Category: GIS

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GIS OGC

OGC – Setting a new direction ?

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.

Categories
GIS

The family names map a victim of it’s own success already ?

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.

Categories
GIS Google Earth Thoughts

Wired worried about web map privacy

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.

Categories
GIS Technology

Where 2.0 Conference 2006 dates announced

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.

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GIS Thoughts

And so it starts – Google Local (maps) get’s blue pins

Spot the blue pins..

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.

Categories
GIS Technology

Offical Google Earth for the Mac !!

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.

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GIS Thoughts

Tim Berners-Lee joins the bloggers

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….

Categories
GIS Thoughts

Digital Mapping and Tracking finds Radio 4

BBC Radio 4 graphic

Before Christmas I took part in the recording of the BBC Radio 4 shoptalk radio show which was broadcast yesterday, the Real Audio archive is here. Drop me a comment if you would like an mp3 version…

I was very impressed by the quality of research carried out before hand, the excellent questions asked of myself and my fellow guests Steve Chilton, chair of the Society of Cartographers, Martin Capel Smith, of Navman, Alain de Taeye of TeleAtlas and Peter Cochrane who presented at the Terrafutre event and Ian Rycroft of Globalpoint Technologies – resulted in a very interesting programme.

Nathalie Vetter and Peter Cridland of the London Borough of Barnet, were a surprise to me as this segment was pre-recorded but it was great to hear from Peter again, as Barnet was one of the few UK local Government Customers to implement MapGuide in my Autodesk days, and it is still going strong !!

And Yes I did say I thought the paper map would survive !!

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

Categories
GIS Thoughts

Galileo improves boiled eggs !

By using spacebourne atomic clocks, Europes chefs will be able to produce the perfect boiled egg.

Ok so I am joking.. but based on the reporting so far of todays successful launch of the Giove-A satelitte – I would not be surpised to find it somewhere.

Make no mistake Galileo when operational will be a technically superior system to GPS and will expand the potential uses of precise positioning hugely.

But the real story here, should be how this political endeavor will be funded? – the costs of the development and then operation of Galileo is expected to come largely from commercial operations – a market not yet established ?

Will satnav makers be willing to license chipsets to receive Galileo signals ?

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

Categories
GIS Thoughts

2005 The message of the year – “It’s the content – stupid”

I knew there was a reason why I worked for a government organisation.. from tomorrow I’m on holiday for two weeks – time to catch up on some reading, DVD’s and to try out building a ruby on rails application !!

Preparing for the holidays got me in a reflective mood looking back over the last 12 months for the GI industry – and what a year! I honestly don’t believe we have seen such rapid developments since the early days of GIS and certainly not with the scale of impact ever.

Clearly many will look back at the development of the mass market web mapping applications as very significant – its hard to believe, but Microsoft Live Local, Google Local, Google Earth and Frappr all appeared this year.

While all these applications have had a major impact in bringing GI to the mainstream and Google Erath in particular has resurrected the globe as a geographical user interface, I believe that the underlying message of all these developments is that – “It’s the content – stupid”

All these applications success, has been made possible by the availability of global geodata initially in the form of imagery at no cost to the consumer. The demand for good quality up to date information can now only increase as the user expectation has been set, and increasingly service providers will need to differentiate themselves based on their content.

This is an important lesson for ESRI with the upcoming launch of ArcGIS explorer, I’m sure explorer will be a more extensible development platform with a open architecture to other data sources, but will it be able to compete in terms of data availability?

The other big trend has been the democratisation of geographic information with community mapping projects and services such as Frapper becoming more popular and indeed the ability to create and publish geographic information is now possible for anybody with a laptop and cheap GPS. For the established Gi industry this is interesting at the moment, but I predict within five years open source geodata will be a reality.

It is disappointing that the GI industry in the UK remains so political with almost constant infighting between the “big fish” in the “small pond”, this seems always to have been the case, and I need to try to remain positive about it – but we are missing out on the innovation that is really moving the market forward elsewhere.

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