Author: Ed Parsons

Categories
GIS web 2.0

Web 2.0 for the suits

Tim O’Rilley has successfully developed the Web2.0 label, and is now exploiting the interest of “Big” Business  by writing a report Web 2.0 Principles and Best Practices: ” with John Musser of ProgrammableWeb.com

The report based on the now classic web2.0 paper is aimed at a market beyond the normal “alpha geek”, instead O’Reily are for the first time really targeting business strategists, investors, and well.. suits !

For the comments to the original posting of this announcement the reaction has been rather negative to say the least, attacking the high cost of the report. The critism I think misses the point here, this is the type of audience that Gartner or Meta Group sell reports costs thousands of dollars to, and who an wiling to pay from quality foresight.

O’Reilly is a business after all !!

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

Categories
GIS Google Earth Thoughts

TBL on Blogging

Tim Berners-Lee makes another of his rare and insightful postings on his blog commenting on the media’s view of his new Web Science Research Initiative.

I’m not alone I’m sure, in thinking that the WSRI, a joint initiative between MIT and the great people at Southampton University, which looks to view the growth of the web from a societal as much as a scientific point of view is especially important when looking to the development of the GeoWEB.

Earth riseThere is I’m certain for example a important piece of research to study the impact of exploration tools such as Google Earth and ArcGIS Explorer on users understandings of the physical, social and political environments. Could such tools have a similar but smaller effect to the famous Apollo 8 Earthrise image on todays geographically illiterate generation.

It’s also nice to know that I am not alone at occasionally getting misinterpreted in the Guardian – Sorry Charles 🙂

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

Categories
GIS OS Research Thoughts

Research Labs project reported in New Scientist

As a A-Level Physics student, I used to love reading New Scientist in the School Library – I could at least understand it.. maybe reading too much of it, resulted in my spectacular failure at the subject ?
Map Snapper Still its good to see Ordnance Survey Research Labs joint research with Southampton University making this weeks New Scientist as well as Computer Weekly.

Map Snapper is a demonstration of technology that brings together the best characteristics of paper mapping and geospatial databases. Using a camera phone a photo of any feature on the map is sent to a server application which “recognises” the feature using pattern recognition and return up to date attribute information..

So take a picture of a hotel, and find out its telephone number, rates and this evenings reservation information, or take a picture of a train station to find out the time of the next train.

One way to think of this is a mash-up tool for paper maps !!

Map Snapper is a great example of collaborative research, the real challenge now is to find partners to commercialise the idea…

Categories
GIS Thoughts

GeoDRM data protection will it ever work ?

As I have noted before, OS is interested in GeoDRM activities as a way of standardising how rights to access information and the transfer of those rights between individuals and groups is standardised as much as possible.

Of course we also need to track developments in the more contentious area of data and IP protection techniques, and today I have been visiting some people who have a solution in this space.

As I expected, at the moment, this type of technology is not fit for purpose for geospatial data, not taking into the account the “spatial” nature of geographic information and imposing unacceptable restrictions on the users computer platform (windows & IE only just does not work anymore !!!)

This raises a more fundamental question in my mind, are such protective technologies really worth the effort, sure they reduce the perceived risk of data leakage in the mind of the data owner, but as DVD Jon has proved such systems can nearly always be broken. We don’t currently protect data in this way, and I would suggest continuing not to and relying on other legal means may be the best route forward.

Written and submitted from Starbucks, MK Centre , Milton Keynes, using the t-mobile wifi network.

Categories
GIS

BBC discovers Pictometry

click on pictometry

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.

Categories
GIS opensource

OS NPE Maps online and copyright free(ish) !

Old MapAs Steve points out, Richard Fairhurst’s scanned database of OS New Popular Edition Maps on the 1930’s and 1940’s in now online at www.npemap.org.uk.

Although the mapping is now out of copyright, Richard is claiming copyright over the scans and is licensing the data using the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 license.

This is a fascinating collection which provides a unique view of England 50 years ago, an England without Motorways, Aerodromes with Grass runways, and with an Ordnance Survey which was firmly a military institution.

There is huge potential for this data to form the basis of many applications which don’t require either up to date or very accurate mapping, and it will very interesting to see what develops.. Already the mapping is forming part of a tool to collect an open source geocoded postcode database.

The groundswell of community generated mapping continues…

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

Categories
GIS

Spatial Analysis finds tranquillity

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.
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.

Categories
GIS Thoughts

A VerySpatial Podcast – Episode 66

This week I was interviewed by the guys at Very Spatial for their weekly podcast. Very SpatialDespite a few Skype problems, no doubt down to student enduced network issues, all worked in the end. To listen to this podcast or to subscribe to Very Spatial, follow this link. It’s well worth having a look through the archive of shows, Jesse, Sue and Frank have managed to addess many of the key topics of GIS and Geography over the past year.

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

Categories
GIS

GeoDRM causes ‘heated debate’ on Geowanking list

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

Categories
GIS Google Maps Thoughts

The other data in Mash-ups

With the UK mash-up day coming up at the end of the week, this blog post by J. LeRoy is very timely.

It reports on the response of the Fire Deptartment of Seattle to a google maps mash-up of 911 calls, the dept. has now removed the feed replacing it with a jpeg image. The dept. are not legally mandated to make the information available, but have removed the “machine readable” format version of the information citing “Homeland security concerns”

As Jim points out if they are worried about security they could just put a time delay in the feed as happens with flight progress reporting, this could otherwise set a worrying precedent for data providers !

There is continued debate about the geographical component to mash-ups and how “open” this geographic content is.. well the bigger issue I suggest, is all the other data one might want to map which is clearly not open at the moment.

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