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2106569®=48&lang=2 and https://dst.gov.in/sites/default/files/National%20Geospatial%20Policy.pdf (English pg. 13 onwards)). In the context of geopolitical concerns and open data, this study will explore why some countries (e.g., India) decided to open their geospatial data amid geopolitical tensions while other countries are reconsidering their open geodata policies (such as the Netherlands). The hypothesis to be tested is that countries liberalizing their geopolitical data precisely to develop local (maybe to some extent, sovereign) geospatial technological ecosystem and capabilities, which are instrumental to its national security. Without open data, only high-capital (foreign) companies can buy data and develop technological capabilities around it. Support for the hypothesis in the Indian context may be in the launch, around the same time (2022), of major reforms to Indians space industry that promotes private sector participation and innovation, and one of the cited reasons is to strengthen national security (https://www.swp-berlin.org/10.18449/2026RP09/).
Contact: Bastiaan van Loenen
▶ Governance of open geodata ecosystems
The scope of the open data ecosystem, and especially the incorporation and consideration of the plethora of non-government data in the ecosystem, will have an impact on the governance of the ecosystem. Where the governance of current open government data systems mainly is in hands of government, the governance of the open data ecosystem will require governance structures in which public, commercial and citizens’ interests are equally represented. Global, national and local public-private partnership constructs will be established to determine new rights, roles and responsibilities among the various actors and organizations involved. Who should be responsible for which part of the infrastructure? Who collects which data, provides which services, manages access mechanisms, and who decides on what? And what governance instruments can be used to steer the behavior of individual public and especially non-public actors, and the ecosystem as a whole.
Contact: Bastiaan van Loenen
▶ The open SDI: the user
The users in first and second generation SDIs are well known and their involvement in the SDI is straightforward. In the first generation SDI, users are typically members of the data providing organisation, well known and embedded in the organisation. In the second generation SDI, users are primarily in government with some known users in the private sector. Also these users are involved in the SDI development through the traditional networks of business associations and national SDI platforms. The third generation SDI builds on the involvement of new non traditional users, among others. However, THE third generation SDI user does not exist: there is a wide variety of user types with different needs, and often the use is unknown to the public data provider. Provided this diversity and uncertainty, one may argue that the user cannot be involved in the third generation decision making processes while on the other hand user involvement is critical for the SDI success. This research will investigate the user needs in the third generation SDI and propose ways to incorporate user involvement in the governance of the third generation SDI.
Contact: Bastiaan van Loenen
▶ Open SDI: user motivations
Until now, users appear to be most frequently mentioned, but in fact not seriously involved in SDI development. The future of Spatial Data Infrastructures may be in Open SDIs consisting of open spatial data and open participation of all. This implies a dominant role for users in the SDI decision making processes. This research aims at identifying potential user groups to be involved in the open SDI and developing strategies to include these user groups in the decision making processes. It will study user motivations and incentivizing users in the context of a specific SDI (e.g., Netherlands, Ireland, Italy etc).
Contact: Bastiaan van Loenen
▶ Role of government in SDI development: How to control the SDI development?!
The third generation SDI builds on both public, private and volunteered data. The inclusion of the latter in the NSDI is increasing. For example, the Dutch National Mapping Agency cooperates with OSM and incorporates OSM maps in the key register topography. Ultimately, we may move to a situation where government solely relies on the activities and data of volunteers. This may raise questions about the ownership of the data and the control over the content of the data. Through a comparative analysis with other co-creation initiatives, this research aims at answering the research question should and if so how may government maintain control over SDI framework data.
Contact: Bastiaan van Loenen
▶ Privacy in the open data ecosystem
In a true open data ecosystem, there is an overwhelming number of datasets available. This may have consequences for the identifiability of the data, because if the so-called mosaic-effect: combining several datasets that each on their own does not contain personal data may identify a single person. A clear boundary between personal and non-personal would stimulate open data use, but this appears in many jurisdictions to depend on the specific circumstances of the case. How to balance the utility of a dataset and the protection of personal data remains uncertain. Do we need AI to instantly establish a balancing score of utility versus identifiability to be ‘safe’, do we need to reconsider the concept of personal data? Will jurisdictions that lack legislation on personal data-processing benefit by developing products building on open data about people and move towards a data dictatorship? These are only a few of the questions that should be subject to further study.
