Category: Technology

David Sonnen captures very well the current “State of the Nation” as far as the GI industry is concerned in his Directions Magazine article Spatial Information Management (SIM) – Then, Now, Next . I think David is right to see the disruptive effect of “big guys” on the established GI industry – funny to think of Microsoft as disruptive :-), and the move towards a mainstream SOA future for the industry.

But I think he may be missing the impact of what I would call the underground GI industry of google map hackers and the open geodata movement – here real innovation is happening. Look at how fast new datasets, OK of variable quality, appeared to track the progress of the Hurricane Katrina disaster – in some cases as the most up to date source of information.

Written and submitted from Cambridge, using a Starbucks T-Mobile 802.11 network.

Not to be outdone by the team from Southampton, Martin Daly “the Alpha Geek” at Cadcorp sent this screenshot to illustrate the point, that they are also able to parse Mastermap GML and produce KML data. It’s great to see the companies who have supported the standards in the past really been able to exploit the advantages of open formats.

Still working on some 3-D data…

I got a call from a old friend earlier this week, who pointed me in the direction of an IT Conversations podcast which I had missed. Like many of IT conversations programmes this was a recording of a conference session, in this case the Web 2.0 conference held last October, and the topic was a panel discussion on Geolocation: The Killer Map.

The panel included Tim O’Reilly, John Betz of Microsoft MapPoint, Perry Evans the Founder of MapQuest, Kim Fennell, of Telcontar and John Hanke of CEO Keyhole, now of course Google.

It’s just 15 minutes long but really worth listening to.. the discussion around the moral implications of location aware applications are very interesting. I’m happy that my personal interest in location aware rather than location based applications is picked up on by a number of the speakers.

These are the people who are really taking GI mainstream, and thanks James for the steer.

Thanks to Eddie and Ian at Snowflake who have written a plugin to their Go Publisher product, it is now possible to view, rather flat, Mastermap topo data in google earth – the secret behind the scenes here is our old friend GML.

It was relatively easy for the guys a Snowflake (it took a weekend) to write the schema translation to translate form the mastermap application schema of GML to the KML (Keyhole Markup Language) xml used by Google Earth.

So now all we need to do is find out a way to height the Mastermap building polygons…

For more examples of the value of xml to the GI industry, if you are in the UK towards the end of September, the AGI Technical SIG event on XML and GIS to be held at the Centre for Geospatial Science, Nottingham University on 22nd September will be a very valuable event.

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

William Heath and the The Ideal Government Project blog are running a competition over the summer for people to build a mapping mashup application which displays any government dataset on free online mapping.

OS is providing the prizes in the form of OS Select maps.

Some great examples already including this example which maps recent BBC news stories.

Written and submitted from the W Hotel, San Diego, using the hotels broadband network.

Mobile GMaps is a J2ME application which allows you to use Google Maps on your mobile phone! – VERY COOL !!

As a java application is works on most modern phones which have http access enabled, works well on my SE V800 using UMTS it is also pretty fast !!

You have to handle it to Google, publishing a open api to maps was a very clever move, build up a community of application builders and users to establish your market, so that when MacDonalds or pizza-hut pay for their restaurants to appear on the maps you have as many eyeballs as possible.

Written and submitted from the BA Lounge at LHR, using the BTOpenzone network.

Just came upon this, site while researching my talk for next weeks cc Exchange conference at the OS in Southampton.

Another Google Maps API app but great fun, love this picture of a Tomcat in flight…