Category: GIS

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GIS Thoughts

Tele Atlas get it..

Tele Atlas clearly get one of the key elements of “web 2.0”, engage with your customer and make them part of your solution. Their beta Map Insight website allows users to identify and correct errors in Tele Atlas data.

This is a win-win solution, the data provider identifies and corrects errors that actually matter to their users and the user develops a stronger relationship with the data provider when they see their correction implemented… thats a important step to develop trust.

There may critics will no doubt argue, be quality control issues with some information, but remember we are dealing with quite specialist information hopefully without the potential for agenda driven distortion as see in wikipedia.

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

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GIS opensource Technology Thoughts

Maps Kidnapped ?

DRG's are free !!

As both James and Jo blogged, the complete series of USGS Quad series DRG maps were taken hostage this week and then released following the payment of $1600 to the Free the Maps website.

Now we are thought the data was free right? – well yes but.. Some states made the data available free to download, some commerical operators charge for media (with some mark-up), most of the data is available on sites like Microsoft Terraserver. However as the site explains..

“..Because there are so many different web sites hosting bits and pieces of this data, it is often difficult to find.

When you do find it, there is often missing data, the files are difficult to download, or the site may use non-standard naming conventions for the files. In addition, there are still a significant number of States that have no DRG’s available for free download.”

So $1600 later all the data has been purchased and will now be uploaded to the Internet Archive. Great job Jared !!!

Unlike Jo (no surprise there then :-)), I don’t think this is the model for future funding for European Mapping agencies whose data is currently protected by copyright… but it may well form the model for exploiting and distributing OS maps as they reach the end of their copyright as the mapping will be of similar age.

The example DRG above is 35 years old, and out of copyright OS mapping is 50 years old.

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

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GIS Google Earth Technology Thoughts virtual earth

A picture is worth a thousand words ?

Not when it comes to Geographic Information I would argue…

Adena very well I think identified the massive interest in imagery demonstrated by the vendors at this years ESRI UC exhibition in her latest directions magazine editorial. Imagery is great as context to other types of spatial information, but on its own I believe it’s value is limited.

There are a lot of innovative ideas in this part of the geodata business driven both by the massive demand of the new generation of geographic exploration services from GYM and now ESRI, and from the fact that for much of North America there is no large scale topographic information otherwise available.

southampton in 3D

While technologies like Pictometry are interesting especially when combined with tools like SocketSet and OpenFlight to produce 3-D city models (thanks to John Allan and Rick Mort of BAE for the Southampton example above) , they can only provide contextual information which need expert human interpretation to generate true information let alone ‘Geospatial intelligence”

Using the example above, without access to other geographic information, can you tell.. where in the city are we ?, what is the name of the street in the foreground,? what is the address of the red building?, who “owns” this property ?

To answer these type of questions and indeed to really carry out any type of spatial analysis you need detailed feature based information and I would argue for a lot of analysis up to date information as-well.

So until more feature based information can be produced (it’s expensive !!) new tools like ArcGIS Server at 9.2 and the increasingly popular OGC WFS standard will be constrained..

Have we have invented the equivalent of the CD player, but are still producing 78-rpm mono gramophone records.

And a semantic Geoweb based on imagery.. forget it !!

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

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GIS OGC Technology Thoughts

edparsons.com.. now with added GeoRSS

Another one of those things I have been meaning to do for ages, was to implement GeoRSS in the feed for edparsons.com. This has been more frustrating that I would have liked, but it now works.

GeoRSS support

Why the frustration, firstly there are three favours of GeoRSS, Simple and GML which you will find documented at the GeoRSS website and the so-called W3C Geo standard which for historic reasons is also widely used.

So I started initially using the GML encoding only to find there are very few readers which work with it, so OK back to the simple version and a little greater success.

So I guess we are still at the walking rather than running stage for GeoRSS, buts its great to see the major traditional GIS vendors as well as GYM beginning to adopt this approach.

This has value way beyond blogging and putting pins on web maps however, I think there is great potential for GML encoded GeoRSS to offer a realistic alternative to the Web Feature Server as a mechanism for supplying changed feature data in a change only update service.

We often talk in terms of users subscribing to a service for updated data, well GeoRSS seems to be designed for just this purpose.

To learn more watch the GeoRSS blog and all credit to Mikel for his GeoRSS google map plug-in which was used to produce the map above.