Contact: Hendrik Ploeger
▶ Intellectual property & data ownership in the open data ecosystem
The introduction of a universal right to access and reuse data is a way to arrive at a sustainable open data ecosystem. This implies we have to rethink legal concepts around intellectual property and data ownership. The actual concept of intellectual property was developed in the age of the printed word. At the moment information became shaped as digital data, automatically processed by machines, and can be reproduced easy and without any cost, it becomes less evident to speak about an ‘original’. Engagement in studies on the development of open data in the current environment of mass production of data, especially taking into account the case of machine-generated data and the rights created over them, might develop alternative concepts, like the universal right to access and re-use, that will benefit all.
Contact: Hendrik Ploeger
▶ Assessing open data
Open data is expected to bring a significant amount of extra economic value to our information economies. It also aims at stimulating transparency in government decision making. For a wide variety of reasons open data has not yet provided the promised benefits. This research will develop an assessment framework for open data and test the framework in several countries. This should support decision makers to stimulate open data and to bring the open data dream into reality.
Contact: Bastiaan van Loenen
▶ Governance of open spatial data
Public administrations in Europe and worldwide are aware of the need to promote, facilitate and coordinate the sharing of spatial data and have been working on the development of open spatial data infrastructures for many years. Most countries and public administrations however approach and implement their – open – SDI in their own unique way. This especially applies to the governance instruments being utilized for managing the relationships and dependencies between all involved actors, units and organizations. Due to the lack of research on the governance of open spatial data infrastructures, it still remains difficult to understand the impact of implemented governance instruments and governance models on the performance of the infrastructure. As a result, practitioners and policy makers remain uninformed and uncertain about the success and appropriateness of their governance model, and of their open spatial data infrastructure in general. The central research questions this research aims to answer are: 1) which governance instruments are adopted for governing open spatial data infrastructures in Europe and 2) what is the impact of different governance instruments and models on the performance of open spatial data policies?
Contact: Bastiaan van Loenen
▶ Bridging the public-private data divide
From the beginning of the 21th century, the rise of the digital era, we have witnessed the role of government data in the data society to smoothly diminish towards a more marginal one. The majority of the annually newly created data is in the private (i.e. commercial) domain. In practice, the majority of such non-government data, either collected or controlled by businesses, researchers or citizens, are not readily accessible to all. It may be worrying when (a single or limited number of) parties have data at their disposal which are highly relevant for the execution of a (public) task, but not shared with others, for example, with government. The information position of government (in this example) may be limited if they rely on two-year old data while real-time data are available outside government. Government may then not only have to rely on the knowledge of the parties outside government, but also on the data of these parties. The European Commission is exploring ways to address this gap by extending the scope of the Directive on the re-use of public sector information to high value datasets in the public interest. This research will explore means for the public sector to access, and use private sector data: what means are available and utilised and should we create new instruments to arrive at a true open SDI?
Contact: Bastiaan van Loenen
▶ User friendly geoportals
Since the beginning of the 1990s we have been developing geoportals. Until now none of these portals appear to be user friendly. In addition to complex user interfaces, also the ever increasing amount of data available poses serious challenges to the user friendliness of these portals. Provided the wide variety of (potential) users, this research aims at developing a geoportal user friendliness assessment framework and apply the framework to existing geoportals (and/ or open data portals) around the world.
Contact: Bastiaan van Loenen
▶ Open spatial data and trust in government
One of the drivers of open (spatial) data is increasing the transparency of government operations and processes. However, research shows that transparency of government data may also result in the identification of errors in the data and processes and as a consequence decreasing trust in government. This research will study the impact of open spatial data and open algorithms on the trust of governments providing open spatial data/ models.
Contact: Bastiaan van Loenen
▶ Anonymizing open data
This research aims at developing and performing a risk assessment test on open data in the context of data protection legislation in Europe. Today many geographic datasets are provided without any costs and without restrictions in the use, so called open data. Due to data protection legislation, data related to individuals cannot be provided as open data: these have to anonymised. Question is at what level of detail do these personal data be aggregated to not fall under the scope of the data protection directive. A second part of the research concerns the extent to which existing open data, presumably not being personal data, can be related to individuals by combining it with other open data readily available. Which data are conclusive in the identification of individuals which are less critical, can we provide a clear line between personal and non-personal data?
Contact: Bastiaan van Loenen
▶ Eurotitle: towards a single European land administration system
An increase in cross-border transactions of immovable property within the European Union puts a demand for easy access to the information of the national land administrations of the member states. The projects EULIS and IMOLA (https://www.elra.eu/imola/) were first steps, but these do not resolve the problems of the diversity of the national systems of land registry. The real estate and mortgage market highly values transparency and certainty of rights and restrictions in land. The introduction of a common way of land registration complimentary to the existing national land registrations, the EuroTitle system, may bring the required uniformity of land administration. This approach is in the beginning stages of development and the consequences need to be further researched in order to assess the feasibility of the introduction of such a concept in the world of European land administration.
