Month: May 2007

As a youngster, OK MSc Student.. we all wanted to work for the National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC) an organisation based in Farnborough with loads of exciting technology – GEMS workstations, Prime mini computers, tens of megabytes of disk storage, and a national remit to evangelise and exploit Remote Sensing.
This week the BBC announced the launch of the ‘Green eye’ technology centre, just multiply the old NRSC by 100 and you have some idea of the progress made in Earth Observation in the last 20 years..

A who would have though we would have sub meter imagery of much of the world available to anyone on their home computer !!

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

Today I presented a Keynote to the Partner Conference of Kort & Matrikelstyrelsens or KMS the Danish National Mapping Agency, and as a organisation it represents an interesting contrast to Ordnance Survey. There is in Denmark a clear separation between the capture and use of core geographic information for government use and the commercial exploitation of that data.

Within government agencies there is a free flow of information with little restriction to allow goverment activities to be carried out and services provided to the citizen. All commercial applications of geographic information are served by a group of partners of KMS who all have access to the national datasets via a range of web services implemented using OGC WxS services, including feature serving. Something the OS has been experimenting with for 5 years…
KMS have added to the standards to allow e-commerce tracking of usage and the correct licensing to take place.

Importantly KMS do not compete with their partners in serving these commercial markets.

Technically this is a great solution, which seems to be working both for the customers of KMS and its dynamic partner community and there is complete clarity as to the respective roles of each within the market.. it is nicely summarised by the following statement on the KMS website

“The National Survey and Cadastre creates and maintains geodata, which professional firms use to produce maps and mapping products.”

If nothing else, this should be food for thought for the OS with the government response to the OFT report expected any day now…

Written in the BA Lounge, Copenhagen Airport and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.