Thanks to John, one of the OS semantic web experts for pointing out that Tim Berners-Lee has started a blog.
Some of my colleagues at the OS have in the past discussed the importance of GI with Tim, and he recognises geographic information as an important component to the semantic systems of the future.
Now you know this is going to be one you must read….
Before Christmas I took part in the recording of the BBC Radio 4 shoptalk radio show which was broadcast yesterday, the Real Audio archive is here. Drop me a comment if you would like an mp3 version…
I was very impressed by the quality of research carried out before hand, the excellent questions asked of myself and my fellow guests Steve Chilton, chair of the Society of Cartographers, Martin Capel Smith, of Navman, Alain de Taeye of TeleAtlas and Peter Cochrane who presented at the Terrafutre event and Ian Rycroft of Globalpoint Technologies – resulted in a very interesting programme.
Nathalie Vetter and Peter Cridland of the London Borough of Barnet, were a surprise to me as this segment was pre-recorded but it was great to hear from Peter again, as Barnet was one of the few UK local Government Customers to implement MapGuide in my Autodesk days, and it is still going strong !!
And Yes I did say I thought the paper map would survive !!
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
Jonathan Ive the head of industrial design at Apple and the Map behind the fantastic design of the iPod and iMacs has become aCBE in the New Year Honours list.
As a republican I don’t usually have much time for this stuff.. but in this case I’ll make the exception !!
By using spacebourne atomic clocks, Europes chefs will be able to produce the perfect boiled egg.
Ok so I am joking.. but based on the reporting so far of todays successful launch of the Giove-A satelitte – I would not be surpised to find it somewhere.
Make no mistake Galileo when operational will be a technically superior system to GPS and will expand the potential uses of precise positioning hugely.
But the real story here, should be how this political endeavor will be funded? – the costs of the development and then operation of Galileo is expected to come largely from commercial operations – a market not yet established ?
Will satnav makers be willing to license chipsets to receive Galileo signals ?
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
No postings for a couple of days, Merry Christmas everybody !!
I knew there was a reason why I worked for a government organisation.. from tomorrow I’m on holiday for two weeks – time to catch up on some reading, DVD’s and to try out building a ruby on rails application !!
Preparing for the holidays got me in a reflective mood looking back over the last 12 months for the GI industry – and what a year! I honestly don’t believe we have seen such rapid developments since the early days of GIS and certainly not with the scale of impact ever.
Clearly many will look back at the development of the mass market web mapping applications as very significant – its hard to believe, but Microsoft Live Local, Google Local, Google Earth and Frappr all appeared this year.
While all these applications have had a major impact in bringing GI to the mainstream and Google Erath in particular has resurrected the globe as a geographical user interface, I believe that the underlying message of all these developments is that – “It’s the content – stupid”
All these applications success, has been made possible by the availability of global geodata initially in the form of imagery at no cost to the consumer. The demand for good quality up to date information can now only increase as the user expectation has been set, and increasingly service providers will need to differentiate themselves based on their content.
This is an important lesson for ESRI with the upcoming launch of ArcGIS explorer, I’m sure explorer will be a more extensible development platform with a open architecture to other data sources, but will it be able to compete in terms of data availability?
The other big trend has been the democratisation of geographic information with community mapping projects and services such as Frapper becoming more popular and indeed the ability to create and publish geographic information is now possible for anybody with a laptop and cheap GPS. For the established Gi industry this is interesting at the moment, but I predict within five years open source geodata will be a reality.
It is disappointing that the GI industry in the UK remains so political with almost constant infighting between the “big fish” in the “small pond”, this seems always to have been the case, and I need to try to remain positive about it – but we are missing out on the innovation that is really moving the market forward elsewhere.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
Adena at All Points Blog points out the rather exaggerated reports in the UK computing press about the upcoming lanuch of Giove-A a micro-satellite developed in Guildford.
Rather than be used my mobile phone users to locate cinema listings !!!
Giove-A has just one important job to do..
Giove (Galileo In-Orbit Validation Element)-A is designed to broadcast signals on the frequencies that the operational Galileo system will use, a case of use the frequency or lose it !!
So much for the well informed technical press..
Continuing the excellent online developments at the BBC, its News Archive site has been launched this week. It allows users to download 80 video clips of major news events for use with their own non-commerical projects. While the technology behind this is interesting and of course the content is fantastic, what I think is most interesting is the development of the Creative Archive Licence (similar to the creative commons concept), something that developers of spatial data like the OS need to investigate if we are to really bring geography into the mainstream.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
Jeff Thurston at Vector One has come up with one of my favourite Google Earth images of the year. All those hours learning about geometric correction and orthrectification were not wasted !
You may have picked up on the debate bouncing around the net on the problems Wikipedia is suffering. Wikipedia, for those back from the desert island is the community based encyclopaedia that has been seen as one of the great success stories of the web.
The problems which hit the news last week have focused on the fact that because anybody can contribute content, there is no accountability for the accuracy of content, and the critics argue this means the content may be manipulated by special interest groups.
So this got me thinking about the open geodata projects flowering around the web, and in particular projects like openstreetmap, a really interesting attempt to create a copyright free street map in the UK. It seems from what is happening around wikipedia, that after a while, there becomes a growing demand for “authoritative” information, data which has been checked and quality assured.
From the perspective of geographic information, this in no way means that the only authoritative information must come from commercial providers, but it does mean that there needs to be a clear understanding of how the information was collected, how and by whom it was verified and to what purposes it can be used.
The commercial data providers have always been fully aware of these issues and I think the opengeodata movement needs to address these now rather than later, so that the growth of open geodata is not upset by claims of poor quality due to misunderstanding, or inappropriate use.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.