As promised to those of you who attended the BCS Geospatial Interest Group meeting on Monday night, my slides are now available here
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Copyright free mapping is coming..
Like a spurned lover, I was beginning to feel neglected having been ignored last week by the Guardian’s “Free our Data Campaign”, but this week we are back to normal with a piece describing the efforts of the OpenStreetMap team to Map the Isle of Wight last weekend.
In the past I have made it clear that I am fully behind the efforts of Steve Coast and the OpenStreetMap movement to create copyright free mapping, the technology is here today and with some bright people and organisation it is completely practical to produce a national street database for Great Britain.
As Jeff points out in his blog, National Mapping Agencies such as the OS need to wake up to these community driven developments, however I really think we must see them not as a threat, but as an opportunity.
Will Steve Coast be the Linus Torvalds of open source geodata ? time will tell, but I believe OpenStreetMap is every-bit as important a development in Geospatial data as the development of the Linux Kernel was for operating systems, and I suggest ultimately a similar commercial model may develop around open source geospatial data.
There is without question a place for open source “small” scale data, without the high spatial resolution, rich data models and high levels of currency which characterise products like OS MasterMap.
Open Source geospatial data products will meet the needs of many users who just need to be able to produce simple location maps and which need to be updated less frequently. But even these maps will need to be updated..
Keeping such datasets up to date, is a lot more difficult but potentially possible.. however it may need a more robust long term funding stream to support the process, keeping servers running and bandwidth costs real money.
This does boil down ultimately to the old “Free as in Speech” or ‘Free as in Beer” debate, copyright free or open source mapping may well ultimately migrate to the former position – copyright free but commerical supported in some way, this I think is still very positive for the Gi Industry, with many opportunities for commercial support and value add services.
Such a “free as in Speech” dataset supported by a robust commercial model may well meet the needs of the user community, but I not sure it will go far enough for the “free our data’ campaign which is more politically motivated.
In conclusion we must recognise that open source geodata is here to stay and is real, Mapping Agencies such as the OS must learn to adopt it’s values and meet the needs of a user community not fully served today.
Actually I really do see a role for the OS in contributing to open source databases in the future, copyright free street maps are a great starting point, but it would be great to have urban area boundaries and a coastline, for example, contributed by the OS?
btw – I appreciate the efforts of guys last weekend to make sure they were not using “in-copyright” maps of the Isle of Wight, but I think the Map of Namibia used by the guys in the articles photograph is taking things a bit too far !!
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
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London Black Cabs add GPS
This evenings Evening Standard, London’s evening newspaper reports that for the first time London’s Black Taxi Cab drivers are to be allowed to supplement they “Knowledge” of the streets of London with GPS navigation systems.
For the Public Carriage Office, not an organisation known for its grip on technology (have you ever tried to pay by credit card in a London Taxi ?) to adopt this is a massive leap forward.
This could get interesting.. is the navigation system a match for the encyclopaedic knowledge of you average London taxi driver, I actually doubt it, the intricate knowledge of the streets of London and how congested they are likely to be at any point of time is something very difficult to capture at present – another “sense of place” type of data where traditional GI approaches fail.
Still there is no longer an excuse to hear.. “Sorry Guv, Can’t go south of the river!”
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
I’ve just got back from the inaugural meeting of the British Computer Society’s Geospatial Interest Group, another example of GI hitting the mainstream. I was asked a number of questions on positioning technology and the accuracy of data, which reminded me that the OS has just completed it’s Positional Accuracy Improvement (PAI) programme.
Like most other national mapping agencies and other creators of national geospatial data products, the data contained in the OS National Database dates from a time before absolute positioning technology, where the location of a feature was ‘measured’ relative to a fixed control network and other “stable” geographical features.
For most purposes this has not been a problem, however with the introduction of GPS and the fact that the data was originally collected using local country projection systems, random location errors of up to 10 metres became obvious in rural areas.
The OS was left with the dilemma, ignore the issue – or correct it. This is not as obvious a decision as you might expect, in the UK most organisation who had captured they own information had done so in relation to features as positioned on OS maps, and these features might now be moving.
There really was no choice for the OS, as with many other organisations the widespread use of GPS meant the data has to be corrected, so five years ago the project was started and it was completed last month !
Out of the 244,000 sq Km of Great Britain, over 160,000 sq km had to be corrected using photogrammetric survey to increase positional accuracy to around a metre in most cases. To allow user defined data to be adjusted geometrically, no less than 450 million change vectors have been calculated for use in transformation software.
The OS may be one of the first organisation to address this issue, but I’m sure many other organisations will have to follow the example, the relative accuracy’s of mapping data used in the early days of digital cartography are no longer ‘fit for purpose” in the era of widespread GPS use, so for many people the earth may well be moving!
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
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Perceptions of Open Source
Last week the AGI Technical SIG, ran a one day workshop of Open Source in GIS, and although I very much enjoyed the presentations I was most interested to judge people’s perception of Open Source.
