Last week I attended the Google Zeitgeist event, a kind of mini-TED the highlights of which are in the video. I’m the one with 8 screens of Google Earth goodness, and after a ride I’m saving up for the Tesla !
As a Geographer and map geek one of the hardest lessons I have learnt, and what many in the web mapping field still need to learn is…
Eds law of mashups..
“The map is important, but not as important as the data you are publishing on top of it”
Yes the expensively created, well drafted work of art you have struggled to produce following years of effort, is actually just providing a background or context to the location of pizza restaurants or free car parking places.
You might not like that, but is true !
A number of web mapping companies have over the last few years experimented with a few different colour pallet tile sets, but last week rather buried by the other Google I/O announcements, the latest enhancements to the v3 Google Maps API was announced in the form of “Styled Maps“.
Rather than just present a few fixed tile sets, styled maps allow you to dynamically create a map based on a custom colour palette so there is a huge range of possible map styles available to you.
Styled maps may be used to;
So this is not a full computer cartography tool yet, but these enhancements we meet the needs of many map developers to make their maps unique.
Those in the know will realise this represents a whole new way of rendering maps online, the definition of a “map style” is stored as JSON matching map feature types to styles defined by hue, lightness, saturation, gamma, inverse_lightness and visibility.
To make life a little easier there is a rather neat web tool to define your styles.
Remember one day, no two Google maps will be the same…
Written and submitted from the Google Offices, London (51.495N, 0.146W)
A week ago today I stood nearly ten miles away from the launch of Space Shuttle Atlantis, on its way to the International Space Station. Despite the distance I “felt” the launch in a number of ways. Unless you have experienced a launch it’s hard to describe the physical impact of such power, shaking the ground, vibrating every molecule around you, imagine a continuous clap of thunder lasting for more than a minute is the closest way I can attempt to describe it.
But the launch also effected be emotionally, I felt the same way watching the last three Concordes landing back at Heathrow together when they were retired from service.
As a child growing up in the seventies I expected my adult life to involve jumping on and off supersonic aircraft, perhaps flying to a spaceport somewhere to fly into orbit, instead I got the 8:20 South West Trains Service to Waterloo.
Perhaps it was always science fiction, but as a boy growing up watching Thunderbirds and Tomorrows World, if you had told me that society would develop and then lose supersonic transport and that by 2011 NASA would no longer be able to put Americans into low earth orbit I would not have believed you.
My hypothesis to this rather sad state of affairs for a geek, is that we allowed ourselves to over engineer solutions producing an era of machines that are so complex that economically they are unsustainable.
For example to launch Atlantis required tens of thousands of people to work at facilities all across the United States for four months to service the shuttle following it’s previous mission. This means that each shuttle missions in pure operational expenses costs hundreds of millions of dollars. Concorde was also a “hanger queen” requiring far more maintenance than conventional airliners.
Both Concorde and the Shuttle will not be directly replaced, instead in many ways less capable and simpler systems have and will take their place.
In the field of geospatial technology will we see the same trend ? Complex highly engineered solutions replaced by less capable and simpler systems, there is some evidence to suggest that trend, on the other hand Arc/Info in it’s various forms is only a year younger than the space shuttle programme and looks like it will outlive it with ease…
Is Google to ESRI as Scaled Composites and SpaceX are to NASA? I’m not sure but the old guys can always learn new tricks, while for the new guys there is wisdom to appreciate.
Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)
Last week I presented at the “Location Business” summit in Amsterdam, and it was interesting to reflect on just how far the LBS market has developed over the years.
One of the points I made was that we are on familiar ground, it seems every year since about 2001 has been the “year of location”, so I posed the question – this year “are we there yet?”.
Well clearly a lot has changed in the last ten years, devices are now very powerful, despite what they may think the mobile networks operators are no longer major players (bottlenecks) in the value chain, and with hybrid location technology from the likes of Google and Skyhook location determination is straightforward and ubiquitous .
More than anything else this last point and the fact that location is exposed through simple operating system level functions or via modern browsers means that it is trivial to add location to any application almost for free. This has fuelled the massive interest in bringing location into social applications, from Facebook to Twitter, foursquare to yelp, people are at last central to location based services.
