Author: Ed Parsons

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..

Categories
GIS Thoughts

Eisenstein at a GIS conference?

Battleship Potemkin

It is rare indeed that you are treated to the famous Odessa steps scene of the classic Eisenstein film Battleship Potemkin at a GIS conference.. then Terra Future was not trying to be a normal GIS conference!

As I have often argued here, the GI industry is too insular in its thinking, and needs to look elsewhere to really innovate.. hence Terra Future.

Eisenstein’s classic silent film was presented by Daniel Erasmus, a fellow of the Rotterdam School of Management and co-founder and director of the Digital Thinking Network. He made the point.. that with most media we are familiar with today, the makers and the medium itself, is sophisticated enough to obtain a emotional response from their audience, who after-all could not be moved by the scene of the small boy trampled on the steps or the shooting of his mother by the Cossacks – but as Daniel pointed out when did you last see a website or digital content which prompted a similar emotional response in you ?

There is still some work to do.

Mike Liebhold is well known to the new generation of Geo hackers and the open source GI movement from his presentations at Where 2.0 and the Location Intelligence Conference. Mike focused in on the potential impact of both open source tools and data, and the importance of standards based, non proprietary storage of information, making the excellent point that it may be difficult to develop RDF based semantic web applications when the data is held in “closed” GIS systems.

Robin Mannings a returning speaker from last year, reflected on the convergence of ubiquitous computing, positioning technologies and geographic information to provide a platform for the next generation of GI applications – perhaps using the human body as an important part of the hardware of such a system. As might be expected,sadly, this was the only element of the whole day picked up my the mainstream press (The Daily Express) who described Robin as a “scientific astrologer” – Its enough to make you want to give up !!!

Daily Express

There were many more interesting workshops during the day which looked into other societal changes expected in the future and how the needs of the market for geographic information will change over the next decades. Look out for the Terra Future podcasts in the next month of so..

It is vital that as an industry we focus of better understanding the future needs of the market and continue the fundamental research in both Computer and Information Science. The innovation we have seen over the last year from the likes of GYM and the growing band of community driven mapping is after-all built on the work of the research of 30 years ago… GPS, Relational Databases, Network Topology, Remote Sensing etc.

I’d like to use this posting as a opportunity to thank everybody involved in another successful event and in particular to thank the speakers and delegates who really made the day the great success it was.

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

Categories
GIS

The Semantic web ‘lightbulb’ moment

Talk to most people in the GI industry about the semantic web, eyes glaze over or people try to move the conversation on to something else.
Why is this ?
The productive use of Geographic information online is an area where taking a semantic approach is useful, and many would argue vital, if we are ever to develop a true GeoWeb!

It does not help that trying to understand the semantic web involves understanding an impenetrable soup of acronyms and terms, RDF, OWL, SPARQL and ontology etc, however it really helps to have an expert to explain and there is no one better than Tim Berners-Lee who presented at yesterdays Terra Future event as reported by ZDNet.

Semantic tube map

For many people attending i think the real “lightbulb” moment in understanding what the semantic web was all about, was Tim’s slide of the semantic web as represented by a Tube map; after-all GI people love maps..

This really does encapsulate the need to link different types of data (the lines) semantically to extend the usefulness of particular types of application or user need (the stations).

Using the example above, a photo taken by Tim at the Ordnance Survey can be linked via its embedded time stamp to his calendar, which in turn can then be linked to the Terra future event he was attending which in turn could be linked to the address of the Ordnance Survey.

While each of these applications and their associated databases have been developed for specific purposes, by describing and making their contents available using an Resource Description Framework (RDF) description of their meaning (ontology) we can join up these databases.

You cannot underestimate the challenge or importance of a semantic approach to solving the problem of linking geographical databases, an approach of linking databases based on a single view of the world as characterised by the DNF approach can only take you so far.

My thoughts from the other excellent speakers who presented at Terra Future tomorrow..

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