Blog posts
If you work in a UK Local Authority, I would be grateful if you could send me (confidentially if you prefer) any communications you may have received recently from the Ordnance Survey in reference to the potential use of the Google Maps API on your website.
Thanks
ed
Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.
I’ve been thinking over the last few weeks that at last LBS (Location Based Services) is becoming a real market, what with the release of iPhone 2.0 and the imminent release of the first Android phone with its location platform. It has taken much longer then any of us would have expected, but applications using location are finally becoming mainstream.
At the same time however I have also been thinking that the term itself may no longer be appropriate. Actually location is just one signal that application and service developers can use to understand context, ie what is happening at any point in time to an individual and therefore what information is most relevant to them.
I quite like the term “context based computing” to describe this, as it encapsulates what we understand as LBS today but also extends into the future use of other types of sensors and devices to provide services relevant to specific activities we carry out in our daily lives.
A great example of the type of service I mean is the soon to be released fitbit, which was a runner up in this weeks Techcrunch 50 event. Fitbit is a small device which measures your activity during the day and night and reports back to your computer whenever you are in wireless network range of it, building up a profile of the calories you burn, how much time you sleep and the quality of your sleep.
Very neat !
Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.
Seems like only last year, ah yes it was last year, that the bored press hits upon it annual “shock horror – nobody can read maps” story. This year there is a slightly different spin, due to the input of the British Cartographic Society (BCS) complaining that nobody is creating maps like they used to..
Modern online maps and satnavs don’t display as much detail, it is argued by the BCS, missing out features like churches, village greens , etc., of course this is rubbish! Most online maps contain more detail than any traditionally designed map could ever do, but that detail is hidden behind an interactive interface, features are displayed dependent upon the level of zoom (scale) or the purpose of the map itself.
Cartography the craft of compiling maps by selecting the information to be displayed and how it is to be represented in print, has a long history, but the traditional skill is becoming less relevant as the final media used to communicate is rarely paper, hence this desperate cry for attention.
That’s not to say the principals of design are not important in the creation of “maps” for screen display, indeed one could argue for the need of a “new” cartography which adopts rather than ignores the capabilities of screen based maps to portray information dynamically.
The criticism also fails to take into account the biggest impact of the online revolution as far a mapping is concerned, now anyone with a web browser can be the publisher of maps, you no longer need to be a government institution or a large commercial company to produce a map and publish it to a global audience, Mash-ups anyone ?
Will the people mapping the impact of Hurricane Gustav over the next few days, care that perhaps they don’t have the academic qualifications and experience to call themselves cartographers or will they just get on and share useful information more quickly that could every have been done before ?
As the courses offering to teach cartography close down, there is no dedicated course in cartography taught at any UK university anymore for example, the craft/science of cartography has a choice adapt to a new world or face the same fate as Coopers, Millrights, Locomotive firemen, and Chimney-sweeps!
“Cor blimey Mary Poppins, they don’t need us cartographers to make their maps anymore and no mistake”
If you think this seems farfetched, there is reason behind my Disney reference..
In the early 1990’s Disney Animation Studios was having great success with movies such as the Lion King, Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast. Indeed they opened up an animation studio as part of the theme park in Florida, so that visitors could see animators working on the next film in production. I visiting this studio two weeks ago on vacation, it was shut down in 2004, when Disney stopped it’s traditional animation efforts, as it began concentrating on its own computer generated efforts and the outputs of the young upstarts at Pixar.
I’m sure at one point the animators of Disney looked at the crude early output of pixar and had similar comments to those of the BCS president, lets hope she and the cartographers she represents are able to adapt to the new technology, as the change is coming and the pixar of the cartographic world is an army of thousands of map-makers contributing to the most detailed global map every produced.. The GeoWeb.
Written and submitted from the BA T5 Lounge at Heathrow Airport, using it’s free 802.11 network.
From the Mapperz blog, news that Bill Chadwick has added the ability to use the Google Earth plugin to his excellent “Where is the Path” application. For a long time this has been in my mind the best OS OpenSpace API site, allowing users to visualise routes using both the excellent OS maps and Google Imagery amongst many other data sets, and then export routes directly to their GPS via the GPX format.
This is just the type of innovative value add that comes from allowing developers access to raw data and server infrastructures, users now have access to a capability that is not present in the OS Get-A-Map service for example. It would be great to see further development of OpenSpace and eventually more favourable licensing terms to see more OS data used in this way, who knows even on Google Maps one day 🙂
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
Lisa and I sat down last night and watched the excellent first epsiode of a new BBC series Britain for Above, which uses beautiful aerial photography to illustrate what can best be described as the “Geography of Britain”. This looked fantastic in HD (Virgin media managed to key the one HD channel they supply working for a whole hour !) and I’m sure the series and its website, books and DVD it will be a great success.
This got me thinking as to the widespread appeal of aerial photography, and the contrast with popular perception of cartography. This is driven by the fact that I have two talks to give at the Royal Geographical Society and Society of Cartographers conference in September, and am thinking about the future of cartography.
It’s difficult to imagine Andrew Marr using topographic maps to explain.. the british transport network, or the structure of the city of London on prime time TV, but why is this? Of course the same spatial patterns are represented on a cartographic map, indeed there is much more information of an OS map than an aerial photo, so why are maps not more widely used by the mass media?
In the UK of course there are specific issues to do with licensing mapping, but I think there are two key issues..
