Author: Ed Parsons

Categories
autodesk GIS opensource

Autodesk and the big opportunity..

Pete Southwood

I had a real flashback from the past when I received an email from Autodesk, inviting me to join in on a webcast to be presented by an old colleague and ex-pat Brit, Pete Southwood on MapGuide Enterprise. Despite a financially poor period a result of a downturn in the core AEC market ?, Autodesk is once again making a impact in the GIS market.

Autodesks support of OSGeo and the release of the Open Source version of MapGuide have got people talking about Autodesk again, and clearly Map 3D 2007 remains a strong data capture tool, but… and its a big but, the issue of CAD / GIS integration still remains a problem for many organisations and customers of Autodesk.

I would argue that most geospatial data actually resides today as design data held in DWG and DGN files not in GIS file formats let alone geospatial databases.

So there remains an opportunity for Autodesk to finally begin to migrate this data using their tools – perhaps the innovation which results from the open source development around MapGuide may provide some clues to opening up this difficult to crack market.

When I was involved with MapGuide at Autodesk, I often argued with anyone who would listen, that MapGuide had the makings of a excellent server of geospatial drawing data for AutoCAD Map clients – at the time there was never the engineering resource available to do it, of course today, there is a whole community of skilled developers looking for the challenge.

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

Categories
GIS GPS Technology

TomTom and Microsoft take-over rumours

Silicon.com picks up on market rumours that Microsoft are viewing the Amsterdam based portable SatNav maker as an acquisition target…. If true, it would mean that Microsoft are really jumping into the consumer GI marketplace, are they after the great software platform or are they thinking of a new hardware business line ? Other than the Xbox MSFT don’t have a great track record with hardware…

Categories
GIS Thoughts

UK SDI interest begins to develop

Just a few weeks ago I blogged that the UK seems to have a blind-spot when is comes to thinking or debate about Spatial Data Infrastructures. So I was really please to see the AGI are running an UK SDI event tomorrow.

We must hope that there is a constructive debate, too often in the past old arguments have been rolled out at these events leading to wasteful mud slinging – the UK GI industry is too small to be effective if there is not a co-ordinated approach to dealing with what is really a policy / organisational issue.

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

Categories
GIS Thoughts

OS 2.0 We need to listen…

A thought provoking post by Steven on the Free Our Data blog, I’m sure many we share his opinions, but they are more difficult to implement than one might imagine :-(, but we are trying !

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

Categories
LBS Technology

And the walls come tumbling down..

Silicon.com reports that the international mobile operator 3, is to allow access to external websites, intially using Yahoo rendering technology.. This is a start, however it is not clear if the location platform component that 3 lead the market in developing will also be opened up – lets hope so

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

Categories
GIS GPS

Sat Nav.. how old is your data ?

Thanks to Adena at allpoints for pointing out this press release from Navteq announcing their new “Sat Nav” Challenge website which allows users to find out if there is updated data for their navigation system.

navteq data

Great I though.. I checked for my system, only to find that my system is not listed.., although my Nissan X-Trail has a factory fit navigation system, the data comes from Zenrin and is not compatible with either navteq or Tele Atlas data for that matter. Zenrin as you might guess don’t seem to offer updates..

My car is two years old, the data on the navigation DVD was published two years earlier so I am using at least four year old data – and I am unable to update.

In my view this is not an acceptable situation, once again a new technologies growth is been limited by a “walled garden’ approach to technology in the same way LBS will not take off until the applications are separated from the network providers, sat nav will stall unless there is an open data format for navigation systems.

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

Categories
GIS Thoughts

What did an SDI every do for us…

ECGIS

I spent yesterday attending the second day of the 12th European Commission workshop on Geographic Information and GIS. The major topic of discussion is the ongoing development of European SDI’s – Spatial Data Infrastructures.. In the UK it is a topic rarely discussed, so to paraphrase the Monty Python classic – What does a SDI do for us…

In some ways one can think of an SDI as a cross organisation / cross border enterprise GIS, so GIS tools working on a common view of shared data. It is more than just the technical solution to interoperability however, an SDI also requires all the organisational and operational processes and agreements to be in place so that the common shared view of data is truly dynamic and more than a data snapshot.

