Category: GIS

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GIS GPS Thoughts Transport

The dust settles on NOKTEQ

The Analysts views on the Nokia offer for Navteq makes some interesting reading. Now that the initial excitement is over, the collective view as excellently summarised by Adena at All Points Blog is in some ways surprising.

NokTeq

On many occasions these industry experts describe Navteq and for that matter Tele Atlas as GPS companies, clearly demonstrating a lack of understanding of the GI / PND market.

Navteq and Tele Atlas are classic examples of the “Data is the Intel Inside” O’Reilly-ism, provided a crucial element to a larger solution not just in the navigation space, but to a lesser extent web-mapping, and even professional GIS. It’s interesting however that neither company while still independent was able to achieve brand recognition, to the extent it registered with the consumer – one did not hear “Sorry I will only buy your device if it has Tele Atlas data”.

Clearly Nokia are positioning Navigation, Maps and LBS even as a major part of their offering, in Europe marketing a Nokia PND which competes directly with Tom-Tom. But Nokia (and Tom-Tom) realises I’m sure that the future of personal navigation will increasingly be off-board navigation delivered to mobile devices perhaps delivered through channels independent of both the mobile industry and the automotive industry who are too conservative in their approach.

For the PND potential alone this deals make sense for Tom-Tom and Nokia as they provide control over a major cost of their solutions, what will be interesting in the future will be the relative contribution made by “Cloud” collected data, as organisations like OpenStreetMap, and the new generation of devices start to collect data themselves as they are used. If this grows as rapidly as some expect, it will make there acquisitions appear even more expensive.

Written and submitted from the BA Lounge, Heathrow Airport, using the BTOpenzone 802.11 network.

Categories
Data Policy GIS

Nokia courts Navteq

How serious is Nokia about the LBS and Local Search space, well at least $7bn is would appear if today’s report in the Wall Street Journal is accurate. Following the Tom-Tom play for Tele Atlas, Navteq was always going to be up next.

At $7bn this makes the Tele Atlas deal of approx €2bn look great value ?

Written and submitted from the Scandic Regina Hotel, Herning, Denmark, using the hotels free 802.11 network.

Categories
AGI GIS neogeography

AGI 2007 Here come the neogeographers

Just got back from the 2007 AGI conference, which I thought was a massive improvement on previous years events. Steven Feldman and his team at the AGI have done a great job downscaling the event, and taking a new direction as a residential conference for the GI industry to talk to itself.

The GI industry in the UK is now well beyond the stage in its maturity where there is a need for a big conference and exhibition to attract new users – today if you need GIS, you are already a user.

So this years conference was really an opportunity for the industry to meet and discuss issues and developments, and to help develop a sense of community.

Barney SurveyorThis year the recurring theme seemed to be the impact of Neogeography (Andrew Turner has a lot to answer for !!) on the traditional GIS industry or Paleogeography as I called it in my keynote.

I think, there is still someway to go for the GIS industry to fully come to terms with the potential that a neogeography approach to providing solutions to users has, and there is still a large amount of scepticism, but I was really pleased to see a programme which contained a number of “neogeo” presentations.

Of particular note for me, Ian Holt and John Abbott of Widr gave two excellent practical demonstrations of building mashups using location aware API’s, Ed Freyfogle of Nestoria was impressive as ever and Nick Black opened many peoples eyes in the audience to OpenStreetMap, many of whom it would appear had not come across it before.

Nick introduced Cloud Made a new project in collaboration with Steve Coast to offer commercial support to organisations wanting to use OpenStreetMap data – Cloud Made is only just getting off the ground, but think Redhat and Linux.

There really are two ages of geography at the moment, the established GIS industry is great at serving the needs of organisations for which geospatial data really is core and for creating core large scale geospatial data. This will not change fundamentally, although there are important lessons in particular around simplicity of tools and licensing models that can be picked up from neogeography !

On the other hand Neogeography offers a better approach to communicate and engage with communities of users who need to use geography to put whatever data they are interested in, in context. This is potentially everybody !!

Vanessa Lawrence in her presentation confirmed that the OS will be releasing the OpenSpace API before Christmas!! I have a couple of bottles of Champagne I promised the team once upon a time, that I can put back on the ice !

In many ways this year the conference also seemed to represent to some extent a handover to a more relaxed and down to earth view of the industry, no better demonstrated than by the soon to be infamous AGI party, partly captured on my camera phone !

GIS professionals dressed up as village people… that would never have worked 15 years ago in Birmingham !!

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

Categories
Data Policy GIS Ordnance Survey

No comment – just grab a pint !

CheersI am not going to comment on this weeks Story in the Guardian, as I would never discuss the details of any potential commercial arrangement in public.

But I am personally very disappointed for the people at CASA at University College London who have developed a world class 3D city model which could potentially have been licensed to many organisations, not just Google.

Keep up the great work guys, it is vital for University departments to both move forward the science of GIS but also innovate in a commercial setting and develop products and techniques which have the potential to be used both by Industry and Government.

Have a few beers over the weekend, and enjoy the rest of your vacation !!

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

Categories
GIS

It’s August.. time for a “people can’t read a map” story

This is actually quite funny, maybe I have discovered a method of telling the time of year from the stories in the press.

This time last year, I was sitting in the studio’s of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, about to do a piece about how terrible Satellite Navigation was, and how PND’s are a threat to the continued existence of western civilisation.

