Excellent news from the Free our Data campaign blog, David Rhind well respected in the UK GI industry, and ex-DG of the Ordnance Survey is to be the new Chair of the Advisory Panel on Public Sector Information. His insider knowledge will be very valuable in moving the debate of making public sector information more accessible forward.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
Emerging Mass Market Geo Standards
Andrews Turners excellent presentation to last weeks OGC Technical Committee meeting. Ask yourself, how many of these technologies you knew / could explain, many of these will be important to the GI industry over the next few years.
Sokwanele
With the continued concern over the election held last weekend, the Sokwanle site which has been mapping the election conditions in Zimbabwe, is an important example of our the new tools of the geoweb have allowed new communities of users to map what is important to them. The politicisation of mapping is not new and maps have been used to make political points for as long as there have been maps, but now the process is open to all, not just governments.
Preserved Ukrainian military aircraft at Poltava AB
Aviation geek image, from one of my very favourite Google Earth related site, IMINT & Analysis, informed image interpretation from Sean O’Connor. In this case I just love these cold-war era bombers, once so secret now museum pieces.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
There was only every going to be one winner !
Very entertaining online debate featuring Fake Steve Jobs
Wifi no more..
Interesting article on silicon.com, I must admit I don’t spend as much time wifi hunting as I used to before getting my 3 dongle.
Dual Maps from Map Channels
Very neat multiple API site allows you to combine data from Google Maps (including streetview) and Microsoft Virtual Earth
Nuvi Phone in Action
Video of the new Nuvi phone in use, can’t help but think the design is rather 1980’s compared to the iPhone
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
I’ve spent much of this week along with some of the other guys from Google at the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Technical Committee meeting in St. Louis. KML is hopefully just a few weeks away from becoming an adopted standard, and the OGC as an community I’m pleased to say, is increasingly taking interest in geospatial technologies developed outside of its traditional membership.
So amongst the continued detailed work on the W*S standards we know so well, there was much debate about the potential of RESTful interfaces and the use of lightweight technologies such as GeoJSON and AtomPub as realistic alternatives to creating transactional web services beyond mash-ups.
It becomes really interesting when the new and existing are combined, one of the slickest demos I saw was using an extension to the existing SLD standard to control the server side creation of KML data from a component WMS service, populating attribute data into KML Extended data tags.
There is also growing recognition that as a reflection of the new technologies, new approaches to creating standards may also be needed, after-all the pace at which technologies are introduced and adopted by the mass-market is much faster than the traditional standards process can keep pace with.
Perhaps a new approach is needed where standards are defined at the same time as new applications and functionality developed, so that the standards process is driven by individuals and organisations implementing new functionality which is standardised once demonstrated to be both stable and useful !
This new approach which focuses more on the user need, was nicely summarised in a presentation from NASA with a picture of a cheese stall, “I’d like some cheese.. bit I rather not know how it’s made”.
Googles release of the libkml open source library should be seen in this context, as it allows developers to quickly get started in creating well formed KML files, and to experiment quickly by actually writing code. Want to write a FDO provider to read and write KML, then libkml is a great starting point, likewise if you want to write a new iPhoto geo-tagging plug-in, libkml deals with most of the basic requirements you would need. In both cases any extensions or changes that might be needed to KML can be tested and proven in a practial sense before becoming standardised.
I have been to perhaps half a dozen Technical Committee meetings over the last few years, and I leave St. Louis feeling more optimistic than even before that the OGC can remain the positive influence on the industry it has been up to now, change is needed but that’s recognised.
Written and submitted from the Westin Hotel, St. Louis, using its broadband network
Kings College London Geodata Portal
One of the most comprehensive collections of environmental data rendered using Google Earth.
Explanation of Tech, using paper
Have you seen the great video explaining how My Location works on youTube, it was produced by Seattle based Common Craft who have published a series of similar videos on their site, doing a great job explaining things like RSS.
A useful proposed extension to GeoRSS
Andrew Turner suggests multiple geometry’s as the next logical step for GeoRSS, I completely see the sense in this although the encoding of geometry still feels a little uncertain, is anybody using GML ?
Cloudmade gains series A funding of €2.4 million
Congratulations to Steve and Nick, is Cloudmade the Redhat of Opengeodata ? Well many see the potential, and the beer should be free down Putney way for the next couple of days.
