Categories
Data Policy Ordnance Survey

So is the OS derived data issue now solved ?

Well from reading a couple of press releases the signs look hopeful…

Both the OS and the Dept. of Communities and Local Government have announced the signing of the new Public Sector Mapping Agreement (PSMA), a sole source long term contract for providing mapping data to all of the public sector. I’m sure this has not gone down very well with other data providers, but that’s another topic I’m sure we will here all about in due course !

My question today is will this new agreement and the supposed more liberal licensing framework allow public sector organisations to publish their data online without restrictions imposed by the OS.

Specifically will the OS now allow local councils to publish their data using Google Maps or potentially add data to OpenStreetMap ?

Well the language is very positive..

“We’re opening the door to a world of government information that will allow the good ideas of ordinary people to become innovative digital solutions that improve public services.” says Local Government Minister Grant Shapps,

Chris Holcroft of the AGI talks about “Breaking down barriers and better enabling data sharing, the PSMA should help the public sector make better and more transparent decisions and allocate its resources more efficiently, saving time and money.”

The key passage from the OS press release is this..

“The new agreement also introduces a new licensing framework that will enable more collaborative working with delivery partners and will allow public sector organisations to re-use the data for core non-commercial public sector activities. It will also enable sharing of the data, and derived data, with other third parties for specific purposes to support delivery of the member’s public sector activity, for example, contractors, schools, ‘third sector’ charities, the public, for all your core, non-commercial, public sector activity.”

So maybe now the debate will move on from what is derived data to what is a “core activity”?

Still this all seems rather positive does it not, the proof of course will come in April next year when the PSMA comes into effect, and yes I’m sorry I know this is all rather confusing for my Australian readers as your PSMA is a whole different thing!

UPDATE : Paul from the OS Press Office has kindly responded on the OS blog, which I have now commented on, I have reproduced my comments below, but I suggest you follow the debate at the OS blog.

“Paul,

Thank you so much for responding publicly on this issue, so much of the discussion and relied on rumour and misinformed speculation, it is really very useful to have an official OS line on the matter.
I believe contrary to what you say derived data rights do remain core to the issue, however firstly I would like to clarify a few points you make.
Google does not claim any IP rights in data published either using the free or premier (paid for) maps API.
“Google claims no ownership over Your Content, and you retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Your Content.” Makes this point quite clear.
The terms of service also clearly state;
“This license is solely for the purpose of enabling Google to operate the Service, to promote the Service (including through public presentations), and to index and serve such content as search results through Google Services”
To state that “Google claiming the right to use any data you display in Google Maps in any way it sees fit, even if it doesn’t belong to them.” is rather misrepresenting the facts.
If as a data publisher you are unable to agree to this requirement you are able to prevent you map from being indexed or appearing in search results by opting out using the well known robots.txt protocol. This is clearly stated in the terms of service.
Such terms of service are not unique to Google, most services which host user generated content have similar terms, indeed again contrary to your blog post OS Openspace contains the following in section 5.5 of its terms of service..
“However, for the period during which You incorporate and/or display Your Data on a Web Application, You shall grant to Us a revocable, world-wide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive licence to use, display and distribute Your Data on Your behalf, solely for the purpose of allowing Us to deliver the OS OpenSpace service to You and End Users.”
There does not appear to be any alternative to offering OS this rights unlike the Google Maps API.
So no onto Derived data…
At last years AGI conference, nearly 12 Months ago, following my presentation highlighting the problem of derived data, the OS promised to clarify what it views derived data to be and what is not derived data. This is key because many public sector bodies would like to publish their content using Google Maps but have been told by OS sales staff that they cannot as it is derived data.
No such clarification has been made as far as I am aware.
So Paul, Can you answer the following questions..
Can a Local Authority use Google Maps to publish the location of their local libraries, schools or recycling centres ?
Can Defra using Google maps to publish the location of restricted areas to manage any potential future agricultural disease event such as foot and mouth
Can the Royal Household use Google Maps to publish the destination of future visits of the Royal Family, perhaps opening a shinning new office building in Southampton ?
Look forward to reading your comments ?

Written and submitted from the Boulder Marriott (40.016N, 105.260W)

Categories
Thoughts

A Boris Bike Widget

Unfortunately I’m a few thousand miles away from trying this app but I do have my access key!

Last week London finally got its bike hire scheme something that just cries out for a location aware real time application to help users.

So just in time Little Fluffy Toys have released their widget for Android phones that no only tells you where the closest hire point is, but also updates the number of bikes available in real time.

This is neat is so many ways, making use of location – tick, using a government data feed  – tick, crowdsourcing of location status – tick.

Can’t wait to try this out when I get home !

Written and submitted from the Boulder Marriott (40.016N, 105.260W)

Categories
GIS Thoughts

Flash is not dead yet, just ask these guys…

There has been much in the blogosphere, tech and even mainstream press written about the relative merits of Flash and it’s use compared to the up and coming shinny new standard of HTML 5. While nobody other than possibly Adobe denies that HTML will be core to much of the future web, today there are some very pragmatic reasons while flash is still widely used.

