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GIS

Geospatial archiving – or how to backup 25,000 iPods

As is often the case the press have not quite got this story right, but pretty close.
Although it may not match the perception of “the man on the street”, OS is a data business, and over the past 5 years since I have been working here, the volumes of data we deal with have increased massively.

Not only in terms of new sources of digital imagery but also from increasing numbers of geospatial feature databases used in product development.

Data volumes today are over 500 Tb – that’s around 25,000 iPods !!

As a “National Mapping Agency” and as part of government there are additional responsibility’s in terms of maintaining an archive of the data throughout is lifetime and hence the need to develop strategies to archive large amounts of data.

UDO DiscWe have chosen to adopt UDO media, very high density optical media which can store 30GB per disk and which is far more resistant to environmental conditions than traditional magnetic media.

The bigger issue for us however is to make sure that the data is able to be used potentially in 50 years time which is guaranteed life of the media. Will we be able to read the data formats used (TIFF, SQL load files, CSV) in 2056 ? We have tried to select as open generic formats as possible but we need to document how the data is accessed as in the future we may need to be emulating the environments of today on some future computing platform.

There is an interesting precedent.. The BBC’s Domesday Project of 1986 based on a BBC model B micro and LV disc was rescued from its unreadable state by the National Archives a couple of years ago.

Written and submitted from the Holiday Inn Express Southampton, using my Vodafone 3G network card.

Categories
GPS Thoughts

Nuvi integrates ‘where’

I remember the first time I used Satellite Navigation (Satnav), it involved a copy of Auto-route on a pentium powered laptop, a serial cable, a Garmin GPS45 receiver and a lot gaffer (duct) tape – but it worked !!

In many ways today’s portable satnavs have not really changed the way they work much beyond what was available nearly ten years ago.. you enter a destination, the system uses a stored roads database to calculate the route to the destination and this is then iterated as you travel along the route. OK so today’s system may also use a online service or TMC receiver to update traffic data but in terms of the basic operation not a great deal has changed.

In the past I have often noted that in terms of LBS, the industry has ignored the point, that the most important part of “where” is not the absolute location in terms of a lat/long co-ordinate, but the fact that it provides context to other information. In terms of Satnav the same is also true.. are the designers of satnavs really making the most of the fact that they have locational context information always available ?

Garmin UK have been kind enough over the past couple of months to let me try out one of their Nuvi 360 satnav systems (thanks Claire) and I have been very impressed, that in a number of ways, Garmin is making use of locational context in the overall way the system works.

Firstly the Nuvi has a very neat security device, in addition to a 4-digit PIN code, the “security location” is a specific location that you must take you device to unlock it, if you forget the PIN code. e.g. you can only reset the PIN code if you take your device to this location – very smart.

Nuvi

The second use of locational context, is a safety feature which prevents the user from making system changes while the nuvi and the vehicle it is in – is moving!

There is still some way to go to increase the possible integration however, why not automatically change the zoom level with speed, decreasing scale as speed increases – if you are travelling on a motorway you don’t need to see all streets, likewise when travelling at less than 30mph, you are likely to be in a residential area and will need more detail.

There are other simple ways of making the system appear more intelligent to its user – list potential destinations ordered based on distance from the current location, default to home as the default destination if you are not at your home location, during the morning rush hour make “work” your default destination etc..

In terms of Satnav we are I would suggest just entering the mainstream market … there will be a whole bunch of potential customers out there for whom the current generation of systems is still to complex, even without the gaffer tape!

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

Categories
GIS Oracle Thoughts

Map Search.. How difficult can that be ?

Well actually, more complex than you might at first think… If you have bought a map online from Ordnance Survey in the past couple of weeks you will have used a redesigned store application that features a geographic search capability which recommends mapping products based on location.

mapsearch

This is actually a more difficult process than you might imagine, the search works across a range of OS and Partner products each of which are at different scales and which have different extents e.g they cover different areas, which often overlap.

There are two ways to search, one driven using a webmap (a simple ArcIMS WMS implementation) that provides a point to base the geographic search on, and a more sophisticated gazetteer search.

