Category: Blog

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GIS Thoughts

Tim Berners-Lee agrees: our data should be intelligent (not free)

As reported in this weeks Guardian OS Story, Tim Berners-Lee has commented on the OS and the role of Geographic Information in the semantic web.

Contrary to earlier reports, Sir Tim seems NOT to be asking for free access to geospatial data… instead, intelligent, feature based geospatial data, rather than simple mapping should be made more accessible.

Quoting directly from the Guardian…

Berners-Lee said it may be reasonable for OS, the premier state-owned supplier of public sector information, to continue to charge for its high-resolution mapping. But even if licences were required, he added, OS should make its data open to manipulation. “I want to do something with the data, I want to be able to join it with all my other data,” he said. “I want to be able to do Google Maps things to a ridiculous extent, and not limited in the way that Google Maps is.”

This is consistent with the work the OS have been undertaking in semantic referencing systems over the past couple of years, and with the development of intelligent geospatial database products like OS MasterMap.

I’m really proud of the work we are doing in this area, and it is good to see this is recognised by Sir Tim, to find out more this is a good reading list.

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

Categories
GIS

When MasterMap is a Map..

I mentioned a while ago that I was disappointed that few people were really exploiting the information in OS MasterMap to produce different cartographic representations, instead sticking to the OS “house style”.

Well last week the British Cartographic Society awarded its MasterMap “Better Mapping” award to the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, for their new web mapping portal which is based on OS MasterMap data.

RBKC Winning map

The Cartography is the work of Oxford Cartographers Ltd and was praised by the judges as “aesthetically pleasing” not something you hear often when describing web based maps. The application itself is quite slick, and as an ex-resident of Chelsea I was even able to produce a map of my old apartment.

Categories
GIS GPS Technology Thoughts

Outdoor Gadgets

Outdoors Show 2006

I spent a very enjoyable Saturday this weekend, helping to man the Ordnance Survey stand at the Outdoors Show, a public exhibition for everybody who enjoys the outdoors.

Amongst all the stands showing canoes, sleeping bags, climbing ropes, and maps !! what really got my interest was the every growing number of vendors of “high tech” equipment that offer, in effect, consumer GIS software.

Doing very good business were Memory Map, Anquet and Fugawi all selling applications which provide the display of OS Landranger and Explorer mapping on PC’s, and most relevantly on PDA’s and Smartphones.

Garmin had a large stand with their wide range of consumer focused GPS recievers, including the nuvi, which I blogged about last year

But “Best of Show” for me was some real innovation from a small Cambridge company, Viewranger. The OS research team have demonstrated in the past a PDA prototype “Magic window”, which demonstrated the concept of using a mobile device and a geographic information to allow users to identify geographic features based on their location and the know location of the viewer.

Magic Window

It’s fantastic to see Ordnance Survey partners making these concepts reality, ViewRanger is an immersive mapping tool that displays a labelled representation of a view from any particular point on a GPS enabled, symbian based mobile phone.

Viewranger

It also allows users to upload “tags” or comments and photographs of particular locations onto a central server, where they can be shared, a very nice touch and another example of how important social networking techniques will be for geographic information.

Viewrangers’ Mike Brocklehurst, told me they are working on a windows mobile version of this application, so although its still early days – it clear outdoor gadgets are becoming very cool !

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

Categories
GIS GPS Thoughts

Satnav savvy ?

I got thinking last week about the actual impact of GPS navigation systems on peoples driving habits after reports of satnavs sending people through villages as short cuts. I’m not sure this is actually the case, why I’m uncertain was an experience on a Friday evening a few weeks previously…

I travel north up the M3 almost every night, and just after the Farnborough junction hit the end of a 10-15 mile tailback. Using the AA trafficwatch service on my mobile I discovered the cause of the queue was an accident at the M25 junction a few hours earlier which had involved a truck carrying livestock !! visions of cows and sheep on the motorway – the end result was the motorway was completely closed.

