Author: Ed Parsons

Categories
GIS

Geospatial archiving – or how to backup 25,000 iPods

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.

UDO DiscWe 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.

Categories
Technology Thoughts

If YouTube needed the dragons ?

BBC Dragons Den

So Google pays nearly £900m for YouTube, well done Chad and Steve !!

But just imagine it they had attempted to get investment from the BBC’s Dragons Den programme instead of Sequoia Capital..

Chad and Steve – We have this great idea.. a site where people upload they home videos and then let everybody view them from free !!

Dragons – OK, so you charge people to upload the videos.. Internet bandwidth is expensive.. what is your margin ?

Chad and Steve – Actually, er.. you are right it is expensive and we expect to spend about a million dollars a month.. but um.. we don’t think we should charge users to upload either..

Dragons – So you have a business that costs a least a million dollars a month to run, and has no revenue stream – what were you looking for in terms of investment from us ?

Chad and Steve – Well dragons we would like £50,000 for a 0.005 % share of the company..

Evan – Today Chad and Steve left the den empty handed..

Seriously I understand the potential advertising angle here but even with a stock only transaction is this really worth the money?

To understand why YouTube has become such a success however just watch this – all power to the geeks !!
Written and submitted from Starbucks, The Strand , London, using the t-mobile wifi network.

Categories
GPS Thoughts

Nuvi integrates ‘where’

I remember the first time I used Satellite Navigation (Satnav), it involved a copy of Auto-route on a pentium powered laptop, a serial cable, a Garmin GPS45 receiver and a lot gaffer (duct) tape – but it worked !!

In many ways today’s portable satnavs have not really changed the way they work much beyond what was available nearly ten years ago.. you enter a destination, the system uses a stored roads database to calculate the route to the destination and this is then iterated as you travel along the route. OK so today’s system may also use a online service or TMC receiver to update traffic data but in terms of the basic operation not a great deal has changed.

In the past I have often noted that in terms of LBS, the industry has ignored the point, that the most important part of “where” is not the absolute location in terms of a lat/long co-ordinate, but the fact that it provides context to other information. In terms of Satnav the same is also true.. are the designers of satnavs really making the most of the fact that they have locational context information always available ?

Garmin UK have been kind enough over the past couple of months to let me try out one of their Nuvi 360 satnav systems (thanks Claire) and I have been very impressed, that in a number of ways, Garmin is making use of locational context in the overall way the system works.

Firstly the Nuvi has a very neat security device, in addition to a 4-digit PIN code, the “security location” is a specific location that you must take you device to unlock it, if you forget the PIN code. e.g. you can only reset the PIN code if you take your device to this location – very smart.

Nuvi

The second use of locational context, is a safety feature which prevents the user from making system changes while the nuvi and the vehicle it is in – is moving!

There is still some way to go to increase the possible integration however, why not automatically change the zoom level with speed, decreasing scale as speed increases – if you are travelling on a motorway you don’t need to see all streets, likewise when travelling at less than 30mph, you are likely to be in a residential area and will need more detail.

There are other simple ways of making the system appear more intelligent to its user – list potential destinations ordered based on distance from the current location, default to home as the default destination if you are not at your home location, during the morning rush hour make “work” your default destination etc..

In terms of Satnav we are I would suggest just entering the mainstream market … there will be a whole bunch of potential customers out there for whom the current generation of systems is still to complex, even without the gaffer tape!

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

Categories
GIS Oracle Thoughts

Map Search.. How difficult can that be ?

Well actually, more complex than you might at first think… If you have bought a map online from Ordnance Survey in the past couple of weeks you will have used a redesigned store application that features a geographic search capability which recommends mapping products based on location.

mapsearch

This is actually a more difficult process than you might imagine, the search works across a range of OS and Partner products each of which are at different scales and which have different extents e.g they cover different areas, which often overlap.

There are two ways to search, one driven using a webmap (a simple ArcIMS WMS implementation) that provides a point to base the geographic search on, and a more sophisticated gazetteer search.

The gazetteer search is exciting in that is uses not just a list of placenames and points, but also place names and areas where appropriate classified by settlement and feature type.

For example enter “swindon’ into the search, and the system would retrieve ..

  • Swindon (Urban Region) – The area of the town
  • Swindon (Unitary Authority) – The larger area of the unitary authority
  • Swindon Swindon (Town) – A single point representing the centre of the town

As well as the villages Swindon in Gloucestershire, Staffordhire and the hamlets of Swindon in Northumberland and the Scottish Borders classified as such.

The user is then able to select the ‘Swindon” that is right for them, and then the really clever stuff happens..

A query is made to a Oracle Spatial database, overlaying either the point or polygon onto polygon extents of all the potential porducts and where there is an overlay geographically the products are selected.

