The effort to create a copyright free streetmap continues next month with a dedicated weekend of mapping the streets of Manchester. Sounds like it’s going to be a great weekend ..
It is going to take a while, but I firmly believe one day they will be national open source datasets alongside the existing closed source datasets of today!
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
So this weeks Free our Data article attacking the OS (Do you think it’s personal ?) looks into the issue of inaccurate or perhaps out of date data in Navigation Systems and online mapping tools.
These I believe are the facts as presented in Charles Arthurs latest article.
– A street on which a house built in the late 1980’s does not appear to be in some GPS Navigation Systems and web mapping sites
– Sometimes the postcode is recognised but the road name is not.
– On some mapping sites the postcode is correctly geocoded but the mapping does not contain the street.
– Sometimes the postcode is correctly geocoded and the road appears on the map – hooray !!!
What is happening here? – well clearly the different service providers are making a choice as to who to obtain geographic information from, and how often to update the data in their systems.
I would guess most in-car navigation systems today are using data which is at least two years old, some progressive companies such as Tele Atlas actively market update data CD’s and memory cards every year, but the choice is with the owner to install them at additional cost.
Charles as you would expect suggests that is all the data produced by the Post Office and OS was provided for free, these problems would just disappear, as these commercial companies would no longer have to pay for updated data?
There is however another way of looking at this, the one example cited in the article, streetmap.co.uk, which actually had the road in the correct location, used up to date accurate data provided it so happens by Ordnance Survey.
They have made the business decision to source the most up-to-date information possible for their service and to license it.
Other service provides can source their data from elsewhere and may update the data less frequently, it is their business decision to do so, as contrary to popular opinion there is a choice !
There does appear to be a trend in the media at the moment to attack Satellite Navigation Systems for sending users “the wrong way”, nobody mentions you could make the same mistakes using a traditional printed road atlas if your were not really aware of your surroundings
Still I remember when the press had a phase of attacking music CD’s arguing that LP’s were actually better – It’s just the way the media handles new technology, first it’s great, then is terrible, its great but the next best thing is just around the corner and finally shock horror! nobody is making that technology anymore but we the people still love it !!
The Guardian article also states that local authorities are restricted in providing “up to date” data to other data companies as this would breach OS licensing agreements. This is true for OS derived data, if the local authority however has geocoded their own address information using GPS or their own surveyors of course this would not be the case.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
As a regular listener to Steve Gillmors’ Gillmor Gang podcast, I have become familiar with the concept of Attention, which is now entering the technology mainstream with a good writeup in MIT’s Technology Review
Attention as a concept is a realisation that with the massive increase in content on the internet, both professional and “consumer” generated, what we as users chose as sources of useful information actually has value.
What a community of knowledgeable individuals has an interested in, their combined attention has enormous value for other users – who need to know the current “in-thing”. This attention is also of interest to the marketing and advertising industries which are driving the economy of Web 2.0, having much more value that the simplistic view of page views as a measure of eyeballs!
To see attention at work just look at the ‘Hot Tags” at a site like Technorati, which to a certain extent express the combined attention of the blogging community. Likewise you purchase history at itunes, amazon etc, your shared bookmarks at del.icio.us are also manifestations of your attention.
There is a growing concern that such attention information, because of its value, needs protection and the development of the Attention Trust to raise awareness of the issue is very timely.
So where does this discussion interact with the world of geospatial information, well…
Did you realise how much information the developers of Geographic Exploration Systems and web mapping applications have the ability to collect, based on how you interact with their systems?
They know which parts of the planet you virtually visit with the most frequency, when you produce mapping of a particular area, and where you then next produce mapping for, they know where you are from IP location processing and potentially much more if you have registered to use their systems.
I wonder what the value to a marketing company would be to know the most popular searched location for IT workers in Denver, or after looking a maps of Las Vegas Strip the next location visited by the majority of users was ….
Remember your attention has value !!
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.