Well somebody gets it !! Sometimes just surfing for some unrelated information brings up a really interesting nugget of information like this.
Clearly the guys in MV get it.. it’s all about context !!
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
As many of you know Chris Lightfoot, a prolific developer and “mash-up” artist behind some of the most exciting citizen focused website died last month. This mornings Times has his Obituary and I can’t think of a better tribute to Chris.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
A very good article by Jo Best at silicon.com, on how the balance of power is shifting between network operators and mobile phone manufactures following the announcement of the iPhone. 
A small shift perhaps and we could be replacing one walled garden with another ? I amongst others are hopeful that we seen some momentum behind the OpenMoko Open Source phone project, which is coming soon !!
Written and submitted from the garden at home ( 16°C !!) , using my home 802.11 network.
Do you bank with first direct online? First Direct one of the first phone and online banks in the UK, last week upgraded the security on their internet banking site – and made a complete mess of the job. So currently I and many others are locked out of our accounts, and even worse.. my beloved safari browser is no longer supported.
Time to back out of the changes perhaps First Direct ?
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
The next evening meeting of the BCS Geospatial SG meeting is on the Digital National Framework.
The meeting on Tuesday 27th March feature presentations from Keith Murray and Les Rackham who are “THE” experts on the Digital National Framework, a potential foundation to a future UK SDI. Key to the Success of DNF will be widespread adoption of its framework geography approach.. so awareness building event like this are key..
See you there.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
Life is really busy at the moment, but I am finally in a position to put down a few thoughts about this weeks Geoware in Arhus.
I was very impressed by the organisation and quality of speakers, credit is due to Anders, Peter and the rest of the team at the innovation lab for putting the event together.
Nicholas Nova who gave a very interesting talk on mobile gaming gives a good review of the event on his blog. This is the closet I have seen to the “must visit” Where 2.0 in Europe.
To me one of the most interesting debates was around business models for these new mobile services, and the fact that for the most part quite traditional business models based on advertising or commission payments underlie these new services.
Nokia for example who demonstrated the N95 smartphone ( Forget the iPhone, this is the phone for geo-geeks) which ships with a free mapping and navigation package for Europe, with POI data sponsored by Restaurants, Hotels, Car hire companies etc. Nokia receive a commission from any transaction, such as booking a hotel which comes from their mobile service – a business model as old as publishing !
I wonder if we will see a similar event in the UK , and if so who would organise it? I know from trying to run the innovation process at the OS how difficult a task it is to get UK companies to think along these lines… and of course the other obvious challenges to GI based startups regarding availability of data are well known.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
Lunar Eclipse from Teddington
Originally uploaded by ed_parsons.
Nothing to do with GI, Maps or Web 2.0 – But the lunar Eclipse this evening caused much interest in the Parsons household – It’s amazing what you can do with a Digital Camera, Macbook and wifi connection.
SIr Patrick would be proud !!
Written and submitted from the garden, using my new “longer range” home 802.11n network.
It’s been a couple of weeks now since Google announced that its main search engine is now able to search and parse KML files, the native file format for Google Earth. This was widely reported in the blogosphere but with little comment, I’m not sure most mainstream GIS users are even aware of the news..
They should be !!
It might not seem a big deal, after-all KML is a “Google” format, and you would expect it to be searchable in the same way that a pdf document is for example. But.. and its a big but, the Google search engine is parsing and understanding the geographical data within the KML and returning relevant results geographically in additional to all the every clever page rank stuff.
So if I chose to publish the KML file of my evening walk around Teddington on my web-site.., The Google spiders would find it and parse the content noting from the description tags that it is about teddington, but would also get the extents of the GPS track from the linestring co-ordinates.
Now anybody searching for content on Teddington would find the file and its content either from the term teddington, or if using Google Earth from it’s actual location encoded as geographic co-ordinates.
Ok now move beyond a simple walking track to a KML with a linked shapefile, or network link to an enterprise spatial database of agricultural information. The mechanism described would search and find this content just as well !
As Michael Jones points out in the excellent Directions interview, Google Earth and I guess potentially tools that understand KML like ArcGIS Explorer become browsers of Geographic content in the same way Firefox or Safari are browsers of document based content.
What does these mean for the GI industry – I think this is really important !!
To develop infrastructures of Geographic information (SDI’s) we are doing the “right thing” working hard on metadata standards, and discovery portals but it is taking a long time and may need a revolution in semantic techniques to actually work using even quite broad controlled vocabularies of terms.
But hang on… the rest of the web did not wait to develop metadata standards for page content, instead it could be argued they took the “dirty” route and chucked massive computing power and very clever search algorithms to solve the problem with great success – To Google is now mainstream language.
With INSPIRE now real, it’s interesting to think, is the solution to a practical and cheap to implement SDI, publishing KML files and a simple search box ?
Wake up everybody !!!
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
Just came across a link to this YouTube video which is doing the rounds at the moment. If you are having trouble explaining how or why Web 2.0 is important or different to anybody, it would be 5 minutes well spent…
Just needs a little bit about KML methinks 🙂
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
I’m not sure of their real value, but I just love the way Landmark are marketing their scanned Soviet Era Military Mapping, or as their say KGB Maps of Great Britain. .
Great stuff Guys !!
In themselves these maps are not a new discovery but to have them made available in a more accessible digital form is an interesting development. To the “Open” mapping community who are looking for the position of Urban Motorways, Airports and more recent developments missing from the digitised NPE series, this could be a potential source.
Of course the data would need to be re-projected etc., but this is clearly within the capability of the community now – also these maps are a rich source of building footprint data, dated yes, but in themselves an interesting historic view of Britain’s cities.
I have one little issue still in the back of my mind, until a couple of years ago my ex-employers maintained that these Russian maps contained OS copyright material.. “stolen” by Soviet spies I no doubt.. has something happened to their change their minds ?
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.