For those of you like myself, not invited to the OS New Strategy Event, the OS have posted a video summary on YouTube. That in itself is progress of course ..
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
Categories
Month: May 2009
While the alpha geeks of the geospatial world were meeting at Where2.0 in San Jose, something really significant happened in Washington.
From the FAQ of the Obama administrations new website data.gov launched today..
“What are some resources for viewing geospatial datasets?
The geospatial datasets available on Data.gov are provided in up to three open file formats: Keyhole Markup Language (KML), Compressed Keyhole Markup Language (KMZ) and ESRI Shapefile. These datasets are all viewable in many commercial and freely available applications. More information about Geographic Information System (GIS) software can be found by doing a web search.”
It does not need to more complex than this for the citizens of the US to benefit, there are many individuals and organisations both commercial and non-commercial who can now build on this.
Written and submitted from the BA Lounge, San Francisco Airport.
Categories
OS puts the “No” back in Innovation
It was all looking so good.. As announced in the budget day strategy document, the Ordnance Survey was amongst others things asked to focus its corporate resources at increasing the amount of innovation around it’s products and services.
Last week the OS launched their Geovation website, and have opened up somewhat their OpenSpace API – all very positive..
But then this morning comes news that Gavin Brocks kml file which allowed OpenSpace tiles to be displayed by any application that understands kml including Google Earth has been blocked by the OS for … well I’m not sure actually read Gavins blog post on the subject for the details.
I hope this is a case of one part of the organisation not realising the world has changed, but then again maybe it’s too early to tell. As someone who tried to get the OS to take innovation more seriously during my time there, I am just very disappointed for Gavin, if not surprised.
UPDATE 19/5 : The OS has reversed its decision, see Gavin’s blog for details
Written and submitted from the Google Offices, Mountain View California.