Category: Thoughts

Digital Planet and geodata

Post author By Ed Parsons
Post date April 17, 2009
6 Comments on Digital Planet and geodata

On the train home last night, I caught up on this weeks podcast of the BBC Radio World Service programme, Digital Planet a regular on my iPhone powered commute these days. As has often been the case recently there was something of interest to Geo people in the form of a report on a LIDAR survey of the recent Italian Earthquake and a report from Kenya on Wherecamp Africa.

It was great to hear in both cases the positive impact that geospatial technology was having, in particular the report from Kenya highlighted once again the importance of making sure the rich infrastructure of geospatial technology we enjoy in the West is made universal.

I was however a bit miffed at the comments made by Bill Thompson, someone I usually have a lot of time for, who made the point that he though it would be better if geospatial infrastructure for Africa was developed in a more open fashion, using openstreetmap or the Mumbai free map as a model.

This is a debate well known to readers of this blog, and as always I ( and Google ) am fully supportive of the open geodata movement, however I will once again argue that making the data available without cost as map tiles in Google Maps and via the Google Maps API will have an impact on Kenyan society orders of magnitude greater than providing a raw data feed alone.

To be clear the point I am making is not that access to raw geodata is not important to some communities, and in Kenya Google is experimenting making the raw data available for non-commercial use, but its impact is small in comparison with the widespread availability of mapping data on the web, mobile phones , etc.

Bill happy to debate the point over a coffee next time I’m in Cambridge 🙂

LBS Thoughts

Latitude finds lost purse.. world a slightly better place !

Post author By Ed Parsons
Post date April 15, 2009
1 Comment on Latitude finds lost purse.. world a slightly better place !

Not the handbag in question — Not the lost handbag !

OK to us Brits it’s a handbag, but this techcruch story is a interesting one both highlighting a technology story and a how old media deals with a technology story story ! A lady in silicon valley loses her bag, but because in it there is a phone which is running Latitude, it is tracked by her sister and recovered by the police.

A positive story about location tracking, yes but.. of course the concerns about the ability of third parties to track you location are quite rightly expressed here. I am not going to argue that this is not appropriate on the contrary I think as an industry we need to be very open about how this technology works, what information is stored, who gets access to it and how it might be used.

Ultimately location aware applications will take off in a big way, when their usefulness from the perspective of a potential user is greater than the difficulty to install and use them plus the loss of anonymity given up to use the system.

The ease of use element to this equation is improving though better user interface design and technology development, the issue of anonymity I argue needs openness from the technology companies and education. I think Google, Yahoo, Loopt, Brightkite, Foursquare etc. are doing a pretty good job in explaining how location aware applications work and have been explicit as to what information is stored and for how long.

The “industry best practice” is there is such a thing, is to store just a users current location, in an anonymous fashion, only after the user has opted into the service and is reminded a regular intervals that they are using such a service.

As part of the education process around location aware services, it is also important to be clear that already telecoms providers make the location of mobile devices available to the authorities when requested along with details of calls made, IP traffic etc., so some level of perspective is also useful.

The big challenge remains making compelling applications that prove to users that sharing their location with others is useful – Handbag hunting is a start..

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

Data Policy Google Earth Thoughts

GIS without a GIS ?

Interesting challenge, Can you do simple spatial analysis without access to a GIS or raw data ?

I received this email today, what do you think ?

“Hope you are well – I am now 18 months into a career in renewable energy and am the “expert” in GIS in this company. We work with Imass (my old employers) with a GIS-based system for working out how much connections of wind-farms, biomass plants etc. are to the electricity grid. I am going through a data checking exercise and want to compare substation locations digitised by Imass with air photos and maps.

It is easy for us to create a KML file and display on Google Earth but do any of your readers know of a clever way of comparing with OS mapping – without the need of a GIS or ownership of the OS maps? Obviously one by one we can compare on Multimap but how do I quickly move around 800 points?

I wondered if Where’s the Path was along the right lines on this. Not sure where I can find the right forum to discuss.”

My guess is that for largely organisational / licensing issues this would not be possible, even if technically it may be, but it’s an interesting thought…

Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.

Thoughts

Do you remember BGIS ?

Ken Field at Kingston University has been asked by ESRI to write an article on the history of GIS at Kingston for publication in the next ArcNews. I’m must admit I did not realise that the GIS course is 20 years old this year, and as the worlds first undergraduate course in GIS this is something to celebrate.

So if you are a BGIS student please either get in touch with Ken with your memories, or add your comments below. I have nothing but happy memories of my time teaching there, and am extremely proud of the students of Kingston who have had a impact on the GIS industry all around the world.

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

Street VIew Thoughts

If you want privacy, don’t invite the BBC !

Post author By Ed Parsons
Post date April 3, 2009
13 Comments on If you want privacy, don’t invite the BBC !

broughton

The irony of this, surely needs comment.

So two upstanding citizens of Broughton (one of Milton Keynes “villages”) flag down a passing Street View car, have a chat with its driver and tell him to be on his way as they (on behalf of the rest of the village I assume) don’t want their privacy infringed by Street View images.

An unusual occurrence to be sure, and one which you would expect would go largely unnoticed, because these chaps clearly don’t want to draw attention to themselves or their village because they “fear” criminals will discover that it is actually quite a wealthy part of the world, and run off with they plasma TV’s

So it’s a bit strange then, within days their names are in all of the papers and the wonderful Rory Cellan Jones of the BBC complete with his satellite truck is filming around the village for TV news, beaming live unblurred images into people homes all around the world.