I tried to make the point that actually places only really exist as a reflection of society..
Place = Location (points of interest) + People
As Gary Gale pointed out in another one of his seminal presentations there is still a “lot of stuff” we need to better understand about managing places.
Surprisingly there was little focus on the years “hot topic” of Augmented Reality, other than an inspirational presentation from Claire of Local AR stars Layar.
Overall a very enjoyable conference, in many ways not so different to ten years ago but now with a few clear areas of areas of agreement.
Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)
Jeff Jarvis author of “What Would Google Do” and co-presenter of the This Week in Google podcast, has a great blog post today on his Buzz Machine blog, on the German perspective on privacy.
Without doubt,within Europe, Germany seems to have the greatest concerns with regards to privacy and so far much of the debate has focused on “what you potentially lose” by making information about you or your street public. Jeff counters this with the opposite opposite argument “what you gain” from making knowledge public.
This will remain one of most important web memes of the next few years as it goes to the heart of what has made the web so influential to our lives so far, but also how that may change in the future.
This is nothing less than a battle for the soul of the web.
The open web based on the concept of open access to information, ideas and knowledge is not guaranteed by any means, and we may need to do more than just watch the traditional holders of power in society start to shut down the elements of the internet they feel threatened by.
The appalling Digital Economy Bill passed in the UK is just the one element of this, the move to accesses information through applications and portals only threatens a return to the world of walled gardens we thought we had moved beyond with the closure of AOL and CompuServe, is another.
The danger of regressing to a world where access to information is again controlled by a powerful few is increasingly real !
Great to see Stanfords one of the great tradtional homes of cartography embracing the web as a channel and making the most of the recent changes at Ordnance Survey. Like many of you this Adwords campaign may be appearing alongside your gmail, or web search results.
Not all OS Maps now free – brilliant.
To better understand how to use similar Google tools and to make sure your website is well placed in organic search results, check out fellow Googler Matt Cutts blog.
Courtesy of last weeks drop of Ordanace Survey Open Data, the Westminster electoral boundaries in Google Earth.
It’s amazing to think that such a key dataset was not easily accessible until so recently. Without doubt this is just the type of data set that the “free our data” movement was calling to be made freely available.
The type of innovation that comes from the increased accessibility of information is well demonstrated by the code point web service developed by Stuart Harrison over the weekend at http://www.uk-postcodes.com/ and documented on the uk-government-data-developers mailing list.
What a difference a week makes !!
I have had a couple of questions about how the free OS data is licensed, here is the license which as you can see is basically a creative commons attribution license.
This confirms there are no derived data issues.
In fact this license makes OS Opendata more “open” than Openstreetmap.
Written and submitted from the Where 2.0 Conference (37.331N, 121.888W)
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Not a normal day in this office then…
A very important day in the history of Ordnance Survey, from later on today it really will be possible to download free OS geodata from www.data.gov.uk, and www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/opendata. This is close to the “Goldilocks” option presented in the recent consultation and contains “mid scales” datasets which are detailed here in the official government response to the consultation.
Importantly this data is usable without restriction and therefore removes the issue of derived data.
Large scale data remains fully commercial and licensed conventionally, although we are promised a solution to the derived data problem for this data in the near future.
This is a massive step forward for the use of geospatial information in the UK, and although as a compromise it will leave some people disappointed, it will meet the needs of many people who have not had access to OS mapping before.
This has been a traumatic experience for Ordnance Survey, and I can only imagine the internal crisis this decision must have caused, but as it is often said, a crisis is the opportunity to push through the necessary changes that were too difficult during stable times.
Just in case you missed it, the 3D streetview is an April Fools Joke !
I have really enjoyed listening to the BBC Radio 4 series “On the Map” a series on mapping presented by Mike Parker a self-confessed OS Map fan, and author of Map Addict
Now Mike is very much a OS paper maps man, so in today’s programme I attempt to defend digital mapping against the acquisition that digital mapping and satnavs are destroying map-making and map-reading.
And on such a momentous day in the history of the Ordnance Survey data.