Month: May 2005

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.