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Once again the issue of “free” and Open Source mapping has been raised by the Guardian , as always a number of good points are made along with a few Gilligan-isms..

The main thrust of the piece is about the potential of open source, community produced mapping data with interviews with representatives of the Mappinghacks and Open Street Maps projects, all great stuff about producing mapping data appropriate for the use of the citizen using GPS and web based editing tools. It is very exciting and does offer the potential to develop the UK GI industry in many different ways similar to the impact of the open source movement on commercial software development.

However.. you knew there would be one..

The article compares OS datasets which are more detailed and maintained daily by a team of 300+ surveyors, surveyed to 10cm accuracy with very expensive GPS receivers, to the data collected by volunteers using handheld GPS costing a few hundred pounds from Dixons.

I am not critical of the open source mapping movement here, but the needs of Utility companies, Local and Central Government often can only be met by high accuracy, up to date data, which is very costly to collect and for which they are willing to pay.

We need to try and take the political steam out of this debate, as I have noted before the decision as to who pays for the collection and maintenance of high quality data is purely political, but I don’t see any potential UK administration choosing the funding of the OS (£100m ?) above other more pressing social spending such as Schools and the NHS.

There are many needs however which don’t require such high accuracy, high cost data for which the OS does not have a viable product offering. This is where open source mapping and the potential improvements to it developed by other third parties offers the greatest potential. Here the UK could follow the example of the US where a range of GI companies could flourish adding value to this data.

The Gilligan moments then…

INSPIRE will result in the mapping of “every lamp-post, phone-mast, river, mountain” etc in Europe !

VMap1 (that’s 1:250K Remember) classified by US intelligence as the most detailed map ever drawn !

Well Known in the GML community Schemasoft the Vancouver based software company was acquired by Apple Inc on Wednesday. Although most well known in the GI industry from its GML – SVG tools, Schemasoft has worked behind the scenes with all the major vendors including Microsoft, Correl and Apple.

So no need to get too excited Apple intrest here is in Schemasofts file conversion and data management expertise which we may see appearing in Apple applications such as iWork , I don’t think we will be seeing GML on a iPod just yet.

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

An interesting article in Electronics Weekly reports on the findings of a DTI sponsored study visit to Japan looking at the uptake of Location Based Services (LBS). The headline is that less than 10% of the users of advanced LBS capable phones on the KDDI network actually make any use of the available services.

This would seem to agree with my perception of the market in the UK, if anything perhaps here it is even less than 10%. In this particular case we may be seeing the effect of a particular technology limitation, KDDI use A-GPS on their phones so get high location accuracy but first fix may take more than a minute – Japanese teenagers it appears are at least as impatient as those in the UK!

My guess however is that the problem lies at least as much with the applications that make use of this technology as with the technology itself. In the UK as in Japan I believe, a user must make an explicit decision to use an LBS type function, e.g. find me the closest ATM. Using the best designed WAP interface that will take at least 2-3 mins including time for the user to connect to a portal, the network locating the users phone, the backend GIS analysis and the presentation of results. Time to ask somebody 30 seconds !!

I have argued before to anyone who will listen that for LBS to work the whole service must be transparent to the user, as soon as you switch on your phone in the background various analysis can be taking place so that the most common requests are pre-calculated, and instantly available as contextual information.

When you are roaming the phone and various networks are working to transfer you to the provider with the strongest signal at any point in time, a process invisible to you other than the operator logo changing on the phones screen – this is how LBS should work !!

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