Month: August 2006

Categories
GIS opensource Technology Thoughts

Maps Kidnapped ?

DRG's are free !!

As both James and Jo blogged, the complete series of USGS Quad series DRG maps were taken hostage this week and then released following the payment of $1600 to the Free the Maps website.

Now we are thought the data was free right? – well yes but.. Some states made the data available free to download, some commerical operators charge for media (with some mark-up), most of the data is available on sites like Microsoft Terraserver. However as the site explains..

“..Because there are so many different web sites hosting bits and pieces of this data, it is often difficult to find.

When you do find it, there is often missing data, the files are difficult to download, or the site may use non-standard naming conventions for the files. In addition, there are still a significant number of States that have no DRG’s available for free download.”

So $1600 later all the data has been purchased and will now be uploaded to the Internet Archive. Great job Jared !!!

Unlike Jo (no surprise there then :-)), I don’t think this is the model for future funding for European Mapping agencies whose data is currently protected by copyright… but it may well form the model for exploiting and distributing OS maps as they reach the end of their copyright as the mapping will be of similar age.

The example DRG above is 35 years old, and out of copyright OS mapping is 50 years old.

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

Categories
GIS Google Earth Technology Thoughts virtual earth

A picture is worth a thousand words ?

Not when it comes to Geographic Information I would argue…

Adena very well I think identified the massive interest in imagery demonstrated by the vendors at this years ESRI UC exhibition in her latest directions magazine editorial. Imagery is great as context to other types of spatial information, but on its own I believe it’s value is limited.

There are a lot of innovative ideas in this part of the geodata business driven both by the massive demand of the new generation of geographic exploration services from GYM and now ESRI, and from the fact that for much of North America there is no large scale topographic information otherwise available.

southampton in 3D

While technologies like Pictometry are interesting especially when combined with tools like SocketSet and OpenFlight to produce 3-D city models (thanks to John Allan and Rick Mort of BAE for the Southampton example above) , they can only provide contextual information which need expert human interpretation to generate true information let alone ‘Geospatial intelligence”

Using the example above, without access to other geographic information, can you tell.. where in the city are we ?, what is the name of the street in the foreground,? what is the address of the red building?, who “owns” this property ?

To answer these type of questions and indeed to really carry out any type of spatial analysis you need detailed feature based information and I would argue for a lot of analysis up to date information as-well.

So until more feature based information can be produced (it’s expensive !!) new tools like ArcGIS Server at 9.2 and the increasingly popular OGC WFS standard will be constrained..

Have we have invented the equivalent of the CD player, but are still producing 78-rpm mono gramophone records.

And a semantic Geoweb based on imagery.. forget it !!

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

Categories
Thoughts

YouTube copyright problems

You can feel the pain… somebody at the cabinet office has fallen foul of copyright issues with last weeks release of a public information film, silicon.com reports..

Another oil tanker with steering problems ?

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