Month: March 2006

Categories
ESRI GIS Technology

Origami useful for mappers ?

No this is not about folding maps, rather a link to Geoff Zeiss comments on the usefulness of the new generation of mobile devices.

The mainstream IT press seems to have really stuck the knife into these devices, comparing them unfavourably to laptops and even tablet pc’s.

But as Geoff points out such devices really are useful to mobile workers, particularly if the issues with battery management are fixed – the two hours possible today is just not enough.

Now if these devices were to ship with solid state storage as announced by Samsung at Cebit, then you have a potentially robust solution with good battery life – a product that professional mobile users would pay a premium for.

Add to the mix ubiquitous wireless network availability, and applications like ArcGIS Explorer which I saw demoed again today in Redlands, which allow access to server based data not only for visualisation but also analysis, and you have quite a compelling proposition..

So Origami like devices do have a place, but as vertical solutions for professional mobile users, not the consumer market where users want smartphones !

Written and submitted from The Hilton Hotel, San Bernardino, using the hotel in-room internet connection.

Categories
GIS OGC

GeoRSS – bringing geography to the blogs..

As Martin points out in his return to blogging (welcome back !!) one of the most interesting presentations at this OGC TC meeting was the one given by Raj Singh on GeoRSS.

GeoRSS is a rapidly developing standard to encode locations into RSS feeds, so that for example, your blog aggregator software could subscribe to blogs whose entries relate to locations within 50 km’s of where you live, and of course to allow this to happen, also allow authors to tag their content with geographic location.

The real challenge here is to keep this encoding simple, following the rationale of RSS itself, while also allowing for more complex geographic information than simple Lat,Long pairs.

The approach taken so far is too offer two encoding types simple and gml which work with the Atom standard to extend RSS.

The Simple encoding which will meet the needs of most users take the form;

<georss:point>45.256 -71.92</georss:point>

While the more flexible GML encoding embeds GML features, offering more flexibility including different co-ordinate systems, and uses the form

<gml:Point>
   <gml:pos>45.256 -71.92</gml:pos>
</gml:Point>

Both encodings also support tagging line-strings, polygons and envelopes (MBRs).

There is real potential here for a standard to bring geographic information to the mainstream, however we also need to recognise there are other encoding out there and geoRSS will have to make it’s case against gpx, kml etc.

Look out for geoRSS entries from edparsons.com in the near future !

Written and submitted from The Marriott Hotel, Huntsville, using the hotel in-room internet connection.

Categories
GIS

Guardian article just plain wrong !!

Once again the Guardian Newspaper in the UK (which I read incidentally) has got caught up in the free geospatial data debate.

I quote..”Our taxes fund the collection of public data – yet we pay again to access it. Make the data freely available to stimulate innovation, argue Charles Arthur and Michael Cross ”

The OS is no more funded from taxpayers than many large software companies who work largely with government customers and have had the development of their core software funded over a number of years of development contracts, this is particularly the case with the large GIS software vendors!

The article is so full of factual errors I don’t now where to begin, but what comes across really clearly is the lack of the customer viewpoint!

Why not ask the customers of OS data what they would prefer – the status quo where they and they alone pay to license the high quality data they need, or the much admired situation in the United States where the provision of spatial data is funded by political mandate, which has over the last couple of administrations, resulted in data which is decades old and not maintained to any level of consistency.

The much admired data in Google Maps, MapPoint etc. comes from commercial vendors, which Google etc. have had to license, the base government supplied data does not meet their needs.. Remember the famous “Where is Apple” discussion last year, a result of government funded data used by Microsoft being so out of date it did not show the location of Apples’ offices in Cupertino !

There is no such thing as “free data”, in the end somebody has to pay for the expensive business of collecting and maintaining national geospatial databases, ask a politician what they would prefer to spend a limited tax funded budget on.. Hospitals and Schools or funding the collection of geospatial databases you know what they will answer !

Written and submitted from The Marriott Hotel, Huntsville, using the hotel in-room internet connection.