Category: Thoughts

As this announcement suggests at some point in 1998 we may finally see the last Landline tile leave Southampton on a CD marking the end of the first generation of digital mapping in Great Britain. At that point Landline as a nationally complete product will be 13 years old and based on a production process that started nearly 30 years previously !!

During this period of time Microsoft will have introduced at least 7 PC operating systems, assuming of course Longhorn will have been released by 2008 🙂
Oracle meanwhile will have introduced perhaps five major releases of its database.

So this begs the question why do data products develop so much more slowly than application software? In some ways the old idiom “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” might be part of this, but I’m rather afraid the lack of progress here is more to do with the perceived value of geographic information and how it has been applied.

The first generation of digital data products were developed to automate the map production process before sophisticated GIS tools became available – they were drawing files with information relevant to how the features represented should be drawn rather than having information about the features themselves. So when accessible GIS tools such as MapInfo and ArcView became widely available, products like Landline were used only as a graphic backdrop, there was little point linking to features which did not exist.

To a large extent the current use of geodata has been constricted by this, so with the introduction of the second generation of truly intelligent feature based products like MasterMap, the industry needs to reset its expectations to really exploit the value of the information now available.
Mastermap and a spatially aware database can answer questions that it was truly impossible to answer with products like Landline, with one SQL query I can calculate the number of residential properties within 500m of the new channel tunnel rail link and produce mailing labels – that is one step, maybe a couple of minutes processing – that really is progress we just need to recognise it.

Many of us of a certain age have fond memories of MS-DOS and Wordperfect and perhaps think we could actually use them productively today, but the reality is we would actually find it very constraining not to be able to cut and paste information, between applications running at the same time, on our pc’s which have access to almost unlimited amounts of memory.

We need to move on in terms of our perceptions of data and embrace the change.

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

I have just download the latest update of my favourite podcast client ipodderX, which amongst other new features offers the ability to embed any digital media within a podcast.

The ability to add any enclosure to a podcast has been there from the beginning of podcasting many months ago !!!
A podcast is just a xml document in RSS format enclosing an mp3 file e.g.

<enclosure url=”http:///www.edparsons.com/test/podcasts/demo_podcast01.mp3” length=”563460” type=”audio/mpeg”/>

A podcast aggregator like ipodderX subscribes to the podcast file hosted on a server and downloads the podcast whenever it changes. The podcast can contain any digital media, videos are becoming more popular and this got me wondering – Is this a potential means of distributing geodata and in particular change only update data?

The technologies are well understood and quite robust, the sofeware already exists – I must experiment…

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

Well with no great surprise the BBC has given into the 4,000 critical viewers (out of 10 million or so) and a few politicians looking for publicity and changed it’s weather maps.

The animated fly around the British Isles has been retained thankfully as this is the most effictive part, but have been ‘slowed” as not to make some viewers ill !!

It would be interesting to see the impact if the convention of putting north at the top of the screen was reversed – might keep the scots happy!

As a Nation we are just so conservative.

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

After a massive amount of work behind the scenes involving many Ordnance Survey, ODPM, Local Authority and Royal Mail staff a solution to the creation of maintaining a national address database has been announced.

For those not aware of the scale of the problem, many places in Britain that don’t get mail delivered to them (e.g. Churches, Sports pavilions etc) don’t have a recognised address. A real problem if you need to get services delivered to them.

In the past, attempts to build a definitive address database have failed because they represented the view of a single organisation or industry – key to this new effort is partnership.

All the main stakeholders will be involved in the creation of the National Spatial Address Infrastructure (NSAI), insuring it meets the collective needs of the country.

There will be for sure some interesting technological challenges to solve to deliver this database as a maintained operation system, but across the stakeholder community there is a combined expertise which will ultimately deliver success.

I hope an example of joined-up government in action!!

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

Hats off to the Snowflake gang, who as part of their moving card have let us know their new TOID !! One day we will all know this information – well OK maybe not 🙂 but its good to see the idea of using feature identifiers communicated in a fun way.

Written and submitted from the BA Lounge at Manchester Airport, using BT’s Openzone 802.11 network.

I lead a session at the Ordnance Survey Partner conference last week discussing our future geoweb services plans, and not surprising the main topic of discussion was business models.

Nobody in the industry today really knows what will happen in the market, I in the past have often drawn parallels with the download music market and with the recent launch of the Yahoo Music Unlimited service it’s interesting to watch this business model dynamic as a potential indicator for future geoweb services.

The established market leader here is Apples’ iTunes Music store which sells tracks at £0.79 or $0.99 each – the transactional model. Once bought the tracks are available for use on a limited number of computers and your ipod forever.

The alternative business model of subscription based pricing has been supported up to now by Napster and Realnetworks but they have been eclipsed by the new Yahoo offering.
The yahoo offering provides unlimited access to an online music catalogue for an amazing $6.99 a month ( the service is not available outside the USA). Tracks may be downloaded to other devices but will only be playable as long as you keep paying the subscription.

Which model will win? The industry pundits are falling over themselves with contrary predictions, nobody seems to think both models will survive, but I’m not so sure!

I think it depends too much on the very different buying habits of consumers, regular buyers may go for the subscription model for example, while less frequent buyers like myself will chose to buy each track. There are big differences for the service provider in terms of the cost of service of course, however the past ten years must have taught us that the customer is now in charge and will vote with their feet.

I think the same will also be true of geoweb services.

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

Its interesting to observe the amount of concern, it appears, has been generated by the BBC TV decision to change how they display their weather maps.

Comments have focused on the use of brown rather than green to represent “Land” on the graphics, the use of animation rather than symbols to represent rain or snow events and the use of a perspective or globe view form of representation – something becoming increasing popular in mainstream GIS tools such as ESRI’s ArcGlobe.

What is most interesting is that none of this technology is new, and many other TV stations have been using interactive graphics for more than a decade, it appears that an organisation like the BBC will always draw more attention because it is so much part of everyday life – and you and I, the general public, really don’t like change.

This is something we at the Ordnance Survey recognise through bitter experience, you change the look of a national icon with great care – but you do have to make changes!

It is important to really exploit the potential on animation and interactive graphics to display complex information, and when used well, this technology has many advantages over static graphics, not least that it is possible to communicate more information in a short period of time.

Personally I’m a sucker for something new and quite like the new BBC graphics, but then I liked the ethnic tail designs British Airways tried a number of years back!

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

Nokia this week released a mobile phone application that perhaps paves the way for other ‘Sentient Computing” applications. Sentient Computing uses location as the underlying framework to deliver user centric applications – the key here is that location information is implicit not explicit as in traditional LBS applications (there are no maps !!!).

Sentient Computing applications tend to work is personal space rather than the larger areas that LBS might work, so if your LBS application works over a number of city blocks the sentient app works within a building or a room.

Nokia’s application “sensor” is a “friend finder” which uses local bluetooth networks to allow users mobile’s to communicate to each other without direct user input, allowing your phone to send messages on your behalf to other phone users which meet criteria you set.

The requirements for data to power these applications is also clearly different to LBS, but no less important – early applications such as Sensor are restricted by not having geodata available to them – for example you might want to automatically turn off the application when you are at the office or on the train, but have it switch on when you are in a restaurant or club.

Sentient computing applications I believe will be far bigger a deal than LBS simply because of their ease of use, but their requirements for geodata means a whole new ball game.

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