Many of you may know of my fascination of all things aeronautic, so just move on if you are not interested…
If you are well, just turn up the volume on your computer and enjoy the video below.
You will need Quicktime and a room without children listening…
Chris Lightfoot the smart developer behind the mySociety websites dropped me an email over the weekend, with details of his latest project Postcodeine an AJAX based application that dynamically maps GB postcodes. OK so it may not be very useful, but it’s cool and Chris is making the code available under a GPL.
And before anybody gets too excited his postcode database is licensed.
Today I attended a meeting of around 30 UK based members of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), called by David Schell and Mark Reichardt who are in the UK to canvas the opinions of OGC members. This example of the OGC wanting to understand the point of view of members based this side of the pond is clearly commendable, many in our industry still see the OGC as a US-centric rather than a global organisation.
The OGC quite rightly see outreach as a key goal for the next year, and this was confirmed by the general sentiment of the meeting – indeed there was a very strong feeling that the OGC needs to concentrate less on the development and communication of technical interface standards, and focus on explaining the benefits of interoperability of geospatial systems in a business context.
“What does this mean for me.. ” is a core message to define in marketing any product or idea to potential customers and I guess we can all be guilty of concentrating on the technical details, leaving the poor customer behind. Are OGC guilty of this – well as somebody pointed out today, imagine if you were new to geographic information and you visited the OGC website.. would you be any wiser – I’m afraid not.
Full credit to David and Mark for taking these points onboard, the message from the UK seems to be – Concentrate more on the WHY not the HOW !!
Written and submitted from the Apple Store Regent Street, using its free 802.11 network.
The BBC reported today on the launch of a project of the Spatial-Literacy group, a collection of universities working together to improve the understanding of spatial data in the “general public”. This is a fantastic project, although i must admit to being on its Advisory Committee, I think this is just the type of outreach activity we need to do to prevent the misunderstandings and mis-reporting I bogged yesterday.
The project maps the distribution of popular surnames in the UK, and apparently illustrates some interesting points including some clear regional concentrations which indicate that our population may not be as mobile as we thought. I say apparently because the site was too busy for me to try out just now.. so clearly the outreach mission is working well.
Projects like Spatial-Literacy and the GIS Day are important activities which we need to embrace as an industry – although the awareness of geospatial information developed by the mapping offerings of GMY (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo) is useful – we also need to grow the next generation of GI scientists who are the people who now want to move beyond web mapping.
Wired adds to the debate over the threat to civil liberties from web mapping sites like google and microsoft local. As seems to have been the case with much of the recent reporting, the issue is not so much with mapping, but the use of detailed imagery. One of the concerns expressed is the apparent danger of identifing “..vulnerable citizens such as women in domestic violence shelters” from the photography !
Similar concerns have appeared in the UK press in the past couple of weeks, although here in typical British fashion the concern is more to do with the government “spying” on building home extensions.
It is all rubbish !! Somebody has been watching too many Tom Clancy movies.
All these reports share a common lack on understanding of the simple facts of remote sensing, as yet nobody is offering >5cm resolution aerial (no its not sateliite) imagery you would need to recognise people, and more often than not the imagery is historic.. for example the imagery in Google Earth for my home is at least three years old !!
The debate in the UK seems to be politically motivated.. so there is little hope for more accurate reporting I fear..
Anybody seen a black helicopter in Southampton yet?
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
Took the opportunity this weekend to upgrade the blog software I use to WordPress 2.0, mainly to use the comment and trackback spam tools. At the same time I updated the header image to use my icon I acquired from a great outfit called dv-graphics, well worth taking a look at!
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
Last years Where 2.0 conference was one of the most important conferences of 2005, and O’Reilly have just announced the dates for the 2006 conference to be held in San Jose, CA. in June. If it has anything like the content of last year it will be a must attend conference, in particular for the “traditional” GI industry to see the direction that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are taking.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
David Galbraith has spotted the arrival of blue pin markers on google local maps representing sponsored hotel locations, as well as the usual red ones.
This was always going to happen, all that mapping data from Teleatlas, Digitalglobe, Navteq etc costs money…I predicted this back in June of last year, and to their credit Google seem to be approaching this is a restrained way so far.. please lets hope we don’t end up with little “Golden Arches” at every McDonalds.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
Hidden behind the news of the first Intel powered iMacs and Macbooks (yuk – don’t like that name!!) Google released the official MacOS version of Google Earth. Having played with the beta for the last month or so, it works very much the same as the windows version, and will work on relatively low spec macs as long as you are running Tiger. Note however this is the basic Google Earth, not plus so you we need to use another method to get you GPS data loaded – if thats your thing.
Thanks to John, one of the OS semantic web experts for pointing out that Tim Berners-Lee has started a blog.
Some of my colleagues at the OS have in the past discussed the importance of GI with Tim, and he recognises geographic information as an important component to the semantic systems of the future.
Now you know this is going to be one you must read….