Category: Thoughts

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Thoughts

Mac iPlayer .. so the wait begins !

Today the BBC opened up its iPlayer service as a public beta, offering on-demand viewing of the BBC’s excellent programming to users of Microsoft Windows XP. If you don’t have XP, don’t want XP then you have to wait as this is all down to Digital Rights Management, protecting the content you have already paid for as television license payers.

Testcard

Imagine if you could only watch BBC 1 on Televisions made by Phillips, or only get TV listings from the Daily Mail.

Don’t think this is right.. then sign this Petition.

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

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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.

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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 Thoughts

How to get Kids interested in Geography

This week I sat in on a course run by the Royal Geographical Society to train teachers to use Google Earth in their classes. The course was excellent and will run again in October and is highly recommended. In talking to some of the teachers we soon got on to the topic of the impact that Google Earth has had in exciting their students, and the extent to which their preferred images to Cartographic view of the world.

As a teaching tool just creating a tour and visiting places without any labels displayed is very powerful, asking students to describe the shape of the landscape, patterns of settlement and of course trying to recognise the locations is fascinating.

Last week I saw this same effect in a different environment visiting the Swiss Museum of Transport Swiss in Lucerne. For an aviation anorak such as myself, this is well worth the visit, but for all geographers you must visit the swissarena, a 1:20 000 scale photo mosaic of all of Switzerland on the floor of a dedicated building.

Swissarena

This is just amazing.. constructed from nearly 8,000 images and detailed enough so that you can see individual buildings it is a huge hit with children visitors and is a brilliant tool to understand the geography of Switzerland.

We really must make the most of this opportunity, new technology has made geography interesting again.. lets make the most of it and move beyond the LandRanger extract !!!

Written and Submitted from the Terminal 2, Heathrow Airport, London using the BTOpenzone wifi network.

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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.

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Apple LBS Thoughts

Even Macheads talk LBS now

Macbreak weeklyHappy listening to the Macbreak Weekly podcast today, and was surprised to hear a really good discussion on the potential of LBS, PND’s and the rumour that Apple may be developing a standalone GPS device – unlikely methinks.

Still it was not so long ago that if you used a mac you were geographically challenged and lonely in the geospatial community.

Now… well, I’d say around 50% of the audience of the recent Where 2.0 conference were using MacBooks.

Written and Submitted from the Google Office, London.

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AGI GIS Technology Thoughts

GI Innovation in the UK – you just need to look in the right place..

Yesterday was a series of interesting contrasts for me, the state of the “traditional” Government dominated GI industry was pretty well summed up by the Chorley Day review event organised by the AGI, key impression – “why after 20 years of trying does nobody listen to us”, while the very same evening brought a larger audience to the mashup* location themed event, key impression – “Hello we would really like to build application “x” using your platform is that OK..”

I was really pleased to see the WIDR guys at the event last night, some bright guys who used to work for me while I was at Ordnance Survey, who have developed a location determination platform, with an open API, based on wifi hotspots. Not a new idea I know, but the API element is really interesting as it offers the potential for developers to easily add location awareness to their own web based applications.

Widr

What would begin to close the gap between the two diverging GI communities, would be if these guys could develop they ideas during the day rather than in their spare time, and bring the benefit directly back to their organisation. The 20% time that Google engineers can use to develop their own ideas is well known, and really is a powerful tool for developing new products and services – would we ever see anything like that in Government ?

No.. I guess not.. but then the next generation of customers of Government services, as David Rhind so brilliantly called them yesterday the “myTube” generation have vastly different expectations of dealing with organisations based on experiences with eBay, Amazon, Facebook, Google etc all of which recognise the importance of innovation in keeping their customers happy.

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

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Thoughts web 2.0

Academic 2.0

This evening I went along to my old haunt Kingston University to attend a lecture giving by a past colleague, Jonathan Briggs to mark him becoming Professor of eCommerce at the University.

The Talk entitled “eCommerce 2.0: How AJAX, blogging, mashups, search engines and social networks are changing business” pretty much did as is says on the tin and covered both technological change and societal impacts of the new “web 2.0” processes and how they are changing business.

All very good, but what impressed me most was Jonathan’s approach to his career so far, although an academic with teaching responsibilities, he has set up a successful internet business the other media , which some blue chip clients and has helped create new educational establishments for teaching new media in Sweden and Kosovo. He runs an excellent blog, which is one of the ways he communicates with his students.

So what we have is a real practitioner of their subject, who can provide their students with real business experience gained by actually building sites, competing to work for clients and running a successful business – for potential employers this is just what they want to hear.

Congratulations to Kingston University for giving Jonathan the freedom to do this, your students I’m sure benefit far more from this, than they would, if he published x peer reviewed journal articles each year.

Web 2.0 has massive potential to change the way higher education works, I wonder how ready Higher Education 1.0 it for it ?

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

Categories
Thoughts

Depressing.. but not surprising – CIOs don’t get open source

I nearly cried over my coffee this morning, after reading this article on silicon.com which finds that British CIO’s see Open source as ‘not relevant’. As an ex-CTO I don’t find this view surprising, having attended a number of IT conferences in the UK where this attitude was all too familiar amongst the generation of IT Directors and CIO’s who view technology changes as a threat rather than a opportunity and could not tell one end of a router from a C compiler.

Come the next generation of IT managers these dinosaurs will go the way of the other dinosaurs who could not adopt to rapid environment change, this time rather than meteor impact and rapid climate change, the mass extinction will come from web based applications like salesforce.com, google apps and open source infrastructures – linux, mysql, drupal etc. and the developers trained in deploying them, who can quickly build the solutions their customers want.

Rant over – feels much better thank you !!

Written and Submitted from the Google Office, London.