Category: Thoughts

Show Us a Better Way, The results show

Post author By Ed Parsons
Post date November 7, 2008

The finalists in the innovative, Show Us a Better Way: competition have been announced and its great so see how many of them make sure of geospatial information, again evidence I’m sure of the pent-up demand for access to geospatial data in the UK.

The finalists are receiving funding to either build working prototypes of continue development of existing systems such as the excellent wheres the path site and ave wrigley’s UK schools map which I first came across at the UK Mash-Up event over two years ago.

The actual winner will be announced in BBC Radio 4’s iPM programme at 5:45am on Saturday morning, for those of us who are already suffering from sleep deficit from Tuesday Night’s US election excitement, of course you can catch up with the results on the shows podcast.

Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.

Data Policy Thoughts

The Elephant in the conference room

Post author By Ed Parsons
Post date November 3, 2008
4 Comments on The Elephant in the conference room

Last week ESRI held its annual European User group meeting in London, which as usual was a masterpiece in professional conference production. Jack gave an inspirational conference keynote on the first day followed by some great product demos by the team from ESRI UK who were the hosts of the conference this year. This was followed by team from Redlands with some pointers as to future features to be expected in the next major release of ArcGIS 9.4 towards the end of next year.

It’s often refreshing to see how much a privately held company like ESRI can talk about future products compared to publicly listed companies who need to be more careful, I was very much taken, for example, by the new Microsoft style ribbon interface in the upcoming revision of ArcGIS Explorer.

Despite all the great technology demonstrations and great examples of the use of GIS in Schools and for humanitarian relief, I could not help feeling that a key aspect of GIS usage in Europe was missing : Data Policy and the difficulties in sharing geospatial data produced by European public sector agencies.

Until INSPIRE really begins to have a impact early in the next decade, many of the demonstrations presented here and at similar conference will remain only demonstrations…

One scenario presented by the team from ESRI UK showed various UK agencies sharing information to manage a flood event, and communicating up to date and relevant information to the population potentially impacted via a website. Those with even a little knowledge of the GI industry in the UK know of course that the various licensing regimes adopted by different Government agencies in the UK would make such a scenario impossible.

We are at a stage now in the development of the GIS industry that key vendors such as ESRI are now concentrating on improving the quality and robustness of the software rather than adding even more specialised functionality, a key sign of maturity and something that both Microsoft and Apple are now focusing on for their next releases of their operating systems, at the same time how information is discovered and shared to ultimately power these GIS tools is still caught up with the IP and publishing models of the 19th century.

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

Fun !! Technology Thoughts

The old computers quiz

A bit of midweek fun from the BBC. The old computers quiz inspired by a question asked on University Challenge no less, which my wife just knew I would love. A little UK-centric, but good fun anyway. I am a Super-Mario of old computers it seems, my children must be so proud !

Written and submitted from a First Great Western Train near Reading, using my Three 3G modem.

Thoughts

The real King Arthur…

Much as I and the family love the BBC’s new Saturday night family drama, “Merlin” I can’t help but feel there has been a dumbing down of the Arthurian legends of my childhood. Of course the canonical (love that word.. it’s very geeky at the moment don’t you think ?) version was Monty Python and the Holy Grail, clips of which are now loving reproduced in Lego..

My Favourite… The French Taunting..

It would be great to think that the playgrounds of this Sceptred Isle could once again echo to the shouts of “Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!”

Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.

Google Maps Technology Thoughts

Whose map is it anyway..

View Larger Map

It’s mine all mine..

This is a map of recycling centres in Teddington, my local neighbourhood in London. I created it my looking up the locations of recycling centres run by my local council, the London Borough of Richmond, from their website and then added the points using the existing Google Map and Satellite image for context.

So who owns this new map ?

I do !

By publishing the map using Google Maps, I give Google a license to use my data but it’s “ownership” as such remains with me. The license is just an explicit statement of the implict intenention of publishing a map for consumption by the public using Google as a publication channel.

Google makes no claim over the intellectual property of the maps you create, they remain your maps and the data remains your data !

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

opensource Technology Thoughts User Generated Maps

A conference rich in social capital

Post author By Ed Parsons
Post date October 7, 2008
2 Comments on A conference rich in social capital

I got back last weekend from Cape Town and the Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conference 2008, easily one of the best conference I have attended recently!

The FOSS4G conference is like no other attracting the most enthusiastic and active delegates who as well as talking about the potential of geospatial technology, also get on and build the tools.

