Category: Technology

Earlier this year I was a guest on a BBC radio programme looking into Geospatial technology, one of the topics of debate was the growing industry of tracking. Now the BBC has followed this up on their World Service Programme Click this week.

Although the report perhaps overplays the accuracy of mobile phone based tracking it does fairly in my view cover the ethical issues of tracking, identifying a potential loop-hole in the UK industry guidelines.

Still in these days of “security” driven government legislation, I sometimes think we worry about the wrong things.. it’s not your partner or parent you need to worry has the potential to track you.

I still believe the usefulness of your location being discovered by a service provider with your permission is hugely valuable and is something that will result in the growth of a whole family of new embedded geospatial applications.

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

Last week we hosted at the Ordnance Survey a group from Lantmäteriet the Swedish Mapping Agency who were interested in our programme to develop a new geospatial data management system.

I guess we should not be too surprised, but not only are the problems we are trying to solve very similar but the approach to solving them including the technology choices in terms of ESRI and Oracle are also very much aligned. We were happy to share our experiences and some of the painful lessons learnt over the past couple of years, experiences which we need to be shared as anyone thinking of delivering such a programme would face the same challenges.

The OS business model is not to offer consultancy to other organisations, and at the same time we still need to complete our programme successful so we are not an “open house”, however over the next year or so look for a series of presentations from the OS on our experiences in building real enterprise GIS systems.

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

Chris Lightfoot the smart developer behind the mySociety websites dropped me an email over the weekend, with details of his latest project Postcodeine an AJAX based application that dynamically maps GB postcodes. OK so it may not be very useful, but it’s cool and Chris is making the code available under a GPL.

And before anybody gets too excited his postcode database is licensed.

Last years Where 2.0 conference was one of the most important conferences of 2005, and O’Reilly have just announced the dates for the 2006 conference to be held in San Jose, CA. in June. If it has anything like the content of last year it will be a must attend conference, in particular for the “traditional” GI industry to see the direction that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are taking.

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

Hidden behind the news of the first Intel powered iMacs and Macbooks (yuk – don’t like that name!!) Google released the official MacOS version of Google Earth. Having played with the beta for the last month or so, it works very much the same as the windows version, and will work on relatively low spec macs as long as you are running Tiger. Note however this is the basic Google Earth, not plus so you we need to use another method to get you GPS data loaded – if thats your thing.