The gazetteer search is exciting in that is uses not just a list of placenames and points, but also place names and areas where appropriate classified by settlement and feature type.

For example enter “swindon’ into the search, and the system would retrieve ..

  • Swindon (Urban Region) – The area of the town
  • Swindon (Unitary Authority) – The larger area of the unitary authority
  • Swindon Swindon (Town) – A single point representing the centre of the town

As well as the villages Swindon in Gloucestershire, Staffordhire and the hamlets of Swindon in Northumberland and the Scottish Borders classified as such.

The user is then able to select the ‘Swindon” that is right for them, and then the really clever stuff happens..

A query is made to a Oracle Spatial database, overlaying either the point or polygon onto polygon extents of all the potential porducts and where there is an overlay geographically the products are selected.

Mapsearch how it works

The selected products are then ordered by the amount of coincidence between the area of search and the extent of the product, and these are then returned to the user. So in the example above product B would come before Product A as there is greater coincidence. ( yes I know the diagram looks bad in Internet Explorer – it’s a bug – use Firefox !!)

Like many innovations to the user this seems “no big deal”, but now you know different!! and we are actually using geographic information in a real business process , a case of actually doing as we say..

Written and submitted from the Holiday Inn Express Hotel, Poole, using my Vodafone 3G network card.

Categories
Apple Google Maps GPS

Location comes to iLife

iphoto GPSSo the mac hackers have been taking apart the latest release of iPhoto and have found details of potential GPS integration and closer ties with Google Maps.

MacTelChat reports that there are a number of hidden references in the package which suggest that photos may in the near future be organised by location and mapped using the google maps api.

The ability to extract GPS information available from a photo’s EXIF data is not new, and geo-tagging of photos has been made very popular by Flickr, but the intergration with google maps rather than mapquest as used in the past in the MacOS X addressbook is of greater interest ?

Then again the blogosphere loves to speculate about Apples future plans…

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

Categories
GIS

Peter Cochrane’s Marmite presentation

Love it or hate it ?Peter Cochrane has posted his thoughts on last weeks CIO forum on his blog, as I blogged last week I think what Peter had to say was really important, and if you work in IT or are a customer of an IT dept ( I guess that is everybody) you really need to read it. Some of his key points that I think are “right on the money”

“Throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s people who knew deep technical stuff (nerds) were derided and discounted. The management attitude was that these people were irrelevant and a pain. Deep tech understanding was not seen as necessary to manage anything. How the world has changed” – and some!! however I don’t think generally the management attitude has moved far enough yet.. and in the UK in particular.

“The biggest universal mistake has been to take the old paper processes and transplant them to the screen, and then create even more paper!” – enough said !!!

“Everything is moving to the edge of networks and organisations – computing power, communication, skills, information and knowledge.” – This combined with a more mobile workforce means that we need to architect much more flexible systems with potentialy location awareness built in…

As Peter admits, his presentation was like Marmite.. you either loved it or hated it.. I guess its clear where I stand..

Categories
AGI GIS Thoughts

AGI Student of the Year

Every year Ordnance Survey sponsors the AGI Student of the Year of the year award, this years closing date is on Friday (6th October) so if you are a Lecturer of/or a student of a GIS related discipline who has finished studies in the last year, don’t miss your chance and enter for the award.

Categories
Apple

OS X – Do you really need to be admin ?

As a smug mac user, the one security point I often make to Windows users, is that I am not using a root level account by default, so unlike windows any malware on the mac (if there was any of course) could do only limited damage.

adminWhile my point is strcitly true, as this Mac Geekery blog post notes you are by default in OS X running an Admin account, which while not as scary as root, still offers more system level control than is really needed on a day to day basis.

The moral of this story is to change your user account to a standard account now, it’s very easy to do, as explained by Mac Geekery, taking just two minutes, and you will be that bit more secure..

Categories
GIS Thoughts

Eisenstein at a GIS conference?

Battleship Potemkin

It is rare indeed that you are treated to the famous Odessa steps scene of the classic Eisenstein film Battleship Potemkin at a GIS conference.. then Terra Future was not trying to be a normal GIS conference!