The day started with Martin Daly of Cadcorp debunking some of the myths of open source software, including
– Open source does not mean free !!
– Open source means I can get access to the source code, different to “freeware”
– Open source developers are not cola fuelled communists operating from their bedrooms, but mostly professional programmers employed by commercial companies to contribute to open source projects.
– In many ways open source licensing is as complex as commercial closed source licensing !!
There also seemed to be some confusion or a least frequent use of the terms “open standards” and “open source” in the same sentence. Open Standards are all about delivering interoperability between applications developed by different organisations (think AA batteries – always the same size, voltage etc) – such applications may be “open source” but may also be closed source.
Likewise some open Source applications may be proprietary in nature, offering a private way of transferring data across a network for example.
Of particular interest to me was the business case for selecting ‘Open Source” solutions rather than the more traditional “Closed source” Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) route.
From the user perspective this seems clear, lower initial capital outlay in terms of licensing although the overall Total Cost of Ownership may not be that different with potentially higher internal and external (if available) support costs.
A very unscientific poll of the people at the workshop actually using “Open Source” did seem to be made of largely academic and research users – who are perhaps capital poor but geek rich and are therefore able to work through the maze of compiling using the right code library versions etc.
It was notable that local and central government were poorly represented, it this because the issue of ongoing support is more of an issue – I’m really not sure ?
From the application developer perspective the motivation to go “Open Source” is less clear, the “many eyes” argument of a wide and skilled developer resource looking at your code was one of the arguments put forward, and although this makes sense for the small dispersed development team, I’m not sure this is so much the case for a company like Autodesk.
I have a lot of time for Autodesk and Mapguide in particular, the new open source version demoed by Giulio Pagan looks great, but it is interesting Autodesk chose to experiment with open source with MapGuide rather than Inventor or even AutoCAD ?
It appears that there is little focus of Open Source GIS client development, while MapServer and PostGIS offer a real alternative to closed source software like ArcIMS, there is no open source ArcView or MapInfo, tools like uDig are moving in the right direction but GIS open source does appear to be server centric at the moment.
And yes I do run OpenSource myself, I have MapServer running on my Powerbook !!
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
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Get a Mac TV Ads
With more than a passing resemblance to the switcher ads of a few years ago, Apple has launched a campaign focusing on some of the differences between macs and PC’s. Very funny, but not likely to develop the cult following of Ellen Feiss, although the PC guys does seem strangely familar..
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Google maps does Europe
Google maps (not local any more) now has street level mapping of most of Europe, expanding out from the mapping which has been available for the UK. As in the UK most of the mapping appears to be from Tele Atlas, with various imagery companies providing the imagery. Also new is a very nice dynamic context map display in the lower right corner of the map.
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The Geography of second life
Are you one of the addicted citizens of Second Life yet ? For those not familiar with it, Second Life is an on-line virtual world, in which you can interact with a community of 100,000 users from all around the world.
The reason Second Life is generating so much buzz at the moment, it is this week on the cover of Business Week, is that, it is the first of these virtual communities to offer a fully developed financial system based on (virtual) land ownership.
Second Lifers can develop businesses which offer goods and services to other residents for financial compensation in Linden Dollars , which may be exchanged for real currency at a number of third party currency exchanges.
Over time particular real estate in the second life world will develop to mirror the real world, there will be challenges of rich (you can buy your own island – a dedicated Linux server for $1250 dollars and sub-let land parcels) and poor areas , High growth areas, red light districts, all the problems for which GIS technology in the real world is deployed to manage.
So I am off to start thinking about building the mapping agency of second life, now I wonder if I should charge for its products…. or perhaps a web mapping tool funded by Second Life business advertising.
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OSGB National Grid – get it here for free !!
The OS has just launched a commercial service through partners to provide a highly accurate real-time positioning service based on GPS called OSNet. This launch overshadowed the redevelopment of the Free (Yes Free !!) resources that are provided to users of GPS in Great Britain which includes a software library for software developers to translate between GPS co-ordinates (WGS84/ETRS89) and the OSGB National Grid, and an online conversion tool.
These free resources can be found at;-
www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/gps/osnetfreeservices/
With the increased use of handheld GPS and the production of continental scale datasets it seems that Lat/Long is becoming a more widespread mainstream system, still I can’t imagine the OS ever giving up on a Cartesian system such as the OSGB National Grid, as for most purposes it is far more practical.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
Warning outrageous plug follows ;
A Last minute reminder, the AGI Technical SIG ‘Open-Source in GIS’ Event is next week in Cambridge, it’s not too late to book a place with the AGI to attend.
Find out why there is such as buzz in the industry for PostGIS, MapServer, MapGuide Open Source and the Open Source Geospatial Foundation, hear from professionals who are deploying real industry solutions using open source GIS tools !!!
OK plug over !!
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.