Month: April 2009

Categories
Thoughts

Digital Planet and geodata

On the train home last night, I caught up on this weeks podcast of the BBC Radio World Service programme, Digital Planet a regular on my iPhone powered commute these days. As has often been the case recently there was something of interest to Geo people in the form of a report on a LIDAR survey of the recent Italian Earthquake and a report from Kenya on Wherecamp Africa.

It was great to hear in both cases the positive impact that geospatial technology was having, in particular the report from Kenya highlighted once again the importance of making sure the rich infrastructure of geospatial technology we enjoy in the West is made universal.

Google Map of Kenya
Google Map of Kenya

I was however a bit miffed at the comments made by Bill Thompson, someone I usually have a lot of time for, who made the point that he though it would be better if geospatial infrastructure for Africa was developed in a more open fashion, using openstreetmap or the Mumbai free map as a model.

This is a debate well known to readers of this blog, and as always I ( and Google ) am fully supportive of the open geodata movement, however I will once again argue that making the data available without cost as map tiles in Google Maps and via the Google Maps API will have an impact on Kenyan society orders of magnitude greater than providing a raw data feed alone.

To be clear the point I am making is not that access to  raw geodata is not important to some communities, and in Kenya Google is experimenting making the raw data available for non-commercial use, but its impact is small in comparison with the widespread availability of mapping data on the web, mobile phones , etc.

Bill happy to debate the point over a coffee next time I’m in Cambridge 🙂

Categories
LBS Thoughts

Latitude finds lost purse.. world a slightly better place !

 

Not the handbag in question
Not the lost handbag !

OK to us Brits it’s a handbag, but this techcruch story is a interesting one both highlighting a technology story and a how old media deals with a technology story story ! A lady in silicon valley loses her bag, but because in it there is a phone which is running Latitude, it is tracked by her sister and recovered by the police.

 

A positive story about location tracking, yes but.. of course the concerns about the ability of third parties to track you location are quite rightly expressed here. I am not going to argue that this is not appropriate on the contrary I think as an industry we need to be very open about how this technology works, what information is stored, who gets access to it and how it might be used.

Ultimately location aware applications will take off in a big way, when their usefulness from the perspective of a potential user is greater than the difficulty to install and use them plus the loss of anonymity given up to use the system.

The ease of use element to this equation is improving though better user interface design and technology development, the issue of anonymity I argue needs openness from the technology companies and education. I think Google, Yahoo, Loopt, Brightkite, Foursquare etc. are doing a pretty good job in explaining how location aware applications work and have been explicit as to what information is stored and for how long.  

The “industry best practice” is there is such a thing, is to store just a users current location, in an anonymous fashion, only after the user has opted into the service and is reminded a regular intervals that they are using such a service. 

As part of the education process around location aware services, it is also important to be clear that already telecoms providers make the location of mobile devices available to the authorities when requested along with details of calls made, IP traffic etc., so some level of perspective is also useful.

The big challenge remains making compelling applications that prove to users that sharing their location with others is useful – Handbag hunting is a start..

 

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

Categories
Data Policy Google Earth Thoughts

GIS without a GIS ?

Interesting challenge, Can you do simple spatial analysis without access to a GIS or raw data ?

I received this email today, what do you think ?

“Hope you are well – I am now 18 months into a career in renewable energy and am the “expert” in GIS in this company.  We work with Imass (my old employers) with a GIS-based system for working out how much connections of wind-farms, biomass plants etc. are to the electricity grid.  I am going through a data checking exercise and want to compare substation locations digitised by Imass with air photos and maps.  

It is easy for us to create a KML file and display on Google Earth but do any of your readers know of a clever way of comparing with OS mapping – without the need of a GIS or ownership of the OS maps?  Obviously one by one we can compare on Multimap but how do I quickly move around 800 points? 

I wondered if  Where’s the Path was along the right lines on this.  Not sure where I can find the right forum to discuss.”

My guess is that for largely organisational / licensing issues this would not be possible, even if technically it may be, but it’s an interesting thought…

Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.