Category: Thoughts

Yesterday was the first day at AGI 2005, the UK’s main event for GIS professionals. I must admit I was rather disappointed by the quality of the plenary session, which contrasted with some excellent presentations in the parallel sessions. Both the local Government sessions and in particular for me the session on designing GI systems with usability in mind were excellent.

Both Martin Daly from Cadcorp and Charles Kennelly from ESRI were very open about their efforts to design software with specific users in mind, and our this has developed over time – both made the point that desktop GIS by its very nature is complex. Emma Sutton of EDINA and Lesile Foutain of System Concepts demonstrated the importance of the inclusion of usability design early enough in projects – £1 spent on usability at the beginning of a project is £1000 if spent at the end.

This was really interesting stuff, we are all impressed by the design of devices such as the iPod, but can we ever hope to achieve such a high level of simple task centred design in GIS? How much are we constrained by the conventions of the win32 api ?

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

All Points note the development of a blog by an unnamed USGS employee. The continued disruption to the USGS and the potential of outsourcing large proportions of its activities to commercial operators is clearly causing some concern amongst its staff.

At the end of the day I believe that the collection of national spatial data must be a well funded activity either by central/federal government or by the users of the data purchasing licensed data – it appears that the current plans for the USGS still falls somewhere between the two.

Outsourcing may in the sort term reduce costs, but there is still a more fundamental issue of long term consistent funding – the fact that the most powerful nation on earth does not have modern consistent national mapping is shocking.

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

Announced today Yahoo! Maps is a consumer web map service similar to Google with an open API but in addition to the expected AJAX API Yahoo offers a Flash version as well.

On first impressions the cartography is similar to Google using Teleatlas and Navteq data but without imagery.

Of real interest to me is the RSS feed “Traffic API” which uses dynamic data feeds to produce real time applications, indeed RSS seems to be the input format of choice.

The only minor problem – the world consists of North America only !!

Written and submitted from the Welcome Break Services on the M62, using the BT Openzone wifi network. – the glamour of travel !!

I’m in Warsaw this week to present at the 20th ESRI European User Conference. An interesting contrast to the “big show” in San Diego, today the first day had a similar agenda with presentations from Jack Dangermond and David Maquire, but rather than an audience of thousands, the audience here in the wonderful Palace of Culture and Science was measured in hundreds.

Little difference in terms of message from July, although clearly progress has been made, and there are now a few more details around the upcoming products.

Of particular note for me was the “first public demonstration” of ArcGIS Explorer, the real thing this time rather than the “smoke and mirrors” prototype shown at the International User Conference. ArcGIS Explorer is a Google Earth Killer, clearly ESRI were more than a little put out by the hype surronding Google Earth and have come out fighting.

ArcGIS Explorer will be a free 15Mb download from the ESRI website and will connect to a dedicated ArcWeb server farm at ESRI providing an experience similar to Google Earth, although I was not clear where the imagery is sourced from. What got me excited however, is the ability of ArcGIS Explorer to use other data services including OGC WMS and WFS servers and any ArcIMS server you may already use. ArcGIS can also display local data, File GDB’s,shape files, most image formats and even KML files from your PC’s hard drive.

The interface is quite radical for ESRI and has a task driven interface similar to google earth, with simple search tools as the primary user interface. ESRI have developed a interactive navigation tool which floats as a separate window, and according to my ESRI friend has been developed based on the rich experience of games designers who really know how 3D navigation works.

The open nature of ArcExplorer in data terms is complemented by an API which will allow developers to customise and extend ArcGIS Explorers capabilities. This could be a really hot product for ESRI, and its timing might well allow it to benefit from the building anti Google sentiment – it also might just turn out to be the ArcView 3.x replacement everybody is still looking for.

Written and submitted from the Westin Hotel, Warsaw, using the hotels broadband network.

So things are beginning to calm down in regard to the hype around the introduction of the video capable iPod. But the big news I think behind the hardware is that Apple have cut a deal with ABC television in the States to distribute via the iTunes music store (iTMS), television programmes including Lost and Desperate Housewives (these are not available outside the US due to licensing arrangements) .

For a $1.99 you can download any of these programmes the day after they are shown to view on your computer as well as of course your iPod.

As with the original iPod it’s success comes not only from a its fabulous design, but also from the ease of obtaining content for it, one click at iTMS brings a single track or an album right onto your device. What Apple successfully did was to arrange distribution deals with all the major record companies, against their better judgement, to put in place pricing and licensing agreements that are very simple -a single universal price for each track, playback restricted to five devices etc. The result HUGH SUCCESS and now they are doing the same for video.

In some ways you could argue that Google Local (nee maps) has started to do the same thing, but I think the GI industry needs to learn a lot from the iTunes experience, and yes, that does include the Ordnance Survey. The OS needs to introduce simpler licensing, making available small amounts of mapping data on demand for the increasingly technology literate, traditional topographic map user.

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

Adena at All Points Blog reports on some very interesting news from the USGS, which seems to be beginning the process of outsourcing map production. New USGS Director Patrick Leahy is reported to be looking to outsource the production of maps in flood risk areas to state and local government and importantly commercial suppliers. This follows the inability of USGS to deliver appropriate mapping following the Katrina flooding of New Orleans.

As I pointed out at the SoC conference last month much of the topo mapping covering this part of the states is nearly 30 years old, a result of the under funding of the USGS over many decades. I wonder if this out-sourcing will come with additional funding – or are the USGS falling into the trap believing that “somebody else” will be able to do what they themselves has been unable to for the same money ?

Or maybe we are beginning to see the commercialisation of topo data in the United States ?

Written and submitted from the Edinburgh International Conference Centre, using its free 802.11 network.

Like many ESRI shops who build “Enterprise” class applications we at the OS are increasing looking to use linux based servers from now on – and our vendor of choice at the moment is HP who have a nice range of AMD Opteron based Proliant servers. Nothing unusual in this I hear you say, indeed not, it is actually increasingly difficult to source 32bit processor servers in this class – however the problem my system architects are trying to get around at the moment is that ESRI don’t officially support 64bit processors !!

As much as I buy into the whole ArcServices concept and will deploy ArcServer based applications in the future, this seems a little strange?

So ESRI Technical product management if you are listening…

Jo of Mapping Hacks has responded to my call for her to attempt to collect detailed mapping to the specification of the OS without access to the survey grade GPS and photogrammetry, with the usual rhetoric… but Jo will you take up the challenge ?

I think Jo actually accepts the need for the OS to continue it’s role in capturing large scale vector mapping for the country, this is an expensive business (not just toys) – our opinions differ as to how this is funded.

Jo favours the state funding of these activities, while I and the current government favour the user paying.

btw

– Getmapping do collect imagery on behalf of the OS under contract already..

– The NIMSA agreement represents a “at cost” contract to deliver mapping services to government and represents less than 10 % of the OS revenue.