Across mainland Europe there are both regional and a few national SDI’s operating today, and there is continued debate in the United States about a National SDI, in the UK it seems that we have been quite good a developing vertically integrated data sharing applications like Magic, and clearly have excellent and consistant base data, but have not gone much further…

Why is this… why has then been so little progress towards a UK SDI ?, my own view is that this maybe because culturally we don’t really like sharing, and crucially there is no central organisation promoting the benefits and providing co-ordination. Perhaps this is something that todays meeting to discuss the formulation of a UK GI Strategy will address.

Because going back to that scene from “The Life of Brian”, as Reg said..

“All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”

Sounds like GIS to me…

Written and submitted from the Hotel Grauer Bär, in Innsbruck using the hotels broadband network.

Categories
GPS Technology Thoughts

Innsbruck in a day… thanks to Tom Tom

Just on my way back from a whistle stop trip to Innsbruck – there are still a few places in Europe where it is still only just possible to visit in a day.. I was there to present to some of the team drafting the technical details that will make the Inspire directive to share environmental information in Europe work… well as soon at is passed in a form acceptable to all 🙂

My Journey was only just possible because i was trying out one of the new Tom Tom navigation systems, which came fully loaded with no only the full European road network but North American roads also.. This really is the ipod of navigation systems !

So a round trip of 450Km later I’m back at the airport in Munich and I did not get lost once !! – Now if only my flight was not delayed…

Written and submitted from the Delta Crown Room Lounge, at Munich Airport using the t-mobile wifi network.

Categories
Technology Thoughts

Scoble : from blogger to talking head

Scoble on Newsnight

Just finished watching Newsnight on TV, which had a piece on the “retirement” from full time employment at Microsoft of Bill Gates in 2008. I wonder it this announcement will have more success in delivering to date than Vista ?

Anyhow what was interesting was the BBC’s choice of Microsoft spokesperson, rather than the standard PR person or available VP they selected soon to be ex-Microsoft blogger Robert Scoble.

A case of unintended consequences perhaps or that bloggers are recognised by producers as “spin-free” ?

Anyway thought he did a pretty good job for a “not a PR person.”

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

Categories
GIS where 2.0

Where 2.0 Day 2 – It’s all about data..

If yesterdays conference focus was on innovation, (not just push-pin maps !!), today the second and last day of the conference focused on some of the enabling technologies of Where 2.0 – in other words, positioning technologies, GIS software tools and geospatial data.

The main story of the day I guess was the continued collective works of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation or OSGeo, which after a rather shaky start seems really to be pushing ahead, providing an environment to develop tools like MapServer, Mapbender, PostGIS etc. Indeed for me one of the unsung heroes of GIS today Frank Warmerdam, orchestrator of the GDAL toolkit used almost everywhere across the GIS industry, presented on the power of such open source libraries.

The big buzz in terms of positioning technology was Loki the consumer focused product of Skyhook, who have developed a tool that locates wifi enabled devices using the location of hotspots. To do this of course they need to know where the hotspots are and they are currently driving North America, Australia and South Africa to build their database – industrial warchalking !!!

As Nathan Torkington conference co-chair noted, much of what we see now presented at where 2.0 and on the geospatial web is dependent on the availability of data, the new community developed data as well as the more established base infrastructure datasets. I was rather disappointed with the ‘Future of the Data Industry” session, some big questions around quality, currency and general “fitness for purpose” of data were not really addressed – the future I don’t think is increasingly high resolution imagery as suggested by Microsoft, once you get to 10-15cm resolution imagery do you really need to go much higher.. what Where 3.0 applications will need is intelligent semantically rich datasets.

So my best of show along with many others I guess is MetaCarta’s geoparsing tool, which geocodes geographic terms in any web accessible document. Geoparsing is not new I remember how cool I thought it was when demonstrated to be at Edinburgh University a few years ago, but MetaCarta has built an API to their service to allow easy integration with other applications.

To demonstrate they have geoparsed a number of the texts available as part of the Gutenberg project, and produced maps of the locations involved at www.gutenkarte.org . My Favourite is the map of the locations from H.G. Wells “War of the Worlds” which was set in my local part of England, the map is not perfect, sometimes the wrong locations are identified – but you get the idea.

Gutenkarte map

I need to spend a few days gathering my thought’s about the conference – I can’t remember a conference I have attended in the past few years where this was just so much to take-in.. Where 2.0 will be again taking place in San Jose next June, and will be a show not to miss.

Written and submitted from the Fairmont Hotel, San Jose, using the hotels broadband network.