That said flash has never been very popular from a web mapping point of view, every since the original Google Maps back in 2005 web mapping has developed by exploiting the cutting edge features of html and javascript.

However from a rich user experience point of view there is much that flash still has to offer..

Last week I spent some time with the people behind findmaps.co.uk, a B2B operation in London who have developed a rich mapping/GIS  SaaS  (“software as a service”) application using flash. The service is a very slick interface to OS mapping in the UK, and offers basic GIS functionality without any of the GIS baggage found in other web based GIS tools.

So Findmaps sits somewhere between arcgisonline and Google/Bing maps, and clearly meets a real market requirement. In particular a key point of pain that is largely successfully hidden from professional users is the almost comically complex OS licensing that has been reduced to a running shopping basket total which is updated each time you view a map.

Yes you read that right for large scale OS data you do pay each time you view the map on screen !

In many ways findmaps may represent what GIS ultimately becomes, the complex GIS we know today will become even more focused on the needs of those relatively few organisations that create data, the professional users in real estate, Land and environmental management who currently use desktop GIS will migrate to SaaS applications like this and everyone else will use web mapping tools.

Written and submitted from the Boulder Marriott (40.016N, 105.260W)
Categories
Thoughts

Beyond Maps, my presentation from GI_Forum

By popular request here is the presentation I gave at last week’s GI-Forum in Salzburg. A great conference which I recommend if you are able to attend next year, 1000 GI people in one of Europe’s most attractive cities = success !

Not sure the slides will make much sense on their own, but please get in touch if you have any comments.

Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)

Categories
Thoughts

Call yourself a Geographer ?

If so, can you tell  me what’s wrong with this answer taken from a question asked in the House of Lords via the excellent theyworkforyou website…

UK: Coastline

House of Lords

Written answers and statements, 23 June 2010

Lord Laird (Crossbench)

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is the length of the United Kingdom coastline in miles at (a) low, and (b) high, tide; and what are the lengths of the coastlines of (a) England, (b) Northern Ireland, (c) Scotland, and (d) Wales.

Baroness Hanham (Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, Communities and Local Government; Conservative)

Information provided by Ordnance Survey for Great Britain and by Land and Property Services, an agency of the Department of Finance and Personnel for Northern Ireland, indicates that the lengths of the coastlines at mean high water (MHW) and mean low water (MLW), (mean high water springs [ordinary spring tides] and mean low water springs in Scotland) are:

Country Length of Coastline at Mean Low Water (MLW) [Miles] Length of Coastline at Mean High Water (MHW) [Miles]
England 8,417 9,462
Northern Ireland 620 542
Scotland 14,675 13,186
Wales 2,323 1,999
United Kingdom 26,035 25,189

These coastal lengths include all offshore islands, and land areas which are above MLW.

The precise length of coastlines will vary from time to time due to natural and gradual changes arising from coastal erosion and silt deposition.

Written and submitted from Warsaw Airport (52.177N, 20.974E)

Categories
Thoughts

iPhone 4 – Behold the master at work

I finally got the chance to watch the Apple WWDC keynote last night in my living room on the Apple TV, now that statement qualifies me as an Apple fanboy in itself.  I have seen many stevenotes over the year, even one in person at a Macworld in New York a few years ago, but his performance at this years WWDC was quite brilliant.

So for anyone who makes presentations what tips can we learn from the master.

1 ) Steve always begins his presentation by setting the context, framing the market for the new product announcement. This he does by quoting some very carefully chosen and very selective statistics..so for example iPhone has 28% US smartphone share, compared to windows at 19% ? and Android at 9%, the next slide however drops Windows and compares mobile browser usage with iPhone having  a massive 58.2% compared to Androids 22.7% – I wonder what happened to all those windows smartphone users ?

2) Steve is the master salesman his description of the iPhone 4 is a work of genius, “a quarter thinner for something you did not think could get any thinner”, the retina display so high resolution your eyes cannot see the pixels anymore – quite brilliant.

3) When things go wrong Steve keeps his cool because he knows his stuff, this keynote will be remembered as the one when the wifi broke. There has been much debate as to why, but the end result was that Steve’s demos did no work very well. Rather than panic Steve unlike many CEO’s was able to diagnose the issue on stage and explain it, and then later on make a joke of it asking people to switch off their own wifi devices so he could continue with the demo.

4) Make people believe something is new by selling it better, so Facetime offers the ability to carry out a 1 to 1 video conference using two iPhones 4’s on wifi, "we have been waiting a long time to make this happen", eh no.. I remember calling my wife over the vodafone 3G network using a pair of different Sony Ericsson phones five years ago. Video calling did not really take off, the technology and the public was not really ready for it.

To make the public ready it needs to be sold not on the basis of technology, which the early vodafone live very much was, but the emotional strength of human communication. Compare the vodafone PR shot here with a still from the Facetime video ..

A lonely businessman away from his baby, stuck in a hotel room –  now that’s a market..

There are two really significant technology advancements that are of note and that may not have got as much attention as facetime or the retina display..

Firstly the iPhone 4 is the first quad band iPhone supporting the 900Mhz HSDPA band used extensively in the UK but not previously supported on iPhones. Wonder why your iPhone 3G coverage was often worse than other smartphones ?