Categories
GIS

If it wasn’t for those pesky kids

Is Peter Cochrane turning into an “Old Git” ?, he comments in his silicon.com blog this week, that the internet is suffering this summer from all those kids at home downloading mp3, movies and games from bittorrent and generally spreading trojans and malware as they go…

Not sure I have seen any evidence of this, the “pipes” of the internet seem much the same as they were earlier in the year to me, and the solution to poor online security is better education and better written operating systems (roll on vista?).

These “pesky kids” also represent the next generation of customers and most importantly for the IT industry the next generation of IT professionals, a generation of IT literate young people is actually just what we need.

To me this sounds like an indirect attack on net neutrality ?

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

Categories
GIS Thoughts

Calling UK Geobloggers

Dominic has a very interesting post over at geometrybag, noting the lack of UK centric content in the dozen or so UK based blogs that deal with Geography and GIS. Dominic is on to something here, there are many topics that are of interest to a UK specific readership beyond OS bashing of course 🙂 , but maybe the point is that the technology issues we deal with are global ?

Maybe it is just a problem with the “traditional” GI industry, I know from personal experience that UK organisations are less receptive to blogging than those in the United States for example, and to be fair the OpenStreetMap, and geowanking mailing list communities have very active participation from Brits.

Are we in the UK a year or two behind the curve on this ?

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

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GIS Technology where 2.0

Tim Berners Lee to Keynote at Terra future 2006

Terra FutureFollowing on from the success of last years Terra Future event, this year TBL will be the keynote speaker at Terra future 2006 the Ordnance Survey meeting focused on Research and innovation in the use of Geographic Information. We are very pleased to have Tim presenting as OS has had an active research group looking into the geographic semantic web for a number of years and are well respected.

Also speaking is Mike Liebhold of the Institute for the Future who keynoted at this years where 2.0 conference in San Jose.

Categories
ESRI GIS

ESRI UC Day 1 – My Thoughts

Jack Dangermond on Mainstage

I thought it was best to sleep on my thoughts for day 1 of the conference to contemplate what I have heard… I’m still trying to get over seeing AutoCAD and Intergraph GeoMedia demonstrated on Mainstage at a ESRI UC – that’s real interoperability for you.

Many people I have spoken to were a little disappointed by the lack of “new” stuff, as many people were already aware of the functionality in ArcGIS 9.2 at least from a desktop point of view. The Big story here however is one of consolidation around desktop, but the new stuff is all around the Server products and the wider GeoWeb vision.

I not sure everybody really “gets” what this means or the real impact of this.. In many ways the focus on servers is a more fundamental shift in thinking than the move to ArcGIS from Arc/Info, but initially for the vast majority of users at the UC whose only experience is off the desktop products this may all seem a little remote.

As I noted on Sunday, the GeoWeb vision will not be a easy ride, there are many issues to resolve not only the technology, but there is no doubt about Jack and ESRI’s commitment to it.

Written and submitted from the Wyndham San Diego Hotel, using a local open wifi network.

Categories
ESRI GIS

Directions Magazine Podcast

Jessie and Sue of Very Spatial have some temporary competition in the shape of the Directions Magazine Podcast for the ESRI UC. Their first a review of the Senior Executive Leadership Seminar is a great start.

Written and submitted from the Wyndham San Diego Hotel, using a local open wifi network.

Categories
ESRI GIS

ESRI UC Day 1 – My Stadium Rock moment..

ESRI UC main session

I of course knew it was coming, but is was nevertheless a very strange experience to see my face projected 10 metres high on the six screens at the ESRI user conference, as a video made by ESRI at the OS to celebrate the organisation winning this years Presidents Award was shown.

We are of course very proud to have been given the award, but what I don’t think came across very clearly today, is that it is really an award for the whole organisation, a wonderful team of people who are represented by the eleven of us here at the user conference.

The OS away team

The OS Away team with Jack, David Walsh, Steve Bennett, myself, Vanessa Lawrence, David Henderson, Matt White, Tim Warr, and Chris Maidens (Not in the picture Chiran Paruchuri, Rex Corfield and Malcolm Havercroft)

The OS has come a long way in the last few years and has even further to travel to really meet the needs of our customers, but where we are today is the product of hundreds of very bright people who care with a passion about their work and the organisation they work for.

My thanks to them and to Jack for recognising our success.

Written and submitted from the Wyndham San Diego Hotel, using a local open wifi network.