Category: Blog

Blog posts

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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.

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Apple Thoughts

AppleWorks the end at last..

I loved Appleworks ( previously know as Clarisworks) and it has been finally retired with the addition of the numbers spreadsheet to Apples iWork suite. Not sure where the MacDraw like drawing application replacement is but never mind.

ClarisworksThe long life of Claris/Applework is both a reflection on the perceived dominance of Microsoft Office and a focus on Apple else where, but it is also interesting to note that is was always a very popular application all the way to its end because it was very simple, fast and well integrated. I have only just managed to stop my wife using it exclusively and moved her onto to Pages/Word.

Few users of Office use more than 10% of the capabilty of their applications and while in a business seeting there is always someone who might use more, this is not the case for the vast major of home office, and personal users.

I’m sure there are lessons for GIS designers in recognising the demand for simple applications that offer 10% on the functionality of a tool kit desktop GIS system but to 99% of the users – there are still people hanging on to their copies of ArcView 3.x I’m sure?

Written and Submitted from the Google Office, London.

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
Google Maps neogeography Technology

Thames Valley Flood Map

A Great example of community mapping and the immediacy of tools like the My Maps feature of Google Maps is this map by Oliver Williams who is collating images, videos and reports relating to the current river floods in England.

When I looked this maps was less than a hour old !!

Flood Map

Not only is this a potentially powerful way of communicating up-to-date information quickly, it is also great at telling the human story of such events.

Written and Submitted from the Google Office, London.

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.

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Data Policy neogeography Thoughts

Heads-up : The State of the Map

If you really want to take the temperature of the wider GI community this weekends The State of the Map meeting in Manchester should be well worth the trip. The potential for community generated geo data is now recognised by many of the major commercial providers of Geodata, and I’m hearing rumours that the much delayed OS OpenSpace API will be released soon.

Hope to see you there !!

Written and Submitted from the Hotel du Lac Hotel, d’Enghien-Les-Bains, France using the in-room broadband network.

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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
Google Earth Thoughts

How to get Kids interested in Geography

This week I sat in on a course run by the Royal Geographical Society to train teachers to use Google Earth in their classes. The course was excellent and will run again in October and is highly recommended. In talking to some of the teachers we soon got on to the topic of the impact that Google Earth has had in exciting their students, and the extent to which their preferred images to Cartographic view of the world.

As a teaching tool just creating a tour and visiting places without any labels displayed is very powerful, asking students to describe the shape of the landscape, patterns of settlement and of course trying to recognise the locations is fascinating.

Last week I saw this same effect in a different environment visiting the Swiss Museum of Transport Swiss in Lucerne. For an aviation anorak such as myself, this is well worth the visit, but for all geographers you must visit the swissarena, a 1:20 000 scale photo mosaic of all of Switzerland on the floor of a dedicated building.

Swissarena

This is just amazing.. constructed from nearly 8,000 images and detailed enough so that you can see individual buildings it is a huge hit with children visitors and is a brilliant tool to understand the geography of Switzerland.

We really must make the most of this opportunity, new technology has made geography interesting again.. lets make the most of it and move beyond the LandRanger extract !!!

Written and Submitted from the Terminal 2, Heathrow Airport, London using the BTOpenzone wifi network.