Category: Blog

mySociety have put the analysis of geographical information into the mainstream press, with the London evening newspaper, The Standard running a report today on the Travel Maps they have created working with the Dept. for Transport in the UK.

This is great to see, and again compliments to Tom and Chris for the work they are doing, but don’t you think it is strange that the usefulness of this type of spatial analysis has been popularised in the eyes of the media by the guys at mySociety and not the traditional users of GI who have had access to this data and the tools to produce isochrones for many years.

BTW I live right between the two red vectors to the west of London indicating faster travel times.. ah well 🙂

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

Wired reports on progress in the US on E911 legislation which requires mobile operators to pass the location of emergency calls to the emergency services. Despite a 2005 deadline most providers it appears are only now getting to the position where location data is available and unlike in Europe the route adopted has been through the use of GPS enabled phones, rather than network based analysis.

For the benefit of public safety the faster this and the equivalent E112 rules in Europe are met the better, but remember this will also provide a major boost to the reawakening LBS market.

As I have noted before however knowing where you are is only part of the answer for the development of the LBS market, we still need richer geospatial databases and most importantly really compelling applications.

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

Last week I was asked to make a presentation to the Ordnance Survey Partner Conference, and I took as my topic the innovation that is taking place under the banner of “Web 2.0”

My first surprise was how few of the attendees had heard the term “web 2.0” before, I wonder if this is representative of the inward nature of the industry in general or of the UK in particular ?

Anyway I covered in my presentation the seven elements as identified by Tim O’Reilly as central to the web 2.0 approach, and focused in on the areas I thought of special interest to the GI industry.

So hear with due respect to Tim are the key elements I believe are relevant to the GI Industry;

Simple services

Today’s consumers of geographical information both “amateur” and “professional” require much simpler task orientated applications preferably delivered across the web to browser or thin client applications. Only very few specialist “high end” users, and I would include the OS in this group, need traditional tool kit based GIS software.

Data included

As a one time system vendor I can well remember the days of manning a booth at an industry show showing fantastic GIS software, when a member of the buying public came along and asked to see a map of their house/office etc. Of course I would have to say that we did not have that data loaded on the demo, and that they would have to find a third party willing to provide them with data at additional cost, once they had bought our software – funny enough many did not come back !! If the GYM club has only taught us one thing it is that data must be included, and its quality will increasing be a deal making factor. – As O’Reilly puts it, Data is the Intel Inside.

Exploit the “people inside” the application

Although Google, eBay, and Flickr etc. are technically interesting applications and represent new approaches to on-line business what is really interesting is that much of their value comes from the content of their users. In fact Google has no content on its own, it’s value comes from exploiting the linkages other people make between websites. From a GI perspective it is easy to recognise the value that users of Geographical Information can put “back into the machine”, both in terms of providing quality assurance and most excitingly as a source for the “sense of place” data the traditional GI industry is so poor at.

Innovation from the edge

Lastly don’t look to the traditional GIS industry for innovation, or mainstream IT for that matter… watch the geeks !!

Written and submitted from the BMI Lounge at Heathrow Airport, using the BT Openzone wifi network, on the way to Survey Ireland 2006.

I’ve have been at the Ordnance Survey 5 years now.. and at times I would be the first to admit that life has often been very frustrating… The organisation has come on leaps and bounds in many ways over this time, but I still feel like the proverbial “captain of a oil tanker” trying to turn his ship.

So to vent my frustration to some extent, I present today the first of a number of irregular postings which describe my own personal view as to what the OS needs to do differently, if the OS does not manage to get there, well at least you will understand my intentions – and hey I have got these off my chest.

Let me make it clear at the start, the activities of the OS are highly valuable, and as I have made clear on many occasions I believe the operations of the Ordnance Survey (or any mapping agency) are best funded directly by its users through licensing data rather than general taxation.

There is however, an argument, that the requirement to license data restricts it’s use, and in particular, reduces innovative uses of geospatial data. I don’t think however the problem here is actually licensing data for specific activities, I believe the issue is that the OS makes it too difficult for potential users to understand the value in its data.

Historically the OS has made it very difficult for anybody to gain access to its data, in many markets there was no alternative to using Ordnance Survey mapping and very restrictive controls of it’s use were enforced (When I joined the OS it was not possible to license OS data for display on the web in any from whatsoever !!).

Well clearly the Landscape has changed..

There is now real choice for many users of OS geospatial products, both in terms of other commercial providers and through the developing open source geodata movement. Also, as with the general software industry, the customer is taking control, demanding much more from their providers – wanting better understanding of their business, solutions rather than pre-packed solutions etc.

The software industry is responding to these demands by changing the way it operates, and the OS needs to the follow these trends.

Software publishers, like geospatial data providers have traditionally exploited IP in the form of packaged solutions, this is changing – increasingly software is becoming a service business, where in the past corporate customers might have bought a CRM system, now they rent usage at salesforce.com.

Geospatial data on its own can never deliver a total solution in the way that salesforce.com does, however the OS with it partners can provide geospatial data as a managed service… do customers really want the hassle of installing GIS software, loading and converting data at regular intervals ?

Providing OS data as a service to an increasingly networked group of potential customers massively reduces the barrier of entry to geospatial information.

The big difference I think this would also make, is that is would allow potential users to “Try OS data for Free” – OK pick yourself up off the floor and let me explain..

Let users discover the value in OS data by actually deploying it, and if the value is there, they will pay for it later.
This is clearly based on trust, but the reality of our industry is that for too long we have focused on the buyers of geospatial information and not its users, who are often the innovators but who need access to OS data for example, to figure out its value.

Most enterprises are honest and when a real need is identified and a solution found they will pay!! This is how salesforce.com has become successful selling to sales guys who were frustrated by the big iron ERP systems, it is also behind the success of the Blackberry which was a personal buy before it became corporate.

So Ordnance Survey 2.0 must work at reducing the resistance to identifying the value in geospatial data by concentrating on the delivery of information within a service and by making the service initially free – if the user sees no value then simply switch the service off.

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

I blogged a few weeks ago about the generally unrecognised potential value of geospatial “attention data”, the information which describes what we are interested in, as manifested by the information we leave behind when we use web-sites.

The BBC today reports on Googles harvesting of its attention data using its new Trends analytic tools.

It appears that Birmingham in the UK is the centre globally for searching for porn on the internet, following by Brisbane, Perth and Sydney and Melbourne – does this say something about Australians? Very bizarrely these major cities are followed by Brentford a suburb of London just a few Km north of Teddington…

I smell something fishy 🙂 with these findings, but regardless of how this information may have been analysed, I think it still demonstrates the value of this type of data.

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