Blog posts
A great early example of the value of the new TfL train prediction API, a map of the ‘Real time” locations of Tube Trains.
Produced by MySociety ace Matthew Somerville a really neat demo and another example of the value of releasing government datasets, and in this case an example of an occasion where an API is more useful than the raw data.
Written and submitted from the Google Offices, London (51.495N, 0.146W)
Mapnificent LondonI have for a while called out for some new cartographic approaches to communicating information which make use of the radically different capabilities of electronic displays compared to paper. To be fair I suppose the palette of tools available to the online cartography have been limited, and the state of the art was probably some of the renderings of OpenStreetMap data developed over the last year or so.
With the release at Google I/O this year of the V3 Maps API and styled maps functionality these tools are becoming more accessible, and one of the early results is a beautiful map produced by Stefan Wehrmeyer in Berlin. His Mapnificent London map uses the styled map API to show London by night, and then with full credit to the famous mapumental map, dynamically displays journey times if you used the extensive London night bus network.
The dynamic aspect makes this map really interesting by simply dragging a time slider bar you are presented with a great deal of information is a clear and simple way, something which would be difficult to achieve with traditional static cartographic techniques.
Hopefully the first of many new dynamic maps..
Written and submitted from the Google Offices, London (51.495N, 0.146W)
Courtesy of last weeks drop of Ordanace Survey Open Data, the Westminster electoral boundaries in Google Earth.
It’s amazing to think that such a key dataset was not easily accessible until so recently. Without doubt this is just the type of data set that the “free our data” movement was calling to be made freely available.
The type of innovation that comes from the increased accessibility of information is well demonstrated by the code point web service developed by Stuart Harrison over the weekend at http://www.uk-postcodes.com/ and documented on the uk-government-data-developers mailing list.
What a difference a week makes !!
I have had a couple of questions about how the free OS data is licensed, here is the license which as you can see is basically a creative commons attribution license.
This confirms there are no derived data issues.
In fact this license makes OS Opendata more “open” than Openstreetmap.
Written and submitted from the Where 2.0 Conference (37.331N, 121.888W)
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I have really enjoyed listening to the BBC Radio 4 series “On the Map” a series on mapping presented by Mike Parker a self-confessed OS Map fan, and author of Map Addict
Now Mike is very much a OS paper maps man, so in today’s programme I attempt to defend digital mapping against the acquisition that digital mapping and satnavs are destroying map-making and map-reading.
And on such a momentous day in the history of the Ordnance Survey data.
Today some 230,000 miles of Street View coverage has gone live in Google Maps, which represents arguably the most detailed map of the UK every produced. I say this because of the amount of information contained in each panoramic photograph is simply massive.
Yes it may not look like a conventional cartographic map, but it is nevertheless rich geospatial information and represents the next evolution of maps.
Street View images contain both quantitative information, parking restrictions from signs, opening times of shops, the type of tree most common is the surburan streets of Manchester and qualitative information, the “sense of place” something very difficult to represent using traditional cartographic techniques.
Street View imagery in the UK will I hope become a valuable resource to academics researching the state of the nation at the beginning of the 2010’s, a image taken every 10 metres or so for 238,000 miles a distance equivalent to travelling from the earth to the moon, must represent one of the largest archives of photographs ever collected.
It is disappointing that the raw images used to create street view will have to be destroyed at the request of the European Union Data Protection Working Party, leaving only the privacy blurred published versions for future generations to accesses, still that is the balance we need to achieve between providing useful services and protecting privacy.
When I was running around Covent Garden in the early 1990’s creating a “hypermedia” map using a video camera and Apple’s Hypercard, I had a vague idea that such a database of navigable scenes might be extended to other parts of London, but National Coverage… that would have been Science Fiction !
But then again so once was putting a man on the moon !
Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)
I spent the beginning of a very busy week last week talking about the benefits of making public sector data more accessible. I was speaking at the launch of public transit data in Brussels, where the local public transport agency STIB made their schedule information available for use within Google Maps in Belgium.
As in all previous Transit data launches this is a non-exclusive arrangement, and others organisations or individuals could make use of the data to build applications.. This is one of main drivers of making information like this available, as it allows innovative solutions to be developed rapidly to meet real user needs.
The most well developed ecosystem of applications developers around transit data has developed around the BART System in San Francisco, who have a web page listing around 30 free and paid for applications which help people use public transport in the Bay Area.
At last weeks launch in Brussels, a local developer eMich demonstrated their android application which provides access to real time information on the STIB system, clear evidence that Europe’s developer community are just a proficient at meeting users needs given access to the data.
In the UK the government has made some excellent progress in both providing the mechanism to download government data sets, but also working hard to develop a community of developers and innovators around www.data.gov.uk.
Now just a few weeks after the site went live we are beginning to see applications developed that exploit the data, a personal favourite of mine is the asborometer, a mobile application that allows a user to understand local crime data in a very simple way..
Listen to the developer Jeff Gilfelt describe his project..
Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)
This is a bit of fun, we have a great team of developers in Sydney who work of the Maps API amongst other things and yesterday launched for the worlds enjoyment a bunch of Labs features to Google Maps which basically allow you to do cool stuff.
One tool allows you to flip you map, making any of the four cardinal map directions top of the map, so here is the Aussie view of Southern England with South at the top.
We are used to maps orientated to the direction of travel within SatNavs, usually in a perspective projection, but a simple reorientation of a small scale map like this still “just does not look right” to me.
Amazing the power of convention when looking at maps. For the geeks amongst you, you will also recognise that this is also a visible manifestation of a new way to render maps..
Check them out by clicking on the green lab flask icon next time you use Google Maps..
Written and submitted from Zurich Airport (47.460N, 8.554E)
So be honest how many of us every expected todays’s announcement would ever come? a day when the very conservative civil service of the United Kingdom made available very comprehensive government data sets available for free. OK there are a few notable exceptions (OS , Royal Mail and TfL spring to mind) but as a starting point to have nearly 2500 data sets available and a community of nearly the same number of application developers is a huge success.
How often is it that the UK government can demonstrate greater openness that the United States, this is a far more impressive launch than the much admired data.gov portal.
The data.gov.uk portal also represents a huge shift in mindset for government in the UK, I’m very proud of a letter which I received while working at the Ordnance Survey almost accusing me of sedition and threatening me with the official secrets act for blogging and suggesting the OS could make data more widely accessible.
Culture change is a term much branded about within the civil service, what we see with the data portal really is culture change.
From a technical perspective data.gov.uk also represents the publish first and sort out the quality / metadata later paradigm which governments must follow, an evolutionary approach is vital in the fast moving world of web today, achieving perfection and accounting for all potential uses of data is not feasible and can no longer be used as an excuse not release data “as is”
The role of Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt in this change cannot be over stated without the “star” factor of these two individuals todays announcement would not have been possible. I look forward to reading the inside story of their activities in the next edition of Prospect Magazine which promises to be a major scoop.
Also influential with government has been the campaigning of former innovation minister Tom Watson among others, has been edging towards this move by holding such events as Show Us a Better Way, a competition with cash prizes for government data mashups.
Today of course is not the end of the battle, we need to keep the pressure on for all public sector data holders to default to making their information available, and there is still time to express support for free access to Ordnance Survey data by taking part in the current consultation process. Evidence for why this is important is illustrated by this example, just one of many issues caused by the current licensing regime.
To paraphrase outrageously, for Open Access to Government data, this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
Written and submitted from the Google Offices, Copenhagen (55.683N, 12.571E)
