Month: October 2006

Todays press release by the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) has picked up a lot of coverage in the mainstream press, with this mornings Today programme discussing the potential findings with reference to the great romantic English poets – its all because of Wordsworth apparently, that we attempt to find Tranquillity.

While I appreciate this sits well with the spin the CPRE would like to attach to this story (Well done the PR Dept !) it would be nice, just one in a while, if the press actually looked behind the map to find out how it was created.

Behind the map was a group of researchers from Northumbria and Newcastle Universities who used GIS techniques to weight a 500m pixel grid model of England, giving each pixel a value based on the weighted overlay of data layers representing amongst others;
• Land Cover
• Proximity of rivers, streams, lakes and the sea;
• Presence of birds and other wildlife;
• Proximity to transport links
• Proximity to urban settlements
• Population density
• Presence of visually intrustive features such as pylons and wind turbines etc.

This is a really interesting study, and yes I’m sure one could pick holes in the methodolgy used, but the team need to be congratulated on making such an impact with their work – its just a shame that in this case, the media as is often the case, runs away from the science behind the map.

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

The subject of GeoDRM something which OS like many other commercial data suppliers is very interested in developing has caused intense debate on the Geowanking mail list.

This comes as no surprise as the term has been damaged by the “heavyweight” tactics of the likes of Microsoft and Apple in relation to the music download industry and is seen by some even as “evil”.

In my mind the GeoDRM work we are supporting as this point is more about the creation of standards based ways of defining, expressing and distributing the rights to access geospatial data – recognising the point that both commercial and non-commercial users may want to manage how their content is used.

Yes of course at some point, some organisations will look to measures of actually physically restricting access to data based on particular rights, this a key element in establishing trust with the content owners. I am not going to argue that the fairplay system used by Apple is 100% right, it is better than many others, but without it there would be no iTunes store, and therefore a far smaller market for download music sales as the music industry would not have released their content!

Written and submitted from the CASA Basement Lecture Theatre at UCL, London, using my Vodafone 3G network card.