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I’m speaking next week at the Location and Timing Forum who are holding a special meeting on the informed traveller, in other words providing contextual services to travellers.

Next week the meeting is at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, so I won’t really be needing much in the way of contextual services to get me there ..

But in all seriousness I have become to rely at least on the mobile mapping services on both my Android and iPhone to get me to meetings, where once I might have printed off a map from a web mapping service, or in the more distant past used a street atlas, I now just use my phone.

This is of course the most obvious and simple application, the real innovation will come when in addition to location the other context clues about the individual traveller such as time and history are also used in applications.

Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.

I’ve spent last week at the Open Geospatial Consortium Technical Committee meeting held at the truly stunning Stata Center building of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Stata Center MIT

Very much business as usual for this important standards making body, but on the first day of the meeting there was a one day summit on the specific issue of Digital Rights Management as it relates to Geospatial data and services.

Before you all run for the exit, shouting “look at the music industry..” the management of rights to information is a topic far greater in scope than copy protection, and is of particular relevance today for  the Geospatial industry.

Adena who was at the meeting has provided a good summary in Directions Magazine, my overall impression is that at last the focus is moving on to the problems which need solving, and that solving them is not really an issue of technology.

As far as I am concerned there is a clear work-flow component to rights management around geospatial data, which it is useful to work through.

Firstly you must want to share your geospatial information, an obvious point but the motivation to share and how strong that motivation is drives all the remaining choices around management of rights of others to access and use your data.

It you really want the widest distribution of your information possible with no “strings attached” there you put your information into the public domain as is the case with federally funded datasets in the USA. Putting geospatial data into the public domain means you have no control whatsoever as to how the data might be used, by whom and under what commercial arrangement.

Outside of the US government very little geospatial data is put into the public domain, instead some form of license is usually established, which provides the user of the data with a set of rights to use the data with some restrictions.

The creation of licenses for information on the web has been hugely simplified by the great people at Creative Commons, who have developed their CC licenses which are simple and offer the type of control over how information is used that meets most peoples needs online.

However the series of CC licenses does not really meet the requirements of expressing rights to a database, which by its nature is not a creative work but a collection of facts. This is one of the reasons the OpenStreetMap Foundation seems to be moving away from the current CC license.

The development of Generic licenses for geospatial data or any database for that matter is relatively immature, as I understand it OpenStreetMap is moving towards adopting the new ODbL license. At different approach is taken by Creative Science an organisation aiming to follow the example of the CC movement but for databases who have come up with the cc0 (CC Zero) license, a license for database which is a formal express of public domain like rights.

Commercial organisations have developed their own licenses that meet their own specific needs such as the Google Map Maker Data license.

This remains a complex and little understood area in the community, with organisations wanting to restrict rights to demand attributions, force third parties to license derived information in the same way, restrict use to non commercial uses etc, and trying to do so without much consistency.

The focus of the DRM activities at the OGC have largely skipped these issues instead concentrating on technical means to encode and transfer licenses using technologies like GeoXACML .

This is all very good, and will at some point in the future be needed, however the point I made at the summit this week is that we are perhaps putting the cart before the horses here, until we can get simpler and more robust licenses to protect geospatial data, there is little point in developing the services that may sit around them.

We may also have to accept that for these licenses to be successful they need to be simple, and may not offer as much fine grained control over rights to databases as some database owners might like.

Kudos to Graham my old friend at the OS for organising the meeting which attracted many from outside the OGC community and provided a great platform to debate the issue.

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

The 11th Spatial Data Infrastructure Conference was held last week in Rotterdam, and like many SDI conference the focus of presentations and the profile of attendees was largely from the pubic sector, and in many cases public sector data producers.

Many of the sessions investigated in depth, progress to date across the many local, regional and global efforts to develop SDI’s, other focused on the building blocks of data standards and interoperability, metadata, portal design and legal/policy decisions.

I sensed, as I’m sure many others did, the missing perspective of the actual intended users of these SDI’s; who represented the users and consumers of these complex systems? who was providing the use cases, as to what sort of information was actually needed?  and how would people like to access SDI’s and what might they want to do with the information.

