Analyse Open Geodata Usage Related to Critical Infrastructure

Europe faces tremendous threats and hostile actions towards its critical infrastructure from the bottom of the ocean to space. With Spatineo’s geospatial API usage analytics, countries can create an understanding of how much valuable data from critical infrastructure is acquired non-domestically. Getting information about reconnaissance targeting critical infrastructure is crucial for decision-makers to protect our valuable data and keep it benefiting our societies.  

In many cases, Open Data providers don’t know how much their datasets are used and by whom. To keep the Open Data policies working as intended, the proper methods and tools are needed to effectively analyse the use of Open Data via public APIs. Organisations responsible for the data and APIs must be able to detect unintended and unwanted API use. With this information, the providers can adjust the provided data and access as necessary to keep the Open Data flows sustainable.

Information describing critical infrastructure objects, such as bridges, harbours, utility networks, or water towers, are usually not provided as Open Data, but many datasets providing beneficial information on the surroundings of these objects are. Spatineo has developed a method for automatically detecting and analysing likely reconnaissance of the surroundings of known critical infrastructure objects based on geospatial analysis of the API metadata and the API web server access logs.

The analysis method has been proven to work in real customer cases and to provide answers to research questions considering likely Open Data API reconnaissance on a national level. It has been applied in projects with over two years of web server access logs from hundreds of individual APIs consisting of tens of billions of log entries.