Blog posts
A great example of an innovative use of Google Earth Enterprise, as an extension to Local Government GIS use in the UK.
To find the application of Beehives you will just need to watch ..
Written and submitted from the Google Offices, London (51.495N, 0.146W)
Google Maps : Dear Dr. Ed, I seem to have developed a rash or well at least I’m completely covered in spots.
Dr Ed : Don’t worry Maps, it just a new way of finding geocoded images contributed by the photographers of the web.
If you have looked at Streetview ( by dragging the pegman) recently outside of the existing areas of coverage you may have noted spots of streetview coverage, this is not the result of a very disorganised group of streetview car drivers, but is a way of exposing other geocoded imagery where it is available.
Although the Google Streetview cars are once again driving the world bringing Street View images to many new countries in the meantime you can find suitably moderated and attributed user contributed images from Panoramio.
The example below is from Karon, the beach resort in Phuket, Thailand which brought back happy memories of my honeymoon, which was contributed by panoramio user bareman
The interesting point to ponder is as more and more geocoded images are published and indexed on the web, at what point if ever in the future will it be possible to replicate the complete coverage of Streetview with user contributed images ?
Well from reading a couple of press releases the signs look hopeful…
Both the OS and the Dept. of Communities and Local Government have announced the signing of the new Public Sector Mapping Agreement (PSMA), a sole source long term contract for providing mapping data to all of the public sector. I’m sure this has not gone down very well with other data providers, but that’s another topic I’m sure we will here all about in due course !
My question today is will this new agreement and the supposed more liberal licensing framework allow public sector organisations to publish their data online without restrictions imposed by the OS.
Specifically will the OS now allow local councils to publish their data using Google Maps or potentially add data to OpenStreetMap ?
Well the language is very positive..
“We’re opening the door to a world of government information that will allow the good ideas of ordinary people to become innovative digital solutions that improve public services.” says Local Government Minister Grant Shapps,
Chris Holcroft of the AGI talks about “Breaking down barriers and better enabling data sharing, the PSMA should help the public sector make better and more transparent decisions and allocate its resources more efficiently, saving time and money.”
The key passage from the OS press release is this..
“The new agreement also introduces a new licensing framework that will enable more collaborative working with delivery partners and will allow public sector organisations to re-use the data for core non-commercial public sector activities. It will also enable sharing of the data, and derived data, with other third parties for specific purposes to support delivery of the member’s public sector activity, for example, contractors, schools, ‘third sector’ charities, the public, for all your core, non-commercial, public sector activity.”
So maybe now the debate will move on from what is derived data to what is a “core activity”?
Still this all seems rather positive does it not, the proof of course will come in April next year when the PSMA comes into effect, and yes I’m sorry I know this is all rather confusing for my Australian readers as your PSMA is a whole different thing!
UPDATE : Paul from the OS Press Office has kindly responded on the OS blog, which I have now commented on, I have reproduced my comments below, but I suggest you follow the debate at the OS blog.
“Paul,
Written and submitted from the Boulder Marriott (40.016N, 105.260W)
There has been much in the blogosphere, tech and even mainstream press written about the relative merits of Flash and it’s use compared to the up and coming shinny new standard of HTML 5. While nobody other than possibly Adobe denies that HTML will be core to much of the future web, today there are some very pragmatic reasons while flash is still widely used.
That said flash has never been very popular from a web mapping point of view, every since the original Google Maps back in 2005 web mapping has developed by exploiting the cutting edge features of html and javascript.
However from a rich user experience point of view there is much that flash still has to offer..
Last week I spent some time with the people behind findmaps.co.uk, a B2B operation in London who have developed a rich mapping/GIS SaaS (“software as a service”) application using flash. The service is a very slick interface to OS mapping in the UK, and offers basic GIS functionality without any of the GIS baggage found in other web based GIS tools.
So Findmaps sits somewhere between arcgisonline and Google/Bing maps, and clearly meets a real market requirement. In particular a key point of pain that is largely successfully hidden from professional users is the almost comically complex OS licensing that has been reduced to a running shopping basket total which is updated each time you view a map.