The citizen as a potential user of SDI’s was almost completely ignored.

In my presentation I made the point that there is also a lack of emphasis on the development of the very necessary network and storage infrastructure needed to allow distributed users to find, access and use spatial data across the web, and made the offer than Google and I’m sure the other geoweb companies would be happy to host data on behalf of public sector bodies.

SDI people like the SD but ignore the I !

This was developed into a useful metaphor by someone in the audience, when I likened this type of infrastructure to domestic plumbing, vital but often invisible until it breaks.

It seems that at the moment much of the industries emphasis is on producing the best quality water that is possible ,while at the same time developing and agreeing on a method to illustrate how pure and clear the water is. To be fair we may also now be discussing the size and shape of bottles we might use to store our water and the colour and design of the labels we will put on the bottles.

As to how we might distribute the water efficiently, there is still little discussion beyond the vague idea that it will obviously need some pipes, valves and taps of a standardised size..

This is all good stuff, but if you ask my plumber Jez, to put in a plumbing system into your house, he will ask you some very pertinent questions first..

He will ask, how many bathrooms will the house have and where are their situated, do you need radiators or under floor heating, are you sure you want a power shower on the top floor of your house,  do you need to run a garden hose.

These are, if  your are following the metaphor, the applications that will use the SDI..

What Jez would not do is just go ahead and lay 150m of  Hep2o 22mm water pipes around your house, install a Taco circulating pump, and connect all to a tanker full of Evian water outside your house, and then leave you without fitting any fixtures!

OK so this metaphor is a little facetious, but it can be extended, how about connecting my and my neighbours houses plumbing together to create a regional SDI… the point is that an infrastructure developed in isolation to it use runs the major risk of not meeting the users needs.

My second point and this is an important one also, is that we are beginning to see many applications outside of the SDI community really adopt the “cloud computing” model, where in addition to local repositories of data used to build and maintain data, data itself is published to the cloud and makes use of the robust and scaleable infrastructure that commercial operators like Amazon and Google and even ESRI are making available.

This type of architecture is perfect for deploying SDI’s as it has the potential to scale with need, Information is my design easy to find and share, and of course it’s cheap !

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

Footnote : Still unsure of what an SDI is, read the SDI cookbook

We have been asking people to vote on the tourist destination that would most like to see covered by Street View in the UK. In many cases the destinations short listed with help from Visit Britain, are not accessible with a car, hence these destinations will have the street view imagery captured using one of custom build tricycles designed for the purpose.

On your trike

I have voted for Stonehenge myself, and of course I am not going to try and influence your decision, but just think of our poor cyclist (not me !!) who may have to cycle round Loch Ness or the Pembrokeshire Coast.

Written and submitted from NH Atlanta Hotel, using the swisscom 802.11 network.

Way back when I was a lowly Masters student studying Remote Sensing, one of the most exciting developments at the time was the availability of imagery from the new French satellite SPOT. At the time this was a huge leap forward with 10m resolution imagery captured by a solid state push broom scanning system, it represented  as big a leap forward from Landsat-5 as CD’s did from cassette tapes.

I had the pleasure last week of attending the International Conference of SPOT Image the Toulouse based company that launched SPOT 1 back then and who are now operating a constellation of SPOT satellites that provide imagery to many familiar names including Google.

I had been asked to make a couple of presentations and take part in a round table debate, but had the pleasure to sit back and watch as Jeff from the SPOT Image web team demoed their new online services using Google Earth.

Over the next five years SPOT Image will launch another 4 remote sensing satellites, and amazingly ambitious goal, Pleiades I and II will be 0.5m highly agile satellites similar in capability to GeoEye and WorldView and SPOT 6 & 7 will be mission continuity satellites for the current SPOT constellation.

That is a great demonstration that in Europe there is a very active Earth Observation industry that is leading the world.

Written and submitted from NH Atlanta Hotel, using the swisscom 802.11 network.