As I sat in the traffic in the darkness I could not but help to notice than at least 10% of the cars had the glow of a GPS navigation system on their dashboards, if you regularly drive in the UK at night you will no doubt have become aware of the rapid growth of satnavs over the past six months or so – well done tom-tom !!!

So as I switched my satnav to detour mode, to get me off the motorway at the next junction, I had the expectation I would be joined by many others making our ways through the A-Roads of Surrey. However when I came off the motorway and followed the route shown in the map below I was almost the only car on the road, it seemed many where happy to sit and wait on the motorway ?

Detour map

Image produced from the Ordnance Survey Get-a-map service. Image reproduced with kind permission of Ordnance Survey and Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland.

With some smugness I rejoined the now empty M3 at the M25 Junction and drove home… so my question is, just how confident are people in using satnav’s to go “off route” ?

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

Categories
ESRI GIS Technology

Origami useful for mappers ?

No this is not about folding maps, rather a link to Geoff Zeiss comments on the usefulness of the new generation of mobile devices.

The mainstream IT press seems to have really stuck the knife into these devices, comparing them unfavourably to laptops and even tablet pc’s.

But as Geoff points out such devices really are useful to mobile workers, particularly if the issues with battery management are fixed – the two hours possible today is just not enough.

Now if these devices were to ship with solid state storage as announced by Samsung at Cebit, then you have a potentially robust solution with good battery life – a product that professional mobile users would pay a premium for.

Add to the mix ubiquitous wireless network availability, and applications like ArcGIS Explorer which I saw demoed again today in Redlands, which allow access to server based data not only for visualisation but also analysis, and you have quite a compelling proposition..

So Origami like devices do have a place, but as vertical solutions for professional mobile users, not the consumer market where users want smartphones !

Written and submitted from The Hilton Hotel, San Bernardino, using the hotel in-room internet connection.

Categories
GIS OGC

GeoRSS – bringing geography to the blogs..

As Martin points out in his return to blogging (welcome back !!) one of the most interesting presentations at this OGC TC meeting was the one given by Raj Singh on GeoRSS.

GeoRSS is a rapidly developing standard to encode locations into RSS feeds, so that for example, your blog aggregator software could subscribe to blogs whose entries relate to locations within 50 km’s of where you live, and of course to allow this to happen, also allow authors to tag their content with geographic location.

The real challenge here is to keep this encoding simple, following the rationale of RSS itself, while also allowing for more complex geographic information than simple Lat,Long pairs.

The approach taken so far is too offer two encoding types simple and gml which work with the Atom standard to extend RSS.

The Simple encoding which will meet the needs of most users take the form;

<georss:point>45.256 -71.92</georss:point>

While the more flexible GML encoding embeds GML features, offering more flexibility including different co-ordinate systems, and uses the form

<gml:Point>
   <gml:pos>45.256 -71.92</gml:pos>
</gml:Point>

Both encodings also support tagging line-strings, polygons and envelopes (MBRs).

There is real potential here for a standard to bring geographic information to the mainstream, however we also need to recognise there are other encoding out there and geoRSS will have to make it’s case against gpx, kml etc.

Look out for geoRSS entries from edparsons.com in the near future !

Written and submitted from The Marriott Hotel, Huntsville, using the hotel in-room internet connection.

Categories
GIS

Guardian article just plain wrong !!

Once again the Guardian Newspaper in the UK (which I read incidentally) has got caught up in the free geospatial data debate.

I quote..”Our taxes fund the collection of public data – yet we pay again to access it. Make the data freely available to stimulate innovation, argue Charles Arthur and Michael Cross ”

The OS is no more funded from taxpayers than many large software companies who work largely with government customers and have had the development of their core software funded over a number of years of development contracts, this is particularly the case with the large GIS software vendors!

The article is so full of factual errors I don’t now where to begin, but what comes across really clearly is the lack of the customer viewpoint!

Why not ask the customers of OS data what they would prefer – the status quo where they and they alone pay to license the high quality data they need, or the much admired situation in the United States where the provision of spatial data is funded by political mandate, which has over the last couple of administrations, resulted in data which is decades old and not maintained to any level of consistency.

