Category: neogeography

Categories
neogeography Thoughts

DIY Drones

Following on from my post on their very cool technology, Jeff at PictEarth has pointed me in the direction of the DIY Drones website set up by Chris Anderson. Yes that is the Chris Anderson, Editor of Wired and Author of The Long Tail – Shame on you if you had not heard of him !!

This really is fascinating, there is a momentum growing around this and it is yet another example of democratising technology – this will be the next step in community geodata capture.

Written and submitted from the Hotel Du Lac, Enhhien-les-Bains, using the in-room broadband network

Categories
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.

Categories
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
Google Earth neogeography Thoughts

Plazes in Google Earth

Despite a few hiccups with the latest Plazer client, I’m sticking with my experiment of using Plazes to track my presence and location. I’m glad I have because, the very interested data behind plazes has now been exposed in the form of a plazes KML file. This is really neat, by logging in you can view your own locations, without logging in, you can view the global plazes database and see a real time feed of the latest plazes registered by users. Credit to Tim at Plazes for a really nice use of KML !!

Plazes in Earth

Like the recent twittermap, in can be almost hypnotic watching the geeks of the world posting their locations, and the experience is all the more interesting in Google Earth.

The plazes KML is available for download at www.plazes.com/kml

Written and Submitted from the Google Office, Zurich.

Categories
Google Earth Google Maps neogeography opensource

Google Developer Day – BBC leads the mash-ups revolution..

As a follow up to the Google Developer Day event last week , Silicon.com has a great article on the adoption of mash-up culture at the BBC and their brilliant backstage project.

GDD PinFor other content owning organisations BBC Backstage sets a great example highlighting the way that forward thinking licensing of information can really aid the innovation process and develop truly useful new content driven sites.

During my time at the OS we made no secret of the fact that Backstage was an inspiration to the OpenSpace project.

Just imagine the mashups which could be created if other content owners in the public sector were as open.. indeed in just this last week, we are beginning to see a more innovative approach to publishing content with the reporting of Brents use of google maps and the Maritime and Coastguard Agency decision to publish some of it’s charts in KML.

A point I made during last weeks London Keynote (about 30 mins in, but its well worth listening to the great Chris di Bona) is that there are still huge amounts of geographic information still to be liberated from existing corporate silos, in addition to the user generated content we are beginning to provide the tools to create.

When you think about it, this is less a technology issue that it has even been – this is now really about information policy..

Written and Submitted from the Google Office, London.

Categories
Google Maps neogeography where 2.0

Where 2.0 and “Sense of Place”

I’m flying back to the UK to present at the Google Developer Day in London, so my comments on this years Where 2.0 are rather brief. What stood out for me was the recognition of the importance of “sense of place” information, geospatial data that is not traditional cartography, but which is really useful and meaningful to people because it is not as abstract as mapping.

StreetView

In StreetView we are attempting to represent the world from the perspective of someone in it, i.e. from a perspective of a viewer 2m high not 1500m in the air. High resolution terrestrial imagery is actually very useful, as John demonstrated in today’s presentation, fro example being able to read street signs is a source of attribute information not available else where. This type of imagery especially when navigable in such a simple way, makes exploring the virtual environment easy and really does provide a sense of what in the case above San Francisco is like to visit.
The power of imagery to provide this “sense of place” was also a major part of Quakr some fellow Brits who are developing a site to put geotagged images in their correct perspective location on an interactive map, so that in effect you walk through the photos..

Combine imagery with the environmental sound-scenes developed by inside 30proof for Wild Sanctuary and you are beginning to see what I think used to be called ‘hypermedia” starting to have an impact in communicating geospatial information.

Written and submitted from the British Airways Lounge, at SFO airport using the free broadband network

Categories
Google Maps LBS neogeography

LBS and actionable content..

Like myself you may have been using the mobile version of Google Maps for the last year or so and it works very well, the application is well adapted to mobile devices – if you look carefully you will see that it uses a different rendering to the normal browser based Google Maps – mobile cartography needs to be different !!

Google Maps Mobile

This week a new version of maps was released in the UK which starts to really deliver on the potential of location based services, now like our American cousins we have up to date points of interest information available, so that if you try to search for a business you will actually find one now..

It’s not new or unique but what I think is really important here it that the content about locations is actionable, so if I search for a pub in London called “The Garrison” I am presented with a map, directions to the pub from where I might be, its address and telephone number which if I click on actually is dialled by the phone – remember the N95 and suchlike actually have telephone capability as well as GPS, WiFi, cameras, coffee machines etc. in them as well 🙂

Content that is actionable is key I believe to LBS finally taking off, a map on a screen is not enough, it’s still often easier to ask somebody for directions, but how likely is it that they will know a pub’s telephone number or its opening hours..

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

Categories
Google Earth Google Maps neogeography

Google LatLong blog

latlong blog

So you may have been wondering why I have not really written a huge amount about Google so far here.. well unlike my previous employer Google is well versed in the business of blogging and the Geo team have been working on a team blog which is now online at Google LatLong – Enjoy !

Don’t worry, I will still keep writing here 🙂

BTW make use of the “What we are reading section” these are links to some of the most dynamic blogs on the internet.

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

Categories
GIS neogeography OGC

Mass-market standards

This week finds me in Sunny Zürich one of Googles Global Engineering hubs, learning how  the Google machine works and trying to catch up on a weeks worth of email..

Last week while I sheltered from the storms lashing New York, (so much for spring as the best time to visit !!) with the family, the OGC held a TC/PC meeting in Ottawa and is appears that considerable progress has been made in beginning to adopt the new “mass market” standards KML and GeoRSS.

This is really great news and will help I believe to bring geographic information to a wider community of users and will allow the creation of a  community of spatial data developers, who will be is the position to easily publish their own information.

With this new user community in mind I think it is vital that we communicate clearly what are the most appropriate technologies to use and when, for example I can easily imagine some confusion in the minds of potential users as to the choice of GeoRSS , KML or simple GML as the format of choice to publish their simple geospatial information.

The relative benefits of these formats is clear in my mind (at least i think it is) I’d be interested in your views dear reader ?

Written and submitted from the Hilton Zurich Airport Hotel, using its wifi 802.11 network.

Categories
GIS neogeography where 2.0

Where 2.0 comes to Europe – Geoware2007

Life is really busy at the moment, but I am finally in a position to put down a few thoughts about this weeks Geoware in Arhus.

I was very impressed by the organisation and quality of speakers, credit is due to Anders, Peter and the rest of the team at the innovation lab for putting the event together.

Nicholas Nova who gave a very interesting talk on mobile gaming gives a good review of the event on his blog. This is the closet I have seen to the “must visit” Where 2.0 in Europe.

To me one of the most interesting debates was around business models for these new mobile services, and the fact that for the most part quite traditional business models based on advertising or commission payments underlie these new services.

Nokia for example who demonstrated the N95 smartphone ( Forget the iPhone, this is the phone for geo-geeks) which ships with a free mapping and navigation package for Europe, with POI data sponsored by Restaurants, Hotels, Car hire companies etc. Nokia receive a commission from any transaction, such as booking a hotel which comes from their mobile service – a business model as old as publishing !
I wonder if we will see a similar event in the UK , and if so who would organise it? I know from trying to run the innovation process at the OS how difficult a task it is to get UK companies to think along these lines… and of course the other obvious challenges to GI based startups regarding availability of data are well known.

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