Written and Submitted from the Google Office, London.
It has taken me a while to get round to commenting on the Trading Funds Report as I have been travelling, and it’s 150 pages long !!
It is a very important document in many ways, for the first time there is a well researched analysis from economists on the impact of different funding models for trading funds on the wider economy. This is something the GI industry and even some in the OS have been crying out for, for many years.
The conclusions are clear ,even through the internal pricing mechanisms within trading funds are very complex, the UK economy would be better off if the OS was to make is key data products (Landline and Mastermap) available at marginal (zero) cost.
The logic of this argument is actually simple if you think about it, on one hand the ludicrous merry-go-round of government departments paying another government department to license data would disappear, reducing costs and increasing the use of geographic information within government, particularly those departments who can’t currently afford it.
On the other hand the still relatively small GI Industry in the UK would flourish, being able to produce value added products based on the unrefined OS data, much as has happened in the US. And remember the companies that form the UK GI industry pay corporation tax unlike the OS.
So the Free our Data campaign is vindicated, we can just sit back and wait for our MasterMap DVD’s in the post… unfortunately no.
The reports authors calculate that the welfare (value of the benefits to the UK economy) would be around £168m for which there would need to be a subsidy paid to the OS of something between £12m and £85m! Not a bad return you might think, even the higher figure, but even if we take the lower amount, who is going to pay the £12m ?
This is a £12m subsidy not paid by any government department today, and it is much more than any one government department pays to license OS data today…
And even if you can find that £12m from within government, you then place the OS in the position where it’s continued operation and the quality of its data is reliant on a subsidy from government, a disastrous position which could result in a USGS like reduction in funding if political priorities change.
Now we have a much better handle of the economics of funding the OS why not look at different ways of funding its operation which still allow increased access to the data.
Fro example, rather than licensing data to create revenue, why not fund the activities through as registration process. It just so happens that the biggest user of OS large scale data is the Land Registry, for producing your title plans, it would be simple to add a fee to each property transaction to fund the OS…
I hope the publication of this long awaited report moves the debate into the circles who can actually make some decisions, for the sake of the UK GI Industry somebody needs to make a decision on this issue once and for all.
Written and submitted from the Crowne Plaza Hotel, Sydney, using its broadband network
POSIPIX – Geo-referenced Stock Photos
With the geo-tagging of photos trend really taking off, a neat service for those looking for stock photos organised by place.. limited to a few cities but a cool idea. Thanks to Sanjay for the link
10 must have aps for your Symbian Phone
Nice to see Google well represented, in a list which represents what the future might hold for Android and iPhone 2.0
State of the Map 2008
The 2nd conference for all things to do with Open Geodata and the OpenStreetMap project will be in Limerick, Ireland this year, the and conference call for papers is now live. The conference last year was excellent, and I’m sure this years will live up to the the high standard. Who knows you might also bump into Fake Ed Parsons…
Jason’s 15 minutes of Fame
Well deserved… if you work in GIS in Local or Municipal Government, some motivation to keep up the good work.
Written and submitted from the Millennium Hotel, Singapore, using its broadband network.
The Geospatial Special Interest Group is hosting a talk on the Guardian Free our Data campaign next month, by Michael Cross.
Should be an interesting meeting, the campaign has done a great job in highlighting the issue of accessibility to geospatial information in the UK in particular, but political progress has been slow, and it is still a struggle to obtain government held information.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
Much like the Google Android platform, yesterdays annoucement from Apple includes news of a Location API as part of the iPhone OS which will allow third parties to develop location based applications, and most importantly enable any iphone application to make use of location.
Seen alongside Android there is now a critical mass of developers building moble applications which use location, and hopefully we will see the same level of innovation we have seen from the web in general.
For the geospatial industry this is fantastic news !
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
Digital Geography Presentations
Slides from the excellent CASA,UCL and NCeSS Day last month.
Call for more mobile masts
Some sense in the Mobile Phone debate from someone who should know..
Lost in Spatial
A new Geospatial blog from my old friend Martin Daly, CTO of Cadcorp – Danger Will Robinson, Danger!!
TripTouch
A nice mash-up based travel planning site, cool in that it really uses the web 2.0 world bringing together Google Maps, The Weather Channel for local context, Kayak for booking and Eventful for local events in a nice simple interface.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.