Category: Thoughts

It’s funny how sometimes you can have a couple of conversations with people, which all seem to be coming from the same perspective but are unrelated. This happened to me last week in talking to a few people about Mastermap and peoples perception of it.

Mastermap was launched almost exactly four years ago and has been an increasing success built on a slow start. But to what extent are people really exploiting the fact that this is a geographic information product – not digital mapping.

You may not recognise that the image above is actually a rendering of Mastermap Topo data, because it does not following the “standard” style developed by the OS.

OSMM “House style”

The Mastermap house style is very good at demonstrating the fact that Mastermap is a full polygon dataset with each feature shaded, but nobody would argue that it is in cartographic terms very flexible.

Why do we at the OS and many of how customers follow the convention created four years ago and still displaying Mastermap in this way?
I and a number of people I have spoken to believe it that it is because we still perceive MasterMap as a cartographic product – a Map!

The reality of course is that MasterMap is a database, which may be rendered using any number of cartographic styles relevant to particular needs, if you want it to look like Landline you can indeed simply change the style remove the polygon fill and there you have it.

The real benefit of Mastermap like any other geographic information dataset is the attributes of each feature and the intelligent relationships between them, not something that is every easily visible from looking at a cartographic rendering.

Attributes

We need to change the way we think about products like Mastermap and start to exploit the fact we are using geographic information not just digital maps.

It is as if we were at stage where we have replaced our horse drawn carts with motorcars, but have yet to realise there is actually a engine in them.

Today I delivered the keynote presentation at the first Snowflake Software User Conference. Snowflake for those who don’t know are a small UK company set up by a couple of ex-Ordnance Survey people who specialise in developing XML applications for the GI industry.

Although a small team, the work that Snowflake do has had a profound effect on the GI industry in the UK. After developing the first tools to allow users to process the OS GML application schema, Snowflake have gone on to create more generic management tools for manipulating XML schemas and loading them in Oracle Spatial.

This is potentially important in terms of interoperability both within and beyond the GI industry, “normal” users need access to tools that allow the creation of XML data to really allow them to share their information with others, just look at all the published data sharing frameworks, things like eGIF.

The guys at snowflake have rightly realised that this is a IT not just a GIS problem, interoperability is not just about loading a shape file into Oracle, it is sharing all types of enterprise data.

Snowflake is one of those companies that has influence much greater than its size, as in the often quoted climate model, like the butterfly flapping its wings in the amazon impacting on the weather in London, Snowflakes efforts may have much greater impacts on how we handle data in the future.

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

Interesting post by Peter Cochrane noting the reliance people have on GPS navigation as it becomes more widespread.

As noted in this blog before, the potential result could be that users perception of location and distance change as geograhphical knowledge is replaced by the female voice of the navigation system. As Peter notes this may not matter, in the same way calculators have replaced mental arithmetic skills.

I think however a “sense of place” remains vital, having a basic understanding of the geography of the world is still really necessary as a knowledge of basic maths is still important despite the arrival of Microsoft Excel. Indeed by daughter is currently being taught how to do quite complex mental arithmetic, “chunking numbers” etc., something I was not taught and wish I had.

I only hope the education world take the same approach to the teaching of Geography, I would hate to see a generation of GPS savvy children not knowing if Birmingham is North or South of London.

I have been playing with Frappr! the google map mash-up which has really caught peoples imaginations. In some ways it combines mapping with sites like friends reunited or friendster which create and join up online communities.

This is really powerful stuff, it may sound very geeky but finding out there is someone doing the same conversion on their MGB as you in the next town, or looking at the destination of pupils of Downfield Sixth Form of 2000 is really interesting – this makes geographic information really accessible to people – and who knows offers the potential of a mechanism for community data capture projects.

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

For those of you in the UK this may be a little bit of a surprise, GIS Day has always been seen as a ESRI marketing event and therefore has never really gained much momentum in the UK, I think there are just five events in total this year. This is a shame, GIS Day is a great idea, making GIS more accessible to people by holding local events is a brilliant idea, it just needs to be supported by the wider industry.

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

Jessie and Sue featured the terrafuture podcasts on their Very Spatial podcast episode 17.

Jessie and Sue are a pair of academics who produce a weekly show on Geography and GIS technology, and although rather US centric is really worth subscribing to.

This week’s discussion focused on the topic of private or personal data, interesting in that it seemed to demonstrate the different attitudes between the US and Europe, where in the US generally, data needs to be identified as private with the expectation that most data is in the public domain, in Europe the reverse is true, data is assumed to be private with legislation like the data protection act to protect access to personal information.

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

At the AGI conference this week Graham Vowles presented a paper on the development of GeoDRM Geographic Digital Rights Managment, and in the debate which followed a consensus seemed to point to the best type of DRM offered only “just enough” protection. Mark’s Sysinternals Blog illustrates how DRM can go too far. Another reason to be an Apple user, rootkits are just evil !!

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

Amazing how tired you can get after just three days… maybe it was the party that did it !

So the end of this years conference got be thinking about how the nature of the annual GI industry conference has changed over the years. This year was I think a little bigger than last year with maybe 300-400 delegates, and a small but busy exhibition of nearly 50 stands.

Once upon a time, in the early 1990’s, when I started attending this conference there were perhaps three times as many attendees and there were two major GIS exhibitions with thousands of visitors.

So what has happened ?

Well the industry as such has matured and I guess those people who need GIS now have adopted the technology and established relationships with data providers, software companies etc. Now of course if your want to find out about new products and services you go online rather than waiting to talk to sales staff at a conference. An often heard quote is that there is “nobody new” at these conferences – well yes that’s true !!

Those people who are adopting GIS for the first time go to vertical shows in retail, health , defence and intelligence etc. – Does this mean that there is no need for a GIS show, in the same way there is no need for a spreadsheet show – No, because GI is still a lot more complex a discipline, with many issues still to resolve.

The AGI conference over the years has shrunk down to a level where now it meets the needs of the industry perfectly, as a forum for the industry to meet with itself, to network and discuss issues of interest to the specialist. The quality of papers this year I thought were exceptional, with excellent discussions taking place in the Q&A sessions I attended.

So long live the AGI conference, it may never need to hire the ExCel conference centre, but it’s not going to end up in a phonebox either.

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