Mobilizy, the Austrian developers of the first mainstream Augmented Reality (AR) application for the Android Platform have been experimenting over the summer and have developed Wikitude Drive a simple navigation system with as your would expect a AR interface.
As you can see from the youtube video it’s a interesting concept, and certainly something with great potential.
My guess is that the accuracy of the GPS and Digital Compass in the current generation of mobile devices is not quite there yet to make an interface that works well for this type of application, but this is a big step forward.
It’s great to see Mobilizy continuing to innovate in this way, and they deserve every success when the product in launched soon on Android and the iPhone!
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network
I have been quoted in a report from ZDNet Asia about the future for stand alone GPS devices. While I agree with the general point of the article in that stand alone GPS devices are not yet doomed, I think we are beginning to see just how useful location is when integrated with other information.
To use location as contextual information the device of choice is of course the smart-phone, which as well as knowing your location also has access personal information you may be storing on the device or via the its wireless the web.
Of course the web also provides access to to other sources of information.
OK, you may say nothing new here, but I would argue there has been a very important change in the last few months..
It is now trivial to build applications that use location as web apps completely by-passing any vendor or network control, and deliver really useful applications quickly. Importantly this is possible via a web standard so the application works in most modern mobile web browsers and is therefore cross-platform.
A great example of this type of development is the BBC OpenAir app, which provides you with a local weather forecast and the location of your nearest park or open space.
Note : Sorry for the poor blogging service recently, holidays and business travel I’m afraid : Normal service is now resumed.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network
I’m a happy user of a new app for the iPhone called RouteBuddy Atlas, a maps application for the iPhone which provides legal access to OS mapping (and note is obviously not to be confused with the native iPhone maps application, whose functionality it in no way replicates 🙂 )
I have long been a fan of the people behind Routebuddy which was about the only way to view Maps on a Ma while connected to a GPS, via a really nice “mac like” application. These guys are real Macheads !
It’s hard therefore to look at the iPhone application and not feel sorry for the Routebuddy development team , because they really have had to work hard to deliver an useful application despite some big limitations imposed by others.
So here is the problem, once a user has downloaded the application how do you let then load mapping content for offline use?
Unlike applications built using OpenStreetMap (which is supported btw as streamed mapping) the application cannot simply stream data and cache, as each map sheet must be transferred individually because that the way it is licensed.
So Routebuddy have come up with a crazy solution of building a webdav server into the app, which you can connect to from you main computer and transfer the file across via wifi. I’m not sure how many of the usual Millets crowd will cope with “establish a webdav connection to http://192.168.144.174:8080”
So I purchased by local 1:25,00 Explorer Map London South which looks fantastic on the iPhone screen, really good, no I mean it – looks amazing, But I had to pay £19.99 for a license to use it. Compare that with the £7.99 I would pay for the paper version which I would own outright !
And I would not have to go through the nightmare of the DRM screen where I need to enter my name and my allocated license key, imagine entering that without copy and paste !
Of course the big problem is the cost..
Quite how anyone can justify charging more for the digital version of a printed product is beyond me. And for any lottery winners out there, I’ve done the maths for you national coverage would cost just over £8000 !
Now I’m not sure how much the Routebuddy guys have to pay in terms of royalty to the OS and of course there is their profit margin but this is just way too expensive, and I don’t remember a time where download albums on iTunes where nearly three times as expensive as the equivalent CD’s
Also why should I have to download the whole map, I’d be happy to pay 99p for a few square km’s on Wimbledon common, or along the Thames walk.. much of this map I many never use..
The parallels between digital mapping online and the music industry have long been drawn by myself (5 years ago !!) amongst others , no more clear example has yet emerged of mapping providers following the same suicidal route taken by the music industry.
Written and submitted from Mother Mash, City of London using The Cloud wifi network
Phil Willis MP, has tabled an Early Data Motion in Parliament calling for the UK Government to support the Museum at Bletchley Park, home of WWII codebreakers and the birthplace of computing. The motion reads ;
Bletchley Park
“That this House recognises the signficance of Bletchley Park, historic site of secret British code-breaking activities during the Second World War and birthplace of the modern computer; acknowledges that the use of the intelligence gained at Bletchley Park and subsequent related actions of the Allies is said to have shortened the Second World War by two years, saving countless lives; and calls on the Government to provide operational funding whilst the museum is developed for long-term sustainability, securing the site for future generations to visit, appreciate and understand.”