Contact: Hendrik Ploeger
▶ Alignment of geo-information policies
Geo-information is relevant to many policies of governments, and these policies and related policy instruments determine how public administrations are dealing with the collection, use, management and exchange of spatial data and information. Due to a lack of policy coherence, there often are contradictions, inconsistencies and gaps between different policies dealing with geographic information, which hinders the effective use of this information. The aim of this research is to develop a policy alignment approach that could support public administrations in realizing alignment between different policies dealing with geo-information.
Contact: Bastiaan van Loenen
▶ Assessment of conditions for access and use of spatial data in Europe
One of the key criteria of a good data policy is that clear, complete and user-friendly information is provided to data users and potential users on how they can obtain access to data and services and under which conditions and charges they can do so. In many cases this information is included – or should be included – in the metadata of spatial data sets and services. Analyzing the metadata records of spatial data sets and services in the European geoportal, this research aims to explore to what extent the conditions for access and use of spatial data in Europe as defined by different data providers are complete, understandable and harmonized.
Contact: Bastiaan van Loenen
▶ Global SDI Assessment Framework
While quite a lot of research is done and empirical information is available on the development of SDIs in European countries, studies in which the development of these European national spatial data infrastructures is compared with SDI developments in other parts of the world are relatively scarce. The aim of this research is to develop a framework that allows to analyse SDI developments in several parts of the world, and to apply this framework on several countries in different regions of the world. The research should contribute to a better understanding on how countries and public administrations in different regions are working on the development of spatial data infrastructures, the particular problems they have to deal with, and the way they are developing and implementing different SDI components.
Contact: Bastiaan van Loenen
▶ Liability in the open data ecosystem
An open data ecosystem also raises questions about the liability in the data. Who can be held liable for errors in the data and data services if these are based on a wide variety of other sources and algorithms?
Contact: Hendrik Ploeger
▶ Financial and economic aspects of the open data ecosystem
Currently, the benefits of open data befall to society at large, whereas the costs are borne by organisations providing the open data. The funding of organisations with the sole or primary task to collect data face significant challenges. This situation will remain as long as data is not considered key for the functioning of our societies. The introduction of a data tax may be one direction, but inhibits significant transaction costs, something that open data itself managed to diminish to the minimum. Research into funding models ensuring that those that bear the cost of open data will be compensated in a sustainable manner should be subject of further study. Further the sustainability of ‘data’ companies in an – open – data society should be studied. We are aware of the impact open government data may have on ‘data’ companies that provide very similar data, but how sustainable is the open data ecosystem if ‘data’ companies also have to make their data available as open data?
Contact: Bastiaan van Loenen
▶ Design of a user driven open data ecosystem
In the end, the data user should be considered the main player in the open data ecosystem. The design of an effective user driven open data ecosystem will be one of the most challenging questions in open data research and practice. There is still very little knowledge available on users, their needs, and effective strategies to accommodate their needs. While current open data initiatives tend to focus mainly on professional users, there are various other groups that might benefit from using open data and want to apply open data immediately. Especially the needs of citizens are still barely considered . In addition, the issue of the divide between the data haves and the data have-nots is still very real . Because many open data frontrunners are European and North American countries, this may increase the socio-economic differences between these countries and other regions in the world. Within countries or regions themselves, a distinction can also be made between people who can deal with the available data (the ‘data cans’) and those who cannot or only to a limited extent (the ‘data cannots’). Clearly this will have serious social implications or consequences, e.g. because (government) facilities do not appear to be equally accessible to everyone. This urges for more (end) user-friendly data services, but also for accessible training opportunities for all user groups of open data (community capacity building).
Contact: Bastiaan van Loenen
Other education & training
The Knowledge Centre contributed to the Massive Open Online Course on Open Government organized by the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management of Delft University of Technology. The MOOC Open Government explores the foundations and objectives of Open Government and examines current developments, including the opening and reuse of governmental data such as the release of data by governments in America and Europe. The course empowers students by helping them to grasp the key principles surrounding open government. Within this MOOC, Bastiaan van Loenen contributed to the module on Technical and legal aspects of open data.
The Knowledge Centre also contributed to the creation of learnign and teaching materials and activities as part of SPIDER – open SPatial data Infrastructure eDucation nEtwoRk, under the Erasmus+ programme – a project involving a consortium of universities, among which Bochum University, TU Delft, KU Leuven, Lund University, University of Zagreb.
KCOD researchers are also involved in several education programs at the Free University in Amsterdam and Leiden University and in the supervision of students at Tilburg University (TILT).