Category: GIS

My Christmas read this year was Richard Dawkins latest, “The God Delusion“, so it seemed appropriate that I received a blog meme from Mikel last week.

Dawkins introduced the term meme to describe a element of cultural information transferred between communities, the social networking version of a gene, I guess, in the blogosphere the term is used to describe a question or debating topic which is propagated across different blogs.

An interesting web 2.0 effect or just a modern form of the scary chain letter – I’m not sure, anyway this one seems mostly harmless so here are five things you don’t know about me.. btw it would be really interesting to work out where this started and when ? Would this not be an interesting spatial-temporal distribution problem.. I can see the time series in ArcGIS 9.2 or Google Earth any day now…

1) If not for a Field Trip in South Wales, taken at the end of my O-Levels, Geography would have passed me by, despite the fact it was about the only subject I was good at – My head was turned by jumping in and out of rivers with a bunch of girls to make stream discharge measurements ( Steady now !!) and analysing landslips using a model developed in BASIC on a Apple IIe !

Looking back why would I have taken technical drawing ?

2) I share a birthday with a great hero of mine, the great British inventor Barnes Wallis who most famously developed the bouncing bomb, Wellington Bomber and the R100 airship. A man of great principles, but an individual never completely at home with the establishment. The bouncing bomb was tested a few hundred metres from when I live in Teddington

3) I grew up in Chelsea, the famous West London “Village”, just off the Kings Road actually, missing both the cultural explosion of Punk (too young) and Sloane Rangers (too poor). Still at least I can say I still support the local team I grew up with.

4) At university for six months I dressed only in a surplus flying suit and red converse all stars, fortunately no photographs of this exist.

5) I nearly appeared on the Radio 4 Today programme to do a segment with Edward Stourton and the editor of a certain walking magazine to debate the merits of satellite navigation compared to “good old” OS maps. At 8.20 I was there sitting across from John Humphrys in the studio, ready to evangelise on the benefits of GPS, problem was the other guy got lost trying to find the studio!

So to continue this meme experiment I hand the tag onto The Very Spatial guys (Sue, Jesse and Frank – a combined answer ?), Jeff, Mr Bridges, Geoff and Dominic

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

So that’s the end of the Sir Humphrey chapter of my career, yesterday I left the OS, packing my belongings into a couple of plastic crates. It’s certainly been interesting!

To my many friends at the OS farewell, you all have my utmost respect, working with great commitment often within constraints beyond your control.

The OS will I hope change over the next few years to hopefully better serve the needs of its customers – the citizens of Great Britain, and provide them greater access to the best geospatial data in the world.

Change is not something to be feared, the history of the OS is full of episodic periods of intense change brought on by changing external circumstances, I’m sorry I was not able to orchestrate faster change during by five years there, but then again five years is but a moment in the history of an organisation which dates back to 1791.

Have a Great Christmas, and best Wishes for an exciting 2007.

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

Just returned from the latest Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Technical Committee meeting hosted by BAE systems in San Diego, where for me a important milestone was reached with the formation of a Mass Market working group, with a remit to work on “joining the dots” between the established GI standards community and the rapidly developing mass stream GI market as represented by the GYM offerings.

Hats off to Raj Singh for putting the creative effort in to developing this so far.

In this respect the attendance of the senior Google Geo staff in the form of John Hanke, Michael Jones and Brian McClendon was very important. Indeed Jones was interested in seeing how OGC could aid the standardisation of KML and clarify its relationship with GML – note these are early days but at least the right people are beginning to talk.

For OGC I think these are really important activities, OGC needs to embrace and recognise the needs of the mass market, as I pointed out in my presentation maybe there is now a new requirement for interoperability, above the levels of W*S services at the mapping API level.

In working with mass market players, OGC as an organisation, will need to recognise that some of it processes and behaviours will also have to change, like it or not the perception of the OGC as bureaucratic and slow moving is a common one, but also one which can change.

OGC has played a very important role is developing the “professional” GI market, its expertise would also have massive value to the mainstream – important progress then !

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

I visited the IGN Research Department today in Paris, and it was interesting to see the different approaches to solving similar research questions.

For a similar sized organisation, IGN has a much larger Research Dept of 100 people, compared to the 30 at the OS. Much of this research is funded by the French Government as part of the Institutes National role as the centre for geographical expertise.

Where at the OS we try to make use where possible of commercial tools and equipment, IGN build more of their own tools, including their own digital air camera for example, and their own software tools.

I was very impressed by the quality of research work taking place, some very clever algorithms are been developed to extract features automatically from imagery and is a clear area of joint interest with the OS. As this work is publicly funded all work is published and made available to the wider community.

What was very noticeable at IGN was less emphasis to market focused research which is important to the OS, in particular understanding user needs to develop new products and services does not seem to be as important – my guess is that although where share many similar problems to solve, because of the different funding models of our two organisations, the focus is slightly different.

Written and submitted from the lounge at Paris CDG airport, using the Orange wifi broadband internet connection.