From the Mapperz blog, news that Bill Chadwick has added the ability to use the Google Earth plugin to his excellent “Where is the Path” application. For a long time this has been in my mind the best OS OpenSpace API site, allowing users to visualise routes using both the excellent OS maps and Google Imagery amongst many other data sets, and then export routes directly to their GPS via the GPX format.
This is just the type of innovative value add that comes from allowing developers access to raw data and server infrastructures, users now have access to a capability that is not present in the OS Get-A-Map service for example. It would be great to see further development of OpenSpace and eventually more favourable licensing terms to see more OS data used in this way, who knows even on Google Maps one day 🙂
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
Lisa and I sat down last night and watched the excellent first epsiode of a new BBC series Britain for Above, which uses beautiful aerial photography to illustrate what can best be described as the “Geography of Britain”. This looked fantastic in HD (Virgin media managed to key the one HD channel they supply working for a whole hour !) and I’m sure the series and its website, books and DVD it will be a great success.
This got me thinking as to the widespread appeal of aerial photography, and the contrast with popular perception of cartography. This is driven by the fact that I have two talks to give at the Royal Geographical Society and Society of Cartographers conference in September, and am thinking about the future of cartography.
It’s difficult to imagine Andrew Marr using topographic maps to explain.. the british transport network, or the structure of the city of London on prime time TV, but why is this? Of course the same spatial patterns are represented on a cartographic map, indeed there is much more information of an OS map than an aerial photo, so why are maps not more widely used by the mass media?
In the UK of course there are specific issues to do with licensing mapping, but I think there are two key issues..
Firstly topographic maps need to be interpreted requiring a knowledge of cartographic design standards; a river is a blue line, a major road is a red or green line (depending upon scale) and a motorway is a blue line, (but not the same blue as a river obviously).
Image produced from the Ordnance Survey Get-a-map service. Image reproduced with kind permission of Ordnance Survey and Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland.
Looking at aerial photography either vertical or oblique it is easy to identify natural and man made features based upon our direct experience, the amount of interpretation needed to recognise how a motorway might look from above compared to ground level is relatively small.
Secondly imagery as presented in last nights programme is dynamic, we were rarely presented with still images, instead we saw buses moving through London streets, trains approaching Waterloo station and ships sailing in the English Channel.
In itself, such dynamic content aids in the interpretation of the information presented, but this can be further enhanced as was done so last night by including animations which illustrated changes over a longer period of time.. the GPS traces of flights or taxi’s very well illustrated the economic structure of the UK.
So for cartography this raises an interesting challenge.. how can the art/science of map making really exploit the nature of soon to be dominant medium of electronic communications, rather than the static medium of paper and will the map of the future actually be an image ?
Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.
At the ESRI UC Executive submit this weekend, Dirk Kempthorne the US Secretary of the Interior announced that the 35 year old archive of Landsat Imagery held by the USGS would be made available for free public access via the web. Of course how federal data is made available in the US has always been something we Europeans looked upon with some envy despite it’s sometimes poor quality, but it’s important to remember that Remotely Sensed Imagery has always been slightly different, and a less permissive licensing regime has existed around what was seen as a more commercial data set.
So this is great news, but it illustrates an interesting question ? What is the economic half life of geodata, over what period of time does the value of geodata decay ? The Landsat archive is in many ways different to “mapping” data in that the empirical value of data in the form of raw pixel values is still of considerable interest to the scientific community, but from the perspective of visual interpretation how much less valuable is a view of Las Vegas from the late 1980’s compared to one of today.
From a mass-market perspective there is a clear difference in usefulness, for providing a synoptic view of the world today to provide context for other types of information clearly geodata needs to be as current as possible, 10 year old imagery particularly for urban areas is much less useful. But financially how much less valuable.
For most types of commercial geodata this value decay curve is impossible to establish, because of the combination of software like licenses and copyright, so for example Ordnance Survey data in the UK has the same commercial value when it is one day old, one year old and 49 years old, but it then drops to zero as it drops out of copyright.
Alongside the broad argument around making public sector information more open, perhaps it would also be useful to think about the data that will always be commercial, but has a value which decays over time.
Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.