Mapsearch how it works

The selected products are then ordered by the amount of coincidence between the area of search and the extent of the product, and these are then returned to the user. So in the example above product B would come before Product A as there is greater coincidence. ( yes I know the diagram looks bad in Internet Explorer – it’s a bug – use Firefox !!)

Like many innovations to the user this seems “no big deal”, but now you know different!! and we are actually using geographic information in a real business process , a case of actually doing as we say..

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

Categories
Apple Google Maps GPS

Location comes to iLife

iphoto GPSSo the mac hackers have been taking apart the latest release of iPhoto and have found details of potential GPS integration and closer ties with Google Maps.

MacTelChat reports that there are a number of hidden references in the package which suggest that photos may in the near future be organised by location and mapped using the google maps api.

The ability to extract GPS information available from a photo’s EXIF data is not new, and geo-tagging of photos has been made very popular by Flickr, but the intergration with google maps rather than mapquest as used in the past in the MacOS X addressbook is of greater interest ?

Then again the blogosphere loves to speculate about Apples future plans…

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

Categories
GIS

Peter Cochrane’s Marmite presentation

Love it or hate it ?Peter Cochrane has posted his thoughts on last weeks CIO forum on his blog, as I blogged last week I think what Peter had to say was really important, and if you work in IT or are a customer of an IT dept ( I guess that is everybody) you really need to read it. Some of his key points that I think are “right on the money”

“Throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s people who knew deep technical stuff (nerds) were derided and discounted. The management attitude was that these people were irrelevant and a pain. Deep tech understanding was not seen as necessary to manage anything. How the world has changed” – and some!! however I don’t think generally the management attitude has moved far enough yet.. and in the UK in particular.

“The biggest universal mistake has been to take the old paper processes and transplant them to the screen, and then create even more paper!” – enough said !!!

“Everything is moving to the edge of networks and organisations – computing power, communication, skills, information and knowledge.” – This combined with a more mobile workforce means that we need to architect much more flexible systems with potentialy location awareness built in…

As Peter admits, his presentation was like Marmite.. you either loved it or hated it.. I guess its clear where I stand..

Categories
AGI GIS Thoughts

AGI Student of the Year

Every year Ordnance Survey sponsors the AGI Student of the Year of the year award, this years closing date is on Friday (6th October) so if you are a Lecturer of/or a student of a GIS related discipline who has finished studies in the last year, don’t miss your chance and enter for the award.

Categories
LBS Thoughts

Nokia – Trimble IP swap..

Earlier this week Nokia and Trimle announced an arrangement where their respective technolgoies would be licesned to each other for use in the development of future LBS platforms, following on from Nokia’s aquistion of Gate 5 last month cleary Nokia are leading the second wave of LBS – maybe this time then..

Of equal interest is the nature of the deal, no inflated sums of money changing hands, just two companies who are mature and know their business strengths and those of the other – refreshing in the slightly mad world of web 2.0

Categories
Thoughts

IT Depts share fate with the Typing pool ?

By all accounts Peter Cochrane’s presentation at this weeks CIO Forum has ruffled a few feathers in the IT establishment. Peter I think made an excellent point calling on the IT industry not to ignore the next generation of IT literate staff, but instead, start to adopt their culture of independence and self reliance.

The culture of the IT literate “young” is not actually to do with a specific generation, I believe it is more to do with attitude and skills. I have always attempted to be my own personal IT dept, not relying on any central IT function because, more often than not, in the past IS was located in a remote location and I had to fend for myself. This has brought the benefit of independence and control over the tools of my trade.

Peter’s point is that the IT literature workforce actually want this level of control and independence, and will reject the overly controlling traditional IT dept. Such depts need to adapt following perhaps the example of BP who are testing a model where there is no corporate network as such.. instead employees connect their own managed and purchased (with company money) laptops to secure corporate servers across the internet.

OK… this sounds rather far fetched ? but would you now ever think of sending a typist a hand written memo for them to type rather than type it yourself ?

In the same way the wider IT industry needs to adapt to a new generation of IT literate employees so must the GIS industry adapt to a generation of Geo-Hackers who rather than use expense and complex traditional GIS tools and gone off and developed their own open-source tools.

After-all last week at least twice as many people attended the FOSS4G (free and open source) conference than the AGI conference.

Written and submitted from the 20:12 Clapham Junction – Southampton train, South of Basingstoke, using my Vodafone 3G network card – EVENTUALLY-!!!.

Categories
Apple

OS X – Do you really need to be admin ?

As a smug mac user, the one security point I often make to Windows users, is that I am not using a root level account by default, so unlike windows any malware on the mac (if there was any of course) could do only limited damage.

adminWhile my point is strcitly true, as this Mac Geekery blog post notes you are by default in OS X running an Admin account, which while not as scary as root, still offers more system level control than is really needed on a day to day basis.

The moral of this story is to change your user account to a standard account now, it’s very easy to do, as explained by Mac Geekery, taking just two minutes, and you will be that bit more secure..