Secondly supplementing the digital compass the 3-axis gyro will allow devlopes o crate much better augmented reality applications, potentially solving many of the pose problems suffered by the current generation of smartphones. In the future who knows maybe some clever software will turn the iPhone into a simple Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) which could allow indoor navigation applications ?

So once again the great snakeoil salesman has got me and I will be taking delivery of an iPhone 4 of thursday as my home phone to sit alongside by Nexus One work phone.

Now which network….

Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)

Categories
Data Policy Google Maps

Live Tube Map

A great early example of the value of the new TfL train prediction API, a map of the ‘Real time” locations of Tube Trains.

Produced by MySociety ace Matthew Somerville a really neat demo and another example of the value of releasing government datasets, and in this case an example of an occasion where an API is more useful than the raw data.

Written and submitted from the Google Offices, London (51.495N, 0.146W)

Categories
Google Maps Thoughts

Mapnificent cartography

Mapnificent LondonI have for a while called out for some new cartographic approaches to communicating information which make use of the radically different capabilities of electronic displays compared to paper. To be fair I suppose the palette of tools available to the online cartography have been limited, and the state of the art was probably some of the renderings of OpenStreetMap data developed over the last year or so.

With the release at Google I/O this year of the V3 Maps API and styled maps functionality these tools are becoming more accessible, and one of the early results is a beautiful map produced by Stefan Wehrmeyer in Berlin. His Mapnificent London map uses the styled map API to show London by night, and then with full credit to the famous mapumental map, dynamically displays journey times if you used the extensive London night bus network.

The dynamic aspect makes this map really interesting by simply dragging a time slider bar you are presented with a great deal of information is a clear and simple way, something which would be difficult to achieve with traditional static cartographic techniques.

Hopefully the first of many new dynamic maps..

Written and submitted from the Google Offices, London (51.495N, 0.146W)

Categories
Thoughts

A televisual feast for Geo-developers

I’m writing this sitting in the back of the room, waiting to make a presentation during the annual Space Show in Toulouse, the closest Europe comes to having a city whose sole export is technology

Seems, like I have been running around almost constantly for the last month, but tomorrow I have made a little time for myself to brew a pot of coffee sit down and watch all of the Geo Developer presentations on youTube from last months Google I/O conference in San Francisco.

If like me you missed the event this is a great opportunity to catch up with things like the Latitude and Places API, developing mobile apps using the v3 Maps API and of course my favourite the new Styled Maps feature.

Kick back and join me before the football starts !

Written and submitted from the Pierre Baudis Convention Centre (43.611N, 1.434E)
Categories
Ordnance Survey Thoughts

Unlike LOST, the derived data saga continues

Not 300m from the site of one end of William Roy’s original baseline for the first Ordnance Survey of Great Britain, the modern Ordnance Survey yesterday held it’s annual business partner conference.

Well for me it was a strange experience, sitting in the audience at an Ordnance Survey partner event (although Google is not a partner) just a few months after it seems the world fell apart around the directors of the OS – talk about a LOST style flash sideways.

It became clear soon into Vanessa Lawrence’s presentation that the organisation is still recovering from these traumatic events, and that there is not a vision yet for the future of an OS that both produces commercial and free data sets.

OS Lost at Sea ?

There were 3 key aspects to the keynote;

  • The release of the free data was as many  suspected  forced upon the OS, and there is still some internal resistance to the whole idea at the top of the organisation.
  • The building of the new OS Head Office is going according to plan, although it always seems to rain when Vanessa is onsite !
  • The Queen will be opening the new building (Did I say the building was on time)

Key issues for the partner community in terms of complex pricing and licensing models remain, work on solving those has been delayed it appears as a result of all the “free data” nonsense, although a new more simple model is promised in the future.

The big issue of derived data also remains, although to his credit in the Q&A session, Peter ter Haar aimed to clarify things by reading out from his iPad a draft version of what OS view is derived data. This it is promised will also be released soon, but to paraphrase;

Derived data concerns the direct copying and manipulation of features which exist within an OS data product. If new data which does not appear within the OS data is captured with reference to OS data, then this data is inferred, not derived, so it’s OK !

Of course the free OS data has no “derived data” limitations..

I asked for the OS to communicate this on their website as some form of White paper, again we await this with interest.

Of interest clearly to OS partners in addition to pricing and licensing and the future role of OS Ltd, which was only briefly mentioned are products..

Here the OS seems to be making real progress the new VectorMap series is at last demonstrating the capability of the OS to produce products that are fit for purpose for electronic rather than paper mapping, John Carpenter delivered an excellent presentation on these new data products and the philosophy behind them, this truly was a breath of fresh air.

Clearly it has been a difficult year for the OS, the landscape has changed massively and continues to do so, Vanessa hinted that the new government spending cuts have already started to have a impact, perhaps as Thierry is suggesting a reduction in the subsidy promised to deliver free mapping?

More than ever the OS needs a new vision fit for such a radically changing environment, embracing the freemium model which has been imposed on them and establishing their role within a very different UK and global geospatial industry.

The new building deserves a new vision ?

Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)