Transport for London boards the mash-up bandwagon

by Ed ParsonsData Policy, Google Maps, TransportPosted on 6 Comments

As introduced by Christopher Osborne @osbornec on Twitter this morning (where else do you get news these days ?), Transport for London (TfL) the government organisation responsible for most transport in London have begun providing access to limited amounts of their transit data, via a simple web feed interface. TfL must be congratulated for this step, and by doing so using simple XML …

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Summer of Code 2009

by Ed ParsonsThoughtsPosted on One Comment

  Google have announced the 2009 Summer of Code programme. If you are an organisation which would like to get student help in moving forward your Open Source project now it the time to get involved. Last year 1000 students took part ,working on projects from 175 organisations, including OSGeo and OpenStreetMap. Written and submitted from the …

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OK if the AGI can change…

by Ed ParsonsAGIPosted on 5 Comments

Last year I pretty much gave up on the AGI conference as it did not seem to be representative of the Geographic Industry I could see around me.  However over the past few months my attitude has begun to change, finally I pushed into completely reversing my opinion my this communication.. Yes,this is a Twitter message from AGI conference organisers announcing a stream …

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mashup* – Being Location Aware Event

by Ed ParsonsLBS, MobilePosted on Comments are Disabled

I am going to be speaking at the  mashup* – Being-Location-Aware Event in London on the 19th March, an event which I hope will really capture the current excitement around using  location in both mobile and desktop applications. After many false starts, your location is finally easily available to application developers allowing them to create a …

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History in Google Earth – Did you miss it ?

by Ed ParsonsData Policy, Google EarthPosted on One Comment

With last months launch of Google Earth 5.0 much “mainstream” interest was focused on the capability to view under the ocean, and of course to begin the search for the lost city of Atlantis 🙂 For many however, myself included, the most important new capability is the ability to view historic images from the Google archive of satellite and aerial imagery. …

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AfricaMap – GSDI 2.0 ?

by Ed ParsonsINSPIRE, SDIPosted on One Comment

As highlighted by Keir on the excellent Google Maps Mania last week,  AfricaMap is an interesting  attempt to build a repository of geospatial data about Africa, developed by the Center for Geographic analysis at Harvard University.   What is interesting about this site, is both the scope of the project and the approach taken. From decades many individuals, groups and organisations have been trying to develop Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) at …

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UK government starts to get open source

by Ed Parsonsopensource, ThoughtsPosted on 2 Comments

As the Guardian Technology blog notes the UK government is once again trying to push Government Departments into looking at Open Source software solutions at least as an alternative to the proprietary software we all know and love. This is not the big stick approach which has been used in some other countries, here the policy is from a procurement perspective to just make …

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Mapping the Victorian fires – Some important lessons for Europe ?

by Ed ParsonsData Policy, Google MapsPosted on One Comment

Nobody can have failed to be moved by the tragedy of the Bush fires which have been devastating Victoria, Australia this weekend. As reported by Official Google Australia Blog the Google Geo team in Sydney worked fast yesterday to get a real-time map of the extent of the fires available online and is has seen extensive use over the last 24 hours. A crucial …

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