To be fair Google has taken some criticism from the FOSS community for not making some of its user generated content available in its raw form “think geodata source code” rather than maps tiles, and this was a topic debated with some feeling at the conference. I did my best to explain our priorities in our approach to date, and I certainly enjoyed the debate.

The Google team from our Nairobi office ran a workshop on MapMaker which is making great progress in filling in the gaps in mapping Africa, in many countries making mapping publicly available for the first time.

For the moment making this mapping available for free to as many users of Google Maps and potential Google Maps API sites is our priority.

Following my keynote I spent as much time as possible at the Google Booth, and it was great to meet and talk to developers for literally around the world over half of the 500 people at the conference had travelling to South Africa to attend, again and indication of the commitment of the FOSS community to get things done.

The power of the FOSS community is demonstrated both by the almost complete stack of open source tools which can be used to build almost any scale of GIS system, and by the projects the community is involved in; projects such as Ushahidi which uses a combination of Free and Open Source tools to monitor human rights violations in Africa.

I spent Friday morning following the conference at Trafalgar High School in Cape Towns infamous District 6 running a workshop for teachers on using Google Earth for GIS education at the same time other delegates were running similar courses using other tools.

If like me you are becoming a little tired of the introspection of the traditional and proprietary GIS world, check out OSGeo the organisation supporting many FOSS4G projects, and start saving for your air ticket to attend FOSS4G 2009 in Sydney… you won’t regret it.

Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.

AGI Thoughts

The Paleotards have spoken..

Post author By Ed Parsons
Post date September 25, 2008
16 Comments on The Paleotards have spoken..

I was trying to be positive I really was… picture the scene the final session of the AGI conference, had descended into the usual case of introspective soul searching, what is a GI professional ?, why does nobody listen to us ?, these newcomers don’t understand the complexity of what we do, and their data stinks, and bizarrely we should stop fighting amongst ourselves…

I felt is was like the last meeting of Association of Empire Telegraph Operators, bemoaning the fact that these new wireless equipment operators could not write Morse code as quickly.

I tried to be a little more upbeat in my comments, I really do believe that this is a time of great opportunity for the GIS industry, GI professionals are the gate keepers of huge amounts of useful geospatial information and knowledge which people are desperate to get access to, but need help to do so… if every there was a grand challenge for an industry that is it.

But no, there was to be no happy ending, at the very end of the conference as Adena has pointed out, the members of the AGI decided to award the prize for the best paper of the conference to Mark Bishop of MapInfo, and his paper “The Hype of Web 2.0”..

Like her I just don’t understand it, OK so the term is rather overused by now, but we have as a community benefited hugely from the technology and business shift that was Web 2.0, do we really want to go back to the GIS business of the late 1990’s.. well I guess maybe the AGI membership does…

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

Google Maps iphone Thoughts

As if my Magic… Traffic on your iPhone

Post author By Ed Parsons
Post date September 25, 2008
2 Comments on As if my Magic… Traffic on your iPhone

This morning we enabled Traffic Maps are part of Google Maps in the UK, and as a result of the magic of cloud based computing, all UK iPhone uses have new functionality to their maps application.

It’s worth thinking just how difficult it would have been to do a similar thing only a few years ago, now with a more open development architecture on mobile devices and the availability of geospatial infrastructures like Google maps.. it just works magically.

Written for the AGI Conference, Stratford-Upon-Avon using my three 3G Modem.

Thoughts

You got kidnapped by something that goes on a salad

Post author By Ed Parsons
Post date September 11, 2008

If like me you love Family Guy, you will love this, and if you don’t find it funny , well it’s an interesting business model !

Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.

Context based computing LBS Thoughts

Context based computing

Post author By Ed Parsons
Post date September 11, 2008

I’ve been thinking over the last few weeks that at last LBS (Location Based Services) is becoming a real market, what with the release of iPhone 2.0 and the imminent release of the first Android phone with its location platform. It has taken much longer then any of us would have expected, but applications using location are finally becoming mainstream.

At the same time however I have also been thinking that the term itself may no longer be appropriate. Actually location is just one signal that application and service developers can use to understand context, ie what is happening at any point in time to an individual and therefore what information is most relevant to them.

I quite like the term “context based computing” to describe this, as it encapsulates what we understand as LBS today but also extends into the future use of other types of sensors and devices to provide services relevant to specific activities we carry out in our daily lives.

A great example of the type of service I mean is the soon to be released fitbit, which was a runner up in this weeks Techcrunch 50 event. Fitbit is a small device which measures your activity during the day and night and reports back to your computer whenever you are in wireless network range of it, building up a profile of the calories you burn, how much time you sleep and the quality of your sleep.

Very neat !

Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.