Sitting next to John Humphrys is a bit scary, but he is actually a nice chap, anyway the nation was saved my defence of SatNav by the “Map Supporter” of the debate, the editor of Walking  Magazine in the UK getting lost on the way to the Radio Studio !!

So this year we have this story in the Daily Mail, reporting on some research carried out by a car insurance company, which suggests people had difficulty recognising obscure map symbols on a OS Road Map.  

Map Symbols

So what is the concern here.. I doubt actually that people could ever recognise this symbols in the first place, PND’s and in-car SatNavs have not made people less map literate, they were never map literate in this way in the first place.

Most people use a map to plan routes, from place A to B not something you need and awareness of the fact that green shading represents mud! 

Fewer people carrying maps in their cars, is a result not only on the increased use of satellite navigation, but also the use of online route planning tools like Google maps, which are often more up to date that road atlases. People also no longer carry extensive tool kits and spare parts in their cars as they would have once done.

We must remember that SatNavs are not perfect, but in almost all cases, contain the same information as road atlases, but presented in a more useable way and with the massive advantage of knowing where you are !!.

Congratulations to the insurance company for recognising the opportunity of the August quite time for the news, they won’t be getting my custom I’m afraid, but lets look forward to next Augusts story. 

Written and submitted from the SAS Radisson Hotel, Stockholm, using the free hotel WiFi

Categories
GIS neogeography

Foot and Mouth – a Geographical Problem

Foot and Mouth

So once again we find ourselves facing an outbreak of Foot and Mouth, hopefully this time around the importance of the geographical information in fighting the spread of the disease will be recognised early on. Things look hopeful, Defra have already a map of the initial outbreak on their website, and of course today the tools to communicate this information are very different from the last outbreak in 2001.

I was able to create this KML file in 5 minutes from the details on the Defra website.

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

Categories
Data Policy GIS LBS

Community Data Capture major part of Tom Tom Tele Atlas deal

Just listening to the conference call on the Tom Tom acquisition of Tele Atlas one of the major drivers behind the deal is the recognition of an ecosystem between PND’s capturing geospatial data and traditional “professional” GIS data capture techniques.

Without community generated content, in a online future if will not be possible to provide the expected level of currency of data – Strong stuff but hard to argue with.

If this is not a wake-up call for the traditional mapping organsiations I don’t know what else is !!

Written and Submitted from the Google Office, London.

Categories
GIS INSPIRE neogeography OGC Thoughts

Neogeography.. it was just a dream..

Imagine waking up in the beautiful Portuguese city of Porto and finding out the past two years of your life were a dream… All that talk of GeoRSS, Map Mash-ups, KML, User generated My Maps, The GeoWEB and Paris Hilton were all part of a dream.

We it felt a bit like that on the first day of the annual European Commission GI and GIS Workshop. Over 200 hundred GIS users from Public Sector Organisations and a few private sector ones are together meeting to discuss the impact of the INSPIRE directive now that it has been passed by the European Parliament.

ECGIS workshop

During this first day the web 2.0 buzzwords of neogeograhy were notable by their absence.

Now I am actually less disappointed that I might have been, let me explain why…

INSPIRE is, contrary to all of the fuss last year drummed up by some in the UK, quite tightly focused on the supply of harmonised environmental geospatial data to the institutions of the European Commission, by public sector organisations in the member states. – There is no “public” interface here and the citizens are not seen as major customers for INSPIRE services.

As such you can think of this as a complex back office system for European Government, as much an Enterprise GIS for Brussels as a Spatial Data Infrastructure. So key to success will be clear definition of requirements and well specified system design.

Now here is the rub, despite the fact that much of the INSPIRE directive is not expected to be implemented until at least 2010, it is been designed now and must used well specified and recognised standards – things like the ISO 19100 series of standards developed by the Open GeoSpatial Consortium.

It’s not difficult to appreciate the problem, REST based interfaces, KML, GeoJSON, GeoRSS etc might actually be the best technologies to use today and would be the tools of choice of many, however like many other Government IT projects INSPIRE needs to follow the low risk route of SOAP, WSDL, WMS, WFS etc.

So we may find that organisations will use OGC style interfaces to communicate to other public sector organisations and the commission, while using lighter weight technologies to publish information to their citizens. This is no bad thing !!

I am however disappointed by the continued focus on metadata driven catalogue services as the primary mechanism to find geospatial data, I don’t believe this will work as nobody likes creating metadata, and catalogue services are unproved.

INSPIRE needs GeoSearch !!

Written and Submitted from the Le Meridien Hotel, Porto using the in-room broadband network.

Categories
GIS

Where not to use Windows (Part 2)

Second, in I think a potentially long series of examples, where I have come across our favourite operating system causing a few problems. So after the South West Trains ticket machine, I give you the new London Underground video advertising display.. or not !!

Not windows plaease
Written and Submitted from the Terminal 2, Heathrow Airport, London using the BTOpenzone wifi network.

Categories
GIS

Spatial Law blog

Increasingly a topic of discussion in both the neogeography and mainstream GI communties are the legal aspects of what we do, from privacy to liability this is becoming the hot topic of the year. So its great to see Kevin Pomfret, well known from a number of conferences presentations starting his Spatial Law blog which has gone to must read status on my blogroll.

Spatial law blog

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

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