Month: October 2006

Categories
GIS Google Maps Thoughts

The other data in Mash-ups

With the UK mash-up day coming up at the end of the week, this blog post by J. LeRoy is very timely.

It reports on the response of the Fire Deptartment of Seattle to a google maps mash-up of 911 calls, the dept. has now removed the feed replacing it with a jpeg image. The dept. are not legally mandated to make the information available, but have removed the “machine readable” format version of the information citing “Homeland security concerns”

As Jim points out if they are worried about security they could just put a time delay in the feed as happens with flight progress reporting, this could otherwise set a worrying precedent for data providers !

There is continued debate about the geographical component to mash-ups and how “open” this geographic content is.. well the bigger issue I suggest, is all the other data one might want to map which is clearly not open at the moment.

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

Categories
GIS

Geospatial archiving – or how to backup 25,000 iPods

As is often the case the press have not quite got this story right, but pretty close.
Although it may not match the perception of “the man on the street”, OS is a data business, and over the past 5 years since I have been working here, the volumes of data we deal with have increased massively.

Not only in terms of new sources of digital imagery but also from increasing numbers of geospatial feature databases used in product development.

Data volumes today are over 500 Tb – that’s around 25,000 iPods !!

As a “National Mapping Agency” and as part of government there are additional responsibility’s in terms of maintaining an archive of the data throughout is lifetime and hence the need to develop strategies to archive large amounts of data.

UDO DiscWe have chosen to adopt UDO media, very high density optical media which can store 30GB per disk and which is far more resistant to environmental conditions than traditional magnetic media.

The bigger issue for us however is to make sure that the data is able to be used potentially in 50 years time which is guaranteed life of the media. Will we be able to read the data formats used (TIFF, SQL load files, CSV) in 2056 ? We have tried to select as open generic formats as possible but we need to document how the data is accessed as in the future we may need to be emulating the environments of today on some future computing platform.

There is an interesting precedent.. The BBC’s Domesday Project of 1986 based on a BBC model B micro and LV disc was rescued from its unreadable state by the National Archives a couple of years ago.

Written and submitted from the Holiday Inn Express Southampton, using my Vodafone 3G network card.

Categories
Technology Thoughts

If YouTube needed the dragons ?

BBC Dragons Den

So Google pays nearly £900m for YouTube, well done Chad and Steve !!

But just imagine it they had attempted to get investment from the BBC’s Dragons Den programme instead of Sequoia Capital..

Chad and Steve – We have this great idea.. a site where people upload they home videos and then let everybody view them from free !!

Dragons – OK, so you charge people to upload the videos.. Internet bandwidth is expensive.. what is your margin ?

Chad and Steve – Actually, er.. you are right it is expensive and we expect to spend about a million dollars a month.. but um.. we don’t think we should charge users to upload either..

Dragons – So you have a business that costs a least a million dollars a month to run, and has no revenue stream – what were you looking for in terms of investment from us ?

Chad and Steve – Well dragons we would like £50,000 for a 0.005 % share of the company..

Evan – Today Chad and Steve left the den empty handed..

Seriously I understand the potential advertising angle here but even with a stock only transaction is this really worth the money?

To understand why YouTube has become such a success however just watch this – all power to the geeks !!
Written and submitted from Starbucks, The Strand , London, using the t-mobile wifi network.