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Thoughts on Being Location Aware

Post author By Ed Parsons
Post date March 20, 2009
4 Comments on Thoughts on Being Location Aware

I really enjoyed attending last nights mashup* – Being-Location-Aware Event in London’s Docklands, after a busy day with the Street View launch in the UK, it was great to have a few drinks amongst a crowd of geeks 🙂

Privacy was again a major topic of debate, even if the rather self-selecting audience felt is was less of an issue that the media tends to report it. I think we just have to accept that there are valid concerns in particular about an individuals location and we have to be even more transparent about why and how such information is used, and as Gary of Yahoo pointed out make the use of location always an explicit opt-in.

Over time users will develop a better understanding of what sharing their location means in terms of benefits of location aware services against potential privacy costs and will be in the position to make an informed choice.

Of course the most pertinent question remains “Where is the money ?”, almost all agreed that location in itself has little value and has become part of the commodity of web mapping. The real value at the moment I suggest comes from the potential to improve the quality of local services and advertising when location is used as one of the signals to describe a users context, and maybe even their intent.

In saying that there are specialised high value applications where users are willing to pay, Traffic TV was mentioned by Jonathan Raper (from now on always @Madprof) and Kidspotter impressed.

Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.

StateoftheMap 2009 Call for Papers

Post author By Ed Parsons
Post date March 16, 2009

The call for papers for always one of the most interesting conference has just been announced. StateoftheMap 2009 is the conference to discuss all thinks to do with the ground breaking Open Street Map Project, and this year will be held in Amsterdam in July

This is much more than a gathering of people who like to ride bikes with GPS tapped to their handlebars however, the conference is a excellent forum for discussions of new types of cartography, data access policy and legal issues around open source data.

Indeed this year I’m sure one of the hottest topics will be licensing of data, not something which appears to everybody, but its an indication that the project has reached a level of maturity that it needs to be addressed.

Written and submitted from the 11:45 London-Cardiff Train, near Bristol.

Data Policy Google Maps Transport

Transport for London boards the mash-up bandwagon

Post author By Ed Parsons
Post date March 12, 2009
6 Comments on Transport for London boards the mash-up bandwagon

tflkml

As introduced by Christopher Osborne @osbornec on Twitter this morning (where else do you get news these days ?), Transport for London (TfL) the government organisation responsible for most transport in London have begun providing access to limited amounts of their transit data, via a simple web feed interface.

TfL must be congratulated for this step, and by doing so using simple XML feeds including using KML for station locations. Contrast this with the route often taken to build complex (and expensive) web portals and online ordering systems for data.

Of course the missing piece which would be of great value to many developers, Google included, would be the schedule information for the Buses, Tubes and Trams that TfL runs. This information is widely available in the US and in some other European cities and is behind the transit feature of Google Maps.

Still a great step forward, and an example for others to follow !

Written and submitted from the Google Office, Dublin.

Thoughts

Summer of Code 2009

Google have announced the 2009 Summer of Code programme. If you are an organisation which would like to get student help in moving forward your Open Source project now it the time to get involved. Last year 1000 students took part ,working on projects from 175 organisations, including OSGeo and OpenStreetMap.

Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.

AGI

OK if the AGI can change…

Last year I pretty much gave up on the AGI conference as it did not seem to be representative of the Geographic Industry I could see around me. However over the past few months my attitude has begun to change, finally I pushed into completely reversing my opinion my this communication..

agitweet

Yes,this is a Twitter message from AGI conference organisers announcing a stream at the conference addressing the issues and potential of the Geoweb, mobile applications, mash ups etc.

Its great to see the AGI making use of Twitter, as it is a mechanism to communicate with a whole new generation of GI developers and users.

This is a great opportunity for both communities to learn from each other, and I hope is a reflection of the AGI actually moving to represent the wider community of Geographic Information users, rather than just a fan club for it’s largest corporate sponsor.

See you in Birmingham !!

LBS Mobile

mashup* – Being Location Aware Event

Post author By Ed Parsons
Post date March 6, 2009

mashupredlong

I am going to be speaking at the mashup* – Being-Location-Aware Event in London on the 19th March, an event which I hope will really capture the current excitement around using location in both mobile and desktop applications.

After many false starts, your location is finally easily available to application developers allowing them to create a range of applications which use where you are, as a key element of context providing more relevant information and services to the user.

There are of course still many areas to be explored, around business models, technology platforms and privacy, and this event I’m sure will provide a great forum to continue the debate.

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

Data Policy Google Earth

History in Google Earth – Did you miss it ?

Post author By Ed Parsons
Post date March 4, 2009
1 Comment on History in Google Earth – Did you miss it ?

With last months launch of Google Earth 5.0 much “mainstream” interest was focused on the capability to view under the ocean, and of course to begin the search for the lost city of Atlantis 🙂

For many however, myself included, the most important new capability is the ability to view historic images from the Google archive of satellite and aerial imagery.

Early days of course, but the potential to view history in this way has massive potential as illustrated by this image of Wembley Stadium in London. As you can imagine the back office system needed to deliver this are substantial, but the limiting factor remains access to imagery from around the world.

