Category: GIS

There has been much comment around the GI blogosphere about the Microsoft Local Live teams latest development a “street” interface
Although a little difficult to drive (hint – use the shift key to stick to the roads) it is great fun !

This is a really interesting highly interactive interface development, and is yet another example of what can be done with AJAX programming – but really how useful is it.

I really don’t want to come across as critical of the developers here, they are trying new stuff out and developing eye catching applications quickly, but this is in my mind an exciting experiment, and a contrast to a9’s yellow pages approach to providing local information.

Is this the future of local live – i don’t think so

There is good reason while the abstract cartographic representation of spatial data has endured, it is because it produces representations that are easy to use and which are effective at communicating large amounts of geospatial information in one go.

While the street interface local live have developed is fun to use, I would argue it is easier to the traditional “virtual earth’ map or image interface to find local information even though or because it is more abstract.

But as a tool for developing a “sense of place”, communicating those qualitative aspects that make San Francisco feel different to London – then this is fantastic.

Architecture styles, street signs, red buses… all of these visual clues are important aspects of geospatial information we have as an industry ignored until now.

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

The most talked about conference of last year, was Where 2.0 and organisers O’Reilly have now opened the 2006 Conference for registration, this year a few miles south in San Jose.

Well worth a visit for the non traditional GI industry view of the world.

Over the next day or so you will see press releases announcing that Ordnance Survey has signed up to be the sole agent for Pictometry in Great Britain. Pictometry is the technology that fuses oblique aerial photography, with orthomodels and geospatial feature data to produce a roamable intelligent images from which you can interrogate spatial data and make accurate measurements.

Microsoft Live local has a basic version of pictometry data, which they call “Birds Eye Images” available for selected US cities. – As a Brit though this makes be think of Fish Fingers !!

This is clearly a bit of a departure for the OS as we will be distributing more than just information, Pictometry is one of the first geospatial fusion products, where to provide very rich information in an intuitive way, there needs to be a very tight binding between the source data, processing algorithms and the client application – in some ways this is similar to the route adopted by geo-exploration products like Google Earth.

Over time I have no doubt that there will be more standardised data models and methods to allow these types of applications to become more interoperable but we are today taking our first steps.. exciting times indeed and a great way to give users access to the rich geospatial data “behind the map”.