Author: Ed Parsons

Jeff Thurston at Vector One has come up with one of my favourite Google Earth images of the year. All those hours learning about geometric correction and orthrectification were not wasted !

You may have picked up on the debate bouncing around the net on the problems Wikipedia is suffering. Wikipedia, for those back from the desert island is the community based encyclopaedia that has been seen as one of the great success stories of the web.

The problems which hit the news last week have focused on the fact that because anybody can contribute content, there is no accountability for the accuracy of content, and the critics argue this means the content may be manipulated by special interest groups.

So this got me thinking about the open geodata projects flowering around the web, and in particular projects like openstreetmap, a really interesting attempt to create a copyright free street map in the UK. It seems from what is happening around wikipedia, that after a while, there becomes a growing demand for “authoritative” information, data which has been checked and quality assured.

From the perspective of geographic information, this in no way means that the only authoritative information must come from commercial providers, but it does mean that there needs to be a clear understanding of how the information was collected, how and by whom it was verified and to what purposes it can be used.

The commercial data providers have always been fully aware of these issues and I think the opengeodata movement needs to address these now rather than later, so that the growth of open geodata is not upset by claims of poor quality due to misunderstanding, or inappropriate use.

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

It’s funny how sometimes you can have a couple of conversations with people, which all seem to be coming from the same perspective but are unrelated. This happened to me last week in talking to a few people about Mastermap and peoples perception of it.

Mastermap was launched almost exactly four years ago and has been an increasing success built on a slow start. But to what extent are people really exploiting the fact that this is a geographic information product – not digital mapping.

You may not recognise that the image above is actually a rendering of Mastermap Topo data, because it does not following the “standard” style developed by the OS.

OSMM “House style”

The Mastermap house style is very good at demonstrating the fact that Mastermap is a full polygon dataset with each feature shaded, but nobody would argue that it is in cartographic terms very flexible.

Why do we at the OS and many of how customers follow the convention created four years ago and still displaying Mastermap in this way?
I and a number of people I have spoken to believe it that it is because we still perceive MasterMap as a cartographic product – a Map!

The reality of course is that MasterMap is a database, which may be rendered using any number of cartographic styles relevant to particular needs, if you want it to look like Landline you can indeed simply change the style remove the polygon fill and there you have it.

The real benefit of Mastermap like any other geographic information dataset is the attributes of each feature and the intelligent relationships between them, not something that is every easily visible from looking at a cartographic rendering.

Attributes

We need to change the way we think about products like Mastermap and start to exploit the fact we are using geographic information not just digital maps.

It is as if we were at stage where we have replaced our horse drawn carts with motorcars, but have yet to realise there is actually a engine in them.

Today I delivered the keynote presentation at the first Snowflake Software User Conference. Snowflake for those who don’t know are a small UK company set up by a couple of ex-Ordnance Survey people who specialise in developing XML applications for the GI industry.

Although a small team, the work that Snowflake do has had a profound effect on the GI industry in the UK. After developing the first tools to allow users to process the OS GML application schema, Snowflake have gone on to create more generic management tools for manipulating XML schemas and loading them in Oracle Spatial.

This is potentially important in terms of interoperability both within and beyond the GI industry, “normal” users need access to tools that allow the creation of XML data to really allow them to share their information with others, just look at all the published data sharing frameworks, things like eGIF.

The guys at snowflake have rightly realised that this is a IT not just a GIS problem, interoperability is not just about loading a shape file into Oracle, it is sharing all types of enterprise data.

Snowflake is one of those companies that has influence much greater than its size, as in the often quoted climate model, like the butterfly flapping its wings in the amazon impacting on the weather in London, Snowflakes efforts may have much greater impacts on how we handle data in the future.

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

Interesting post by Peter Cochrane noting the reliance people have on GPS navigation as it becomes more widespread.

As noted in this blog before, the potential result could be that users perception of location and distance change as geograhphical knowledge is replaced by the female voice of the navigation system. As Peter notes this may not matter, in the same way calculators have replaced mental arithmetic skills.

I think however a “sense of place” remains vital, having a basic understanding of the geography of the world is still really necessary as a knowledge of basic maths is still important despite the arrival of Microsoft Excel. Indeed by daughter is currently being taught how to do quite complex mental arithmetic, “chunking numbers” etc., something I was not taught and wish I had.

I only hope the education world take the same approach to the teaching of Geography, I would hate to see a generation of GPS savvy children not knowing if Birmingham is North or South of London.

I have been playing with Frappr! the google map mash-up which has really caught peoples imaginations. In some ways it combines mapping with sites like friends reunited or friendster which create and join up online communities.

This is really powerful stuff, it may sound very geeky but finding out there is someone doing the same conversion on their MGB as you in the next town, or looking at the destination of pupils of Downfield Sixth Form of 2000 is really interesting – this makes geographic information really accessible to people – and who knows offers the potential of a mechanism for community data capture projects.

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

For those of you in the UK this may be a little bit of a surprise, GIS Day has always been seen as a ESRI marketing event and therefore has never really gained much momentum in the UK, I think there are just five events in total this year. This is a shame, GIS Day is a great idea, making GIS more accessible to people by holding local events is a brilliant idea, it just needs to be supported by the wider industry.

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