As to be expected by now the greatest availability is in the United States where the enlightened federal data policy means that it is possible to view Mountain View Ca. from the late 1940s — fantastic for viewing the development of the city from farmland to Silicon Valley.

Similar imagery of course was acquired at the same time in Europe, if would be wonderful to see it also made available..

Written and submitted from the Fira Exhibition Centre, Barcelona, using its public wifi network

INSPIRE SDI

AfricaMap – GSDI 2.0 ?

As highlighted by Keir on the excellent Google Maps Mania last week, AfricaMap is an interesting attempt to build a repository of geospatial data about Africa, developed by the Center for Geographic analysis at Harvard University.

What is interesting about this site, is both the scope of the project and the approach taken.

From decades many individuals, groups and organisations have been trying to develop Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) at a regional or global level (GSDI), with it must be said very limited success so far.

Unlike many previous attempts at developing a portal to a regional SDI, Africamap tries to hide as much complexity as possible from the user just presenting a map display and a search tool – Great start after-all I would argue that more than anything else a SDI is really just an example of a vertical search application.

But no.. You have been mislead dear user, just searching for something like “Sudan Population” or Nile Delta won’t give you any results – you need to select which maps layers (data-sets) you need to search first. This is not unusual in SDI implementations, but it would be like having to tell a generic web search tool, which websites the information you are looking for can be would.

This approach is, I believe, the result of a culture of system design that is dominated by data providers, not users. The user interface here has been influenced I’m sure by the creation of the metadata that SDI convention states is always the first step in building an SDI.

It’s not that the data is not available, it’s just that the approach taken so far by the SDI community makes its inaccessible to almost anyone other than the original data provider or someone who has the time to work out which map layers should be searched.

So some may argue, this and similar sites are designed for specialised users, who have intimate knowledge of this type of data and how it is structured, even so there is no reason to make access to this more difficult than it needs to be..

OK rant over, from a technology and tools point of view Africmap demonstrates what is possible now with a freely available web tools and open standards based geospatial services, and without doubt the team at Harvard should be congratulated for doing the hard back office work to provide access to all this important information from one place.

This is not yet GSDI 2.0 then, but GSDI 1.5 and a pointer to the direction which ultimately may finally deliver on the GSDI vision.

To understand more about the efforts to create a GSDI, visit the GSDI conference this year in collaboration with the EC’s third INSPIRE conference in Rotterdam in June.

Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.

opensource Thoughts

UK government starts to get open source

Post author By Ed Parsons
Post date February 25, 2009
2 Comments on UK government starts to get open source

As the Guardian Technology blog notes the UK government is once again trying to push Government Departments into looking at Open Source software solutions at least as an alternative to the proprietary software we all know and love.

This is not the big stick approach which has been used in some other countries, here the policy is from a procurement perspective to just make sure open source solutions are see viewed on an equal footing, taking into account the total cost of ownership of new systems recognising the many years of support and maintenance that will follow the initial purchase.

osgov This I hope will not just be seen as the simplistic religious debate between Windows v Linux, Microsoft Office v Open Office, or MySQL v Oracle, because actually it is not in terms of packaged software where the real benefits can be found.

The real big costs in Government IT projects go into the bespoke software development customising or building additional functionality around off the shelf software like Oracle or SAP, or from the GI perspective ArcGIS.

This is where this is massive potential, for much of the code developed solves very similar problems for different departments and agencies across government. As things currently stand none of this code is reused and each department pays for similar code to be developed for them, often I’m afraid to say by the same vendors.

So for example in the GI world, the data management systems developed to build and maintain the maps for Ordnance Survey is not so different from that needed by the UK Hydrographic Survey, or at a larger scale the tools used by the Land Registry to maintain your title deed plans are not so different to what is needed to build and maintain OS Mastermap.

If the code developed to meet these needs was made open source, the initial code base could be used and maintained by all government agencies each benefiting from potential improvements developed by the others, and the tax payer never have to fund more reinvention.

There is once small hitch with this, companies like Google are very open about their use and support of open source software tools, which form the backbone of their back office systems, and which can be maintained and extended internally by skilled engineers.

Over the last 10 years most of the IT expertise has left government departments, meaning that very few actual software engineers or developers are left within government.. They have all been outsourced. This means that the potential benefit is reduced internal maintenance of code and its development cannot occur within house, another reason perhaps government should think about re-skilling in IT ?

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

Google Maps

www.royal.gov.uk – one is impressed

Post author By Ed Parsons
Post date February 12, 2009
9 Comments on www.royal.gov.uk – one is impressed

OK, firstly I’m not a great royalist I must admit, but I am quite impressed by the new Royal Family website. As government websites go this is fairly impressive and well designed with great use of media, social network linking, FAQ’s etc.

royaldotgov

Of course for me the most innovative part of the site is the Royal Diary Map, a simple tool well executed, which allows interested members of the public to find out where members of the Royal Family will be in the next two weeks.

What’s good enough for the Royal Family should be good enough for other parts of UK government don’t you think ?

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