Author: Ed Parsons

The BBC News IT show this week highlights some applications of pictometry imagery. You may not be able to play the video outside of the UK I’m afraid, but a great PR piece from Pictometry.

Interesting to see how imagery is used as an alternative to large scale topographic data where it is not available.. However.. there is massive as yet untapped potential for such imagery when it is combined with intelligent feature data, so that the user can find out what they are looking at without interpretation.

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

Todays press release by the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) has picked up a lot of coverage in the mainstream press, with this mornings Today programme discussing the potential findings with reference to the great romantic English poets – its all because of Wordsworth apparently, that we attempt to find Tranquillity.

While I appreciate this sits well with the spin the CPRE would like to attach to this story (Well done the PR Dept !) it would be nice, just one in a while, if the press actually looked behind the map to find out how it was created.

Behind the map was a group of researchers from Northumbria and Newcastle Universities who used GIS techniques to weight a 500m pixel grid model of England, giving each pixel a value based on the weighted overlay of data layers representing amongst others;
• Land Cover
• Proximity of rivers, streams, lakes and the sea;
• Presence of birds and other wildlife;
• Proximity to transport links
• Proximity to urban settlements
• Population density
• Presence of visually intrustive features such as pylons and wind turbines etc.

This is a really interesting study, and yes I’m sure one could pick holes in the methodolgy used, but the team need to be congratulated on making such an impact with their work – its just a shame that in this case, the media as is often the case, runs away from the science behind the map.

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

The subject of GeoDRM something which OS like many other commercial data suppliers is very interested in developing has caused intense debate on the Geowanking mail list.

This comes as no surprise as the term has been damaged by the “heavyweight” tactics of the likes of Microsoft and Apple in relation to the music download industry and is seen by some even as “evil”.

In my mind the GeoDRM work we are supporting as this point is more about the creation of standards based ways of defining, expressing and distributing the rights to access geospatial data – recognising the point that both commercial and non-commercial users may want to manage how their content is used.

Yes of course at some point, some organisations will look to measures of actually physically restricting access to data based on particular rights, this a key element in establishing trust with the content owners. I am not going to argue that the fairplay system used by Apple is 100% right, it is better than many others, but without it there would be no iTunes store, and therefore a far smaller market for download music sales as the music industry would not have released their content!

Written and submitted from the CASA Basement Lecture Theatre at UCL, London, using my Vodafone 3G network card.

As is often the case the press have not quite got this story right, but pretty close.
Although it may not match the perception of “the man on the street”, OS is a data business, and over the past 5 years since I have been working here, the volumes of data we deal with have increased massively.

Not only in terms of new sources of digital imagery but also from increasing numbers of geospatial feature databases used in product development.

Data volumes today are over 500 Tb – that’s around 25,000 iPods !!

As a “National Mapping Agency” and as part of government there are additional responsibility’s in terms of maintaining an archive of the data throughout is lifetime and hence the need to develop strategies to archive large amounts of data.

We have chosen to adopt UDO media, very high density optical media which can store 30GB per disk and which is far more resistant to environmental conditions than traditional magnetic media.

The bigger issue for us however is to make sure that the data is able to be used potentially in 50 years time which is guaranteed life of the media. Will we be able to read the data formats used (TIFF, SQL load files, CSV) in 2056 ? We have tried to select as open generic formats as possible but we need to document how the data is accessed as in the future we may need to be emulating the environments of today on some future computing platform.

There is an interesting precedent.. The BBC’s Domesday Project of 1986 based on a BBC model B micro and LV disc was rescued from its unreadable state by the National Archives a couple of years ago.

Written and submitted from the Holiday Inn Express Southampton, using my Vodafone 3G network card.