Yes you read that right for large scale OS data you do pay each time you view the map on screen !
In many ways findmaps may represent what GIS ultimately becomes, the complex GIS we know today will become even more focused on the needs of those relatively few organisations that create data, the professional users in real estate, Land and environmental management who currently use desktop GIS will migrate to SaaS applications like this and everyone else will use web mapping tools.
A great early example of the value of the new TfL train prediction API, a map of the ‘Real time” locations of Tube Trains.
Produced by MySociety ace Matthew Somerville a really neat demo and another example of the value of releasing government datasets, and in this case an example of an occasion where an API is more useful than the raw data.
Written and submitted from the Google Offices, London (51.495N, 0.146W)
Mapnificent LondonI have for a while called out for some new cartographic approaches to communicating information which make use of the radically different capabilities of electronic displays compared to paper. To be fair I suppose the palette of tools available to the online cartography have been limited, and the state of the art was probably some of the renderings of OpenStreetMap data developed over the last year or so.
With the release at Google I/O this year of the V3 Maps API and styled maps functionality these tools are becoming more accessible, and one of the early results is a beautiful map produced by Stefan Wehrmeyer in Berlin. His Mapnificent London map uses the styled map API to show London by night, and then with full credit to the famous mapumental map, dynamically displays journey times if you used the extensive London night bus network.
The dynamic aspect makes this map really interesting by simply dragging a time slider bar you are presented with a great deal of information is a clear and simple way, something which would be difficult to achieve with traditional static cartographic techniques.
Hopefully the first of many new dynamic maps..
Written and submitted from the Google Offices, London (51.495N, 0.146W)
Courtesy of last weeks drop of Ordanace Survey Open Data, the Westminster electoral boundaries in Google Earth.
It’s amazing to think that such a key dataset was not easily accessible until so recently. Without doubt this is just the type of data set that the “free our data” movement was calling to be made freely available.
The type of innovation that comes from the increased accessibility of information is well demonstrated by the code point web service developed by Stuart Harrison over the weekend at http://www.uk-postcodes.com/ and documented on the uk-government-data-developers mailing list.
What a difference a week makes !!
I have had a couple of questions about how the free OS data is licensed, here is the license which as you can see is basically a creative commons attribution license.
This confirms there are no derived data issues.
In fact this license makes OS Opendata more “open” than Openstreetmap.
Written and submitted from the Where 2.0 Conference (37.331N, 121.888W)
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I have really enjoyed listening to the BBC Radio 4 series “On the Map” a series on mapping presented by Mike Parker a self-confessed OS Map fan, and author of Map Addict
Now Mike is very much a OS paper maps man, so in today’s programme I attempt to defend digital mapping against the acquisition that digital mapping and satnavs are destroying map-making and map-reading.
And on such a momentous day in the history of the Ordnance Survey data.
Today some 230,000 miles of Street View coverage has gone live in Google Maps, which represents arguably the most detailed map of the UK every produced. I say this because of the amount of information contained in each panoramic photograph is simply massive.
Yes it may not look like a conventional cartographic map, but it is nevertheless rich geospatial information and represents the next evolution of maps.
Street View images contain both quantitative information, parking restrictions from signs, opening times of shops, the type of tree most common is the surburan streets of Manchester and qualitative information, the “sense of place” something very difficult to represent using traditional cartographic techniques.
Street View imagery in the UK will I hope become a valuable resource to academics researching the state of the nation at the beginning of the 2010’s, a image taken every 10 metres or so for 238,000 miles a distance equivalent to travelling from the earth to the moon, must represent one of the largest archives of photographs ever collected.
It is disappointing that the raw images used to create street view will have to be destroyed at the request of the European Union Data Protection Working Party, leaving only the privacy blurred published versions for future generations to accesses, still that is the balance we need to achieve between providing useful services and protecting privacy.
When I was running around Covent Garden in the early 1990’s creating a “hypermedia” map using a video camera and Apple’s Hypercard, I had a vague idea that such a database of navigable scenes might be extended to other parts of London, but National Coverage… that would have been Science Fiction !
But then again so once was putting a man on the moon !
Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)