The much admired data in Google Maps, MapPoint etc. comes from commercial vendors, which Google etc. have had to license, the base government supplied data does not meet their needs.. Remember the famous “Where is Apple” discussion last year, a result of government funded data used by Microsoft being so out of date it did not show the location of Apples’ offices in Cupertino !

There is no such thing as “free data”, in the end somebody has to pay for the expensive business of collecting and maintaining national geospatial databases, ask a politician what they would prefer to spend a limited tax funded budget on.. Hospitals and Schools or funding the collection of geospatial databases you know what they will answer !

Written and submitted from The Marriott Hotel, Huntsville, using the hotel in-room internet connection.

Categories
GIS Thoughts

MapQuest API – a different business model ?

As James at Spatially Adjusted points out MapQuest joins GMY with it’s mapping API. Beyond the “Me too” aspects what is interesting here is that MapQuests’ business model is already very well established as an application service provider.

So here the free API is almost a demo for its commerical services, as the T&C’s state..

“The MapQuest OpenAPI is available free of charge for non-commercial use within the stated transaction levels of 50,000 combined maps and geocodes and 5,000 routes per day. If your needs fall outside of OpenAPI’s terms please refer to MapQuest Business Solutions for additional options.”

It’s easy to forget with all the hype around google local and local live, that MapQuest is still the most used web mapping engine.

Categories
GIS OGC

Open Geospatial TC meeting in Rocketville

Marshall Institute

It is not often you get driving instructions which use Rockets as landmarks, but picking up my hire car I was told to turn of the highway when I went passed the Saturn V !

Huntsville is very much a town with technology at it’s heart, home to the Marshall Space Centre, and numerous defence companies including from the world of GI, Intergraph.

Yesterday was the first day of the Technical Committee meeting of the OGC, I try to attend at least one a year, although the OS is always represented. For the newcomer the consensus approach of a standards organisation can appear to be mind-numbing, with formal processes and much intense study of detailed technical documentation. From this intense work however has come the key standards for geospatial interoperability, the Web Map and Feature Services and Geographic Mark-up Language.

It can be argued that OGC standards are less relevant with the emergence of GMY’s popular and proprietary mapping applications. However the counter argument to this is that all this applications are really only as good as the data in them, and once you start wanting to obtain more local information from 3rd party sources, interoperability will become a real issue, and Google are attending their first OGC meeting here in Huntsville.

The real challenge for the OGC will be to see our quickly it can adopt a rapidly developing standard that is emerging from the blogosphere GeoRSS – more details later this week – watch this space !

Written and submitted from The Marriott Hotel, Huntsville, using the hotel in-room internet connection.

Categories
GIS Thoughts

edparsons.com.. one year on

Today is the first birthday of my blog, one year ago today I wrote my first blog entry and a lot has happened since!

In the industry we have seen the Web 2.0 meets mapping developments of GMY (Google, Microsoft and Yahoo), Google Earth and the announcement of ESRI”s ArcGIS Explorer a very important product for Redlands.

In the UK the creation of Address databases continues to be a complete minefield for all involved (just don’t ask me talk about address databases!!) and the debate around the funding of National Geospatial data continues, while community spatial databases like openstreetmap become a reality.

Increasing people are looking to blogs as a valid source of information as an alternative to more traditional media outlets which are often slower and increasingly lack any journalistic value just becoming repeaters of corporate PR.

There is a danger than many blogs may go that way also, I hope not – where blogs really add value is in allowing authors opinions to be expressed without restriction and this is particularly powerfully when combined with “insider” information.

I know I would be lost without my daily fix of All-Points, Spatially Adjusted with James Fee, Very Spatial, The Tao of Mac, Adam Curry Podcast.

Over the past year I have posted 157 entries on edparsons.com which have generated nearly 200,000 discrete site visits and over 600,000 page impressions.

I’m just on my way to the OGC meeting in Huntville, more details next week.

Written and submitted from Heathrow Airport, using the free internet connection in the BA lounge.