As I have often argued here, the GI industry is too insular in its thinking, and needs to look elsewhere to really innovate.. hence Terra Future.

Eisenstein’s classic silent film was presented by Daniel Erasmus, a fellow of the Rotterdam School of Management and co-founder and director of the Digital Thinking Network. He made the point.. that with most media we are familiar with today, the makers and the medium itself, is sophisticated enough to obtain a emotional response from their audience, who after-all could not be moved by the scene of the small boy trampled on the steps or the shooting of his mother by the Cossacks – but as Daniel pointed out when did you last see a website or digital content which prompted a similar emotional response in you ?

There is still some work to do.

Mike Liebhold is well known to the new generation of Geo hackers and the open source GI movement from his presentations at Where 2.0 and the Location Intelligence Conference. Mike focused in on the potential impact of both open source tools and data, and the importance of standards based, non proprietary storage of information, making the excellent point that it may be difficult to develop RDF based semantic web applications when the data is held in “closed” GIS systems.

Robin Mannings a returning speaker from last year, reflected on the convergence of ubiquitous computing, positioning technologies and geographic information to provide a platform for the next generation of GI applications – perhaps using the human body as an important part of the hardware of such a system. As might be expected,sadly, this was the only element of the whole day picked up my the mainstream press (The Daily Express) who described Robin as a “scientific astrologer” – Its enough to make you want to give up !!!

Daily Express

There were many more interesting workshops during the day which looked into other societal changes expected in the future and how the needs of the market for geographic information will change over the next decades. Look out for the Terra Future podcasts in the next month of so..

It is vital that as an industry we focus of better understanding the future needs of the market and continue the fundamental research in both Computer and Information Science. The innovation we have seen over the last year from the likes of GYM and the growing band of community driven mapping is after-all built on the work of the research of 30 years ago… GPS, Relational Databases, Network Topology, Remote Sensing etc.

I’d like to use this posting as a opportunity to thank everybody involved in another successful event and in particular to thank the speakers and delegates who really made the day the great success it was.

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

Categories
GIS

The Semantic web ‘lightbulb’ moment

Talk to most people in the GI industry about the semantic web, eyes glaze over or people try to move the conversation on to something else.
Why is this ?
The productive use of Geographic information online is an area where taking a semantic approach is useful, and many would argue vital, if we are ever to develop a true GeoWeb!

It does not help that trying to understand the semantic web involves understanding an impenetrable soup of acronyms and terms, RDF, OWL, SPARQL and ontology etc, however it really helps to have an expert to explain and there is no one better than Tim Berners-Lee who presented at yesterdays Terra Future event as reported by ZDNet.

Semantic tube map

For many people attending i think the real “lightbulb” moment in understanding what the semantic web was all about, was Tim’s slide of the semantic web as represented by a Tube map; after-all GI people love maps..

This really does encapsulate the need to link different types of data (the lines) semantically to extend the usefulness of particular types of application or user need (the stations).

Using the example above, a photo taken by Tim at the Ordnance Survey can be linked via its embedded time stamp to his calendar, which in turn can then be linked to the Terra future event he was attending which in turn could be linked to the address of the Ordnance Survey.

While each of these applications and their associated databases have been developed for specific purposes, by describing and making their contents available using an Resource Description Framework (RDF) description of their meaning (ontology) we can join up these databases.

You cannot underestimate the challenge or importance of a semantic approach to solving the problem of linking geographical databases, an approach of linking databases based on a single view of the world as characterised by the DNF approach can only take you so far.

My thoughts from the other excellent speakers who presented at Terra Future tomorrow..

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

Categories
GIS opensource

United Kingdom – OSGEO

osgeo
Following on from last weeks FOSS4G2006 conference in Lausanne, OSGEO the foundation behind the development of open source GIS software is establishing a UK Chapter.

This is great news, as the UK GI community is not a great user of such tools (The OS included it must be said – at least at the moment) and increased awareness of the value of open source tools was one of the main messages to come out of the AGI technical SIG meeting on Open Source earlier this year.

For more details contact Chris Puttick at Oxford Archaeology.