If you really want privacy, why get on the phone to the media and invite them to descend upon your village?

Written and submitted from Sofitel Hotel, Athens Airport, using its wired broadband network.

Data Policy iphone LBS Thoughts

#Geomob just keeps growing

Post author By Ed Parsons
Post date March 30, 2009
3 Comments on #Geomob just keeps growing

On Friday evening, I went along to the latest meeting of Geomob the developer community event created by Christopher Osborne focused on developments in what used to be called Location Based Services, but which now more sensibly people recognise as mobile applications of GEO technologies.

The key difference from the old days (2 years ago !!) of LBS, is that now the barrier to entry is much lower allowing the hacker community to really start to play and innovate without having to have huge resources behind them.

However despite technologies and services like Fire Eagle, Google Maps, OpenStreetMap/Cluodmade, there are still problems getting access to some types of information that would make mobile applications even more compelling, and yes I am talking about that old chestnut, access to public sector data sets.

The relevance of this to the community was demonstrated by the appreciation of the audience for the presentation given by Richard Allan of the Power of Information Task Force, who highlighted the well known issues with OS licensing practises.

For me these problems are demonstrated perfectly by the example of the new iPhone application National Rail.

This is a wonderful application, that is really useful providing real time train timetable information, and making use of location technology to automatically identify the closest station to you, and give you the timetable for trains to take you home.. very useful on a Friday night believe me..

The only problem is the cost, £4.99 which is expensive for an iPhone application where most commercial application cost less than a pound.

Why should the application cost anything? after-all surely the role of the Association of Train Operating Companies (ATOC) is too make it easy for people to use the trains, not to sell software.

I have a similar application on my iPhone produced by British Airways that allows me to look up their timetable.. it is free.

ATOC may argue that there are development costs, etc in releasing an application like this, well the solution to that is straight forward, make he timetable information available free for the Geomob developers to download, sit back and watch what happens !

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

Thoughts

Progress means more helicopters, FTW !

Post author By Ed Parsons
Post date March 25, 2009

From the must read xkcd.com, seems others have caught the R/C helicopter bug..

Written and submitted from the Google Office,Zurich

Street VIew Thoughts

Blobbed City Life

Just read a very interesting blog post by Mark Easton of the BBC on “Blobbing” the process of masking the identity of people from public imagery; while at the same time examining in the most extreme detail the life of “so called” celebrities.

Mark makes a very good point as to how history will judge our decisions, I would add to his argument in, as well as representing a whole generation of children as “blob heads” or “pairs of trainers”, we are also by accident misrepresenting modern city life.

My removing images of drunks in the streets, sex shops, and the random suburban semi-detached are we painting an unrealistic picture of what modern city life is like.

I’m sure the editors of some tabloids would like to be able to return to the largely mythical view of London represented in Ealing Comedies or Disney Films, where although there were plenty of cheeky chappy criminals, no real harm was done, and everybody went about their business with patriotic duty, the reality then, as it is now is a lot more messy – but such is city life !

London is the vibrant exciting cosmopolitan city I chose to live in, and like all cities it has its rough edges, but that’s what makes it the city it is – take those away and you end up with the version of the UK from Disneyworld.

Written and submitted from the BA Lounge, Gatwick, using its free BT Openzone 802.11 network.

Thoughts

Thoughts on Being Location Aware

Post author By Ed Parsons
Post date March 20, 2009
4 Comments on Thoughts on Being Location Aware

I really enjoyed attending last nights mashup* – Being-Location-Aware Event in London’s Docklands, after a busy day with the Street View launch in the UK, it was great to have a few drinks amongst a crowd of geeks 🙂

Privacy was again a major topic of debate, even if the rather self-selecting audience felt is was less of an issue that the media tends to report it. I think we just have to accept that there are valid concerns in particular about an individuals location and we have to be even more transparent about why and how such information is used, and as Gary of Yahoo pointed out make the use of location always an explicit opt-in.

Over time users will develop a better understanding of what sharing their location means in terms of benefits of location aware services against potential privacy costs and will be in the position to make an informed choice.

Of course the most pertinent question remains “Where is the money ?”, almost all agreed that location in itself has little value and has become part of the commodity of web mapping. The real value at the moment I suggest comes from the potential to improve the quality of local services and advertising when location is used as one of the signals to describe a users context, and maybe even their intent.

In saying that there are specialised high value applications where users are willing to pay, Traffic TV was mentioned by Jonathan Raper (from now on always @Madprof) and Kidspotter impressed.

Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.

Data Policy opensource Thoughts

StateoftheMap 2009 Call for Papers

Post author By Ed Parsons
Post date March 16, 2009

The call for papers for always one of the most interesting conference has just been announced. StateoftheMap 2009 is the conference to discuss all thinks to do with the ground breaking Open Street Map Project, and this year will be held in Amsterdam in July

This is much more than a gathering of people who like to ride bikes with GPS tapped to their handlebars however, the conference is a excellent forum for discussions of new types of cartography, data access policy and legal issues around open source data.

Indeed this year I’m sure one of the hottest topics will be licensing of data, not something which appears to everybody, but its an indication that the project has reached a level of maturity that it needs to be addressed.

Written and submitted from the 11:45 London-Cardiff Train, near Bristol.