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Your Geoportal F***ing Sucks

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Your Geoportal F***ing Sucks
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156
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CC Attribution 3.0 Unported:
You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
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Abstract
Many national and regional governments have in the past few decades created GeoPortals to meet their obligations to provide citizen access to their spatial data. This spatial data is collected, in many cases, at tax payer expense. Indeed the EU (2024) says: """ The publication of data is driven by the belief that it brings enormous benefits to citizens, businesses, and public administrations, while at the same time enabling stronger co-operation across Europe. Open data can bring benefits in various fields, such as health, food security, education, climate, intelligent transport systems, and smart cities - and is considered "an essential resource for economic growth, job creation and societal progress". """ But even now nearly a quarter century after the introduction of the first Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards for interoperability there seems to be a wide spread failure to make use of OGC standards to provide access to the underlying data that is needed by citizens create economic growth. This paper will detail the author's experiences with attempting to acquire spatial data and their observations of relatively inexperienced students trying to navigate some examples of geoportals. The paper will then make some suggestions to help data providers serve data with the modern methods and formats that users actually want, using open source tools such as GeoServer.
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