If you live in the UK please use the excellent Write to Them website, to send a message to your MP and ask them to support this motion. Having visited the Museum last week, support is critically needed I hate to think what the electricity bill for Colossus is !
Written and submitted from the Google Office, London
In Amsterdam I had a few chats with people talking about how OSM contributions might find their way into commercial products and if we would see different distributions of OSM, or even a forking of the project as different organisations have varying perspectives as to what they see as important.
Without question the current licensing of OSM does as Stefan points out restrict is commercial use. In my personal opinion there will need to be a less viral license established at some point for many commercial organisations to use OSM data.
Over time we will see other commercial distributions or OSM data and other services set up that compete with Cloudmade which will be another positive step in moving open geodata forward.
This will be because they will no doubt have a different perspective and may suggest changes to the project and licesning of it’s data that will take the OpenStreetMap project in different directions.
This may well be a painful process, just look at the history of other large open source projects, but it may be a necessay step for OSM to as SteveC quoting Geoffrey Moore says “Cross the Chasm” into mainstream adoption.
Written and submitted from the Google Office, London
The Colossus Computer at The TNMOC (click to enlarge)
Today I was able to make a quick visit to the National Computer Museum at Bletchley Park, an absolute must for any geek in the UK. To see Colossus running, to hear it and smell the worlds first programmable computer running is an amazing experience.
There is a great story behind the reconstruction of this machine, which is told at the brilliant Tony Sale’s website.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network
At last weekends State of the Map (SOTM) conference is was clear the the OpenStreetMap project is growing up and trying to position itself at a real alternative to commercial geodata suppliers and not just a fun project for people who love maps and making them.
Perhaps it is the experience of Cloudmade or the numerous iPhone application developers using OpenStreetMap that has brought the necessary focus on the boring stuff of data quality, consistency and currency.
To actually use OpenStreetMap in many applications there needs to be improved data attributes, as Steve Coast himself noted even where there is near complete coverage of streets, such as in London for example, many of the streets are not attributed with street names. Given a focus on fixing this particular aspect, such problems are relative easy to solve, but the key point is that the project leadership now recognises that a guiding hand is needed to help the community complete the task.
In terms of spatial accuracy Muki Haklay has made a specialism of accessing OSM data quality and his latest results presented at SOTM suggest that using the UK as an example, OSM data is better than the equivalent business geographics product produced by the OS, and in some cases comparable to OS MasterMap ITN data, a product that costs over £100,000 per year to license .
Alongside the increased awareness of the importance of data quality, the other clear indication that OpenStreetMap is getting more business like was the dedicated business track day, and the long needed work to produce a new “fit for purpose” license for OpenStreetMap data in the form of the new ODbL.
Some may not like aspects of the new license (myself included) but the awareness of the problem and the willingness to address it shows that the project has reached a real level of maturity. The licensing of community sourced geodata is still novelty, we now have the mirror of a GPL like license for geodata, others licenses I’m sure will follow.
If there are still people out there than believe that community generated geodata is just a joke, its time to wake up!
OpenStreetMap, Google’s MapMaker and Tele Atlas with is Map Share programme in different ways all demonstrate that spatial data capture from the bottom up is a valid alternative to traditional mapping agencies / data providers and is in many parts of the world the only practical solution.
Congratulations to the local organising team for putting together another great conference !
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network
Great to see a little bit of humour applied the the serious stuff of freeing up Government Data. ernestmarples.com, is a project which is making available via an API the Post Office Address (PAF) file. I wonder how the Post Office will respond to this piece of civic minded provocation.
There is no doubt that the postcode is off massive value for building local websites and all things Geo in the UK, as it is key to geocoding many other datasets.
In parallel to the more public debate about OS mapping data, you could argue that making the postcode freely available would have a much greater impact as it’s potential use is more widespread than mapping.
The problem is the Post Office recognise its value and change extortionate fess for people to use it, especially online.
Lets hope this site does not go the way of it’s namesake, the real Ernest Marples escaped to Monaco pursued by the Inland Revenue and Scotland Yard !
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.
Great to see a little bit of humour applied the the serious stuff of freeing up Government Data. 
