Category: GIS

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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.

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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
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.

Categories
GIS Google Maps where 2.0

Google offers commercially supported version of maps

Ok so what does this mean, Google are to offer a fully supported version of Google Maps for Enterprise use, with the promise to offer stable cartography – e.g no Golden Arches.

Mmm.. I need to think about this, along with a international address geocoding service are google now moving more into the “traditional” enterprise space held by mapquest, map-point and multi-map ? The service is for the US and Canada only at the moment, but the intention is to expand to other markets.

Written and submitted from the Conference room of the Where 2.0 at the Fairmont Hotel, San Jose, using the conferences free wifi network.

Categories
GIS OGC

Where 2.0 – The challenge of innovation from the edge

Where2.0

Next week I will be attending the Where 2.0 conference in San Jose, and if it has anything like the impact the conference had last year on the Geographic Information world, it will not disappoint.

Although last year saw major announcements from the GYM club, it was the presentations from people like Nathan Eagle and the father of mash-ups Paul Rademacher who really demonstrated the paradigm shift that is happening in the use of geographic information.

Neither Nathan or Paul come from the “traditional” GIS industry and although it is not unusual for innovation to come from the edge of an existing domain, it is causing a real cultural clash with the established industry.

The “mash-up” community have a different culture and a different world view to the traditional industry, this was perfectly illustrated this week in the blogosphere with a discussion around how the developing GeoRSS standard is taken forward, with well argued points made by Allan Doyle in his blog, where he expresses concerns as to the potential for OGC to “hijack” the standard.

The OGC, I hope in this case, wish only to move towards greater adoption of GeoRSS, but may have to modify their processes radically in recognition that the dynamic of the industry has changed – a point many other organisations representing the “traditional” GI industry would do well to recognise.

If you are travelling to where 2.0 drop me a line – It would be good to catch up over a beer and meet in real life.

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

Categories
GIS Oracle

5,000 changes a day and other urban myths..

We all know the statistic that 80% of all information is spatial, but I guess like most people I’m not clear where that particular figure has come from, and thinking about it.. I not convinced it is actually true. There is much information held in databases around the world which is about activities which happen at specific locations, but as much as 80% ?

Another much repeated statistic is that Ordnance Survey makes 5000 changes to the national geospatial database every day – this time however, although I’m not sure where the statistic came from, I can put more accurate figures in place.

As part of the development of a new Oracle Spatial database system, we have looked at the number of transactions going through the database in order to scale the system, a 10 node RAC cluster by the way ..

In general day to day operations the OS actually makes between 30-50,000 changes per day, representing the modification of existing features in the database and the addition of new features into the landscape, things like new housing estates.

Over the past few years however a larger than average amount of change has been happening as a result of the Positional Accuracy Improvement Programme, resulting in peaks of 500,000 changes in a day !!

These figures sound a lot especially compared to the often stated 5,000 changes a day, but you need to remember the database contains around a billion individual features.

We really did need a new database !!!

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

Categories
GIS Thoughts

Spatial analysis hits the mainstream..

mySociety Travel maps

mySociety have put the analysis of geographical information into the mainstream press, with the London evening newspaper, The Standard running a report today on the Travel Maps they have created working with the Dept. for Transport in the UK.

This is great to see, and again compliments to Tom and Chris for the work they are doing, but don’t you think it is strange that the usefulness of this type of spatial analysis has been popularised in the eyes of the media by the guys at mySociety and not the traditional users of GI who have had access to this data and the tools to produce isochrones for many years.

BTW I live right between the two red vectors to the west of London indicating faster travel times.. ah well 🙂

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

Categories
GIS Thoughts

E911 almost there…

Wired reports on progress in the US on E911 legislation which requires mobile operators to pass the location of emergency calls to the emergency services. Despite a 2005 deadline most providers it appears are only now getting to the position where location data is available and unlike in Europe the route adopted has been through the use of GPS enabled phones, rather than network based analysis.

For the benefit of public safety the faster this and the equivalent E112 rules in Europe are met the better, but remember this will also provide a major boost to the reawakening LBS market.

As I have noted before however knowing where you are is only part of the answer for the development of the LBS market, we still need richer geospatial databases and most importantly really compelling applications.

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