Firstly topographic maps need to be interpreted requiring a knowledge of cartographic design standards; a river is a blue line, a major road is a red or green line (depending upon scale) and a motorway is a blue line, (but not the same blue as a river obviously).
Image produced from the Ordnance Survey Get-a-map service. Image reproduced with kind permission of Ordnance Survey and Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland.
Looking at aerial photography either vertical or oblique it is easy to identify natural and man made features based upon our direct experience, the amount of interpretation needed to recognise how a motorway might look from above compared to ground level is relatively small.
Secondly imagery as presented in last nights programme is dynamic, we were rarely presented with still images, instead we saw buses moving through London streets, trains approaching Waterloo station and ships sailing in the English Channel.
In itself, such dynamic content aids in the interpretation of the information presented, but this can be further enhanced as was done so last night by including animations which illustrated changes over a longer period of time.. the GPS traces of flights or taxi’s very well illustrated the economic structure of the UK.
So for cartography this raises an interesting challenge.. how can the art/science of map making really exploit the nature of soon to be dominant medium of electronic communications, rather than the static medium of paper and will the map of the future actually be an image ?
Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.
At the ESRI UC Executive submit this weekend, Dirk Kempthorne the US Secretary of the Interior announced that the 35 year old archive of Landsat Imagery held by the USGS would be made available for free public access via the web. Of course how federal data is made available in the US has always been something we Europeans looked upon with some envy despite it’s sometimes poor quality, but it’s important to remember that Remotely Sensed Imagery has always been slightly different, and a less permissive licensing regime has existed around what was seen as a more commercial data set.
So this is great news, but it illustrates an interesting question ? What is the economic half life of geodata, over what period of time does the value of geodata decay ? The Landsat archive is in many ways different to “mapping” data in that the empirical value of data in the form of raw pixel values is still of considerable interest to the scientific community, but from the perspective of visual interpretation how much less valuable is a view of Las Vegas from the late 1980’s compared to one of today.
From a mass-market perspective there is a clear difference in usefulness, for providing a synoptic view of the world today to provide context for other types of information clearly geodata needs to be as current as possible, 10 year old imagery particularly for urban areas is much less useful. But financially how much less valuable.
For most types of commercial geodata this value decay curve is impossible to establish, because of the combination of software like licenses and copyright, so for example Ordnance Survey data in the UK has the same commercial value when it is one day old, one year old and 49 years old, but it then drops to zero as it drops out of copyright.
Alongside the broad argument around making public sector information more open, perhaps it would also be useful to think about the data that will always be commercial, but has a value which decays over time.
Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.
I’ve just spent the last couple of days the Google Geo Marketing people, and was introduced to and instantly became a fan of a series of videos produced by the vacationeers, a LA based group of video artists.
These were developed independently of Google and are just brilliant..
This is my favourite (please note Daily Mail journalists.. this is a work of fiction), but visit their site to watch them all !
Written and submitted from Madrid Airport, using its kubi 802.11 network.
Seems more of the ways of the mobile industry is rubbing off on the once shinny Apple brand.
This is a link to a disscussion on one of the Apple forums discussing availbailty of the white iPhone as an upgrade for O2 users in the UK. Only it has been removed…
Thanks to the wonders of the Google Index cache however we can view the original content, and is does not make happy reading for Apple or O2, however the fact that these critical comments have been removed shows poor judgement, and puts Apple in a very poor light.
The final comment by Neil Holmes before the discussion was removed is damming..
So much for Think Different !
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
In the Retail industry the growth of Apple Sores has really stood out, as a success story in the electronics sector, and anyone who has ever visited a PC World or Currys Digital (Its still Dixons to me) cannot but comment on the different experiences, knowledgable enthusiastic staff, slick processes, great design etc.
Well the wheels have come of the Apple Store shine for the past two weeks, following the launch of the iPhone 3G. What a shambles, from The Unofficial Apple Weblog, Chris Mac Morrison took this photo in the Regent Street Apple store of the queue of people waiting to buy their iPhones.
Rather than continue the ground breaking activate your iPhone at home process from the old iPhone, it would appear that Apple has given in to the demands of the mobile phone operators and are selling iPhones in the same way other phones are sold on the high street, with the required ID checks, credit checks, DNA samples and general humiliation.
And of course we all know how well the O2 online store worked !
The tragedy is that Apple had the opportunity to change an aspect of the mobile phone industry, one of many aspects people dislike, actually its difficult to find anyone who has much positive to say about their mobile phone operator.
I personally believe the whole industry would be in a better state if all phone were sold sim free, users would of course have to pay the full price for their devices but would then have the freedom to change operators more easily and in the process through competition drive up the standards of service provided by the operators.
Would you be happy to buy a car subsidised by a particular oil company, with the agreement that you would only buy petrol (Gas) from that companies service stations ?
A real missed opportunity, and Apple as a brand has been tarnished by association.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
As many of us have always suspected, geospatial data is a great foundation to finding and publishing all types of government information, so it should not be unexpected that many of the entries for the Show us a better way competition to develop applications using public sector information make use of geospatial technology.
These move beyond the simple map mash-ups including for example some mobile LBS applications.
It’s wonderful to see organisations like the Dept. for Transport, Post Office and the OS 🙂 opening up their databases via API’s and simple click through licenses. These are of course temporary arrangements in many cases, but this is a great opportunity to prove the potential of publishing this information in this way.
For many years the supporters of both sides of the argument around the release of public sector information based their argument not on real evidence, but on dogmatic positions.. hopefully we will soon have some real world examples to develop evidence to conclude the arguments one way or the other.
Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.
