A rare victory for public sector data reuse in Europe

by Ed ParsonsData PolicyPosted on Comments are Disabled

From Jeff Thurston at the Vector One blog, news that the Dutch operation of Landmark Information Group have won a case at the Dutch High Courts asserting that they should be able to access environment information from the City of Amsterdam without high license costs or limitations to its reuse. This is an interesting development because it is an area where there is little case …

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A different perspective of London

by Ed Parsonsconference, LBS, ThoughtsPosted on 4 Comments

I gave a presentation at the Digital Cities Seminar yesterday and was fascinated by some of the maps Sir Terry Farrell showed as part of his presentation which will be featured in his new book Shaping London. It is always refreshing to look at how people other than cartographers choose to represent geospatial information, the image below taken from Terry’s presentation show the …

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Richmond Maps nearly everything…

by Ed ParsonsGoogle Maps, SDI, ThoughtsPosted on 7 Comments

Its great to see my own local authority making great use of Google Maps, as pointed out  by the Mapperz team , Richmond Council have produced a series of maps using Google Maps to illustrate most of their local services, including a pet subject of mine Recycling sites.  There is much to be said for a very simple approach like this, the …

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StateoftheMap 2009 Call for Papers

by Ed ParsonsData Policy, opensource, ThoughtsPosted on Comments are Disabled

The call for papers for always one of the most interesting conference has just been announced. StateoftheMap 2009 is the conference to discuss all thinks to do with the ground breaking Open Street Map Project, and this year will be held in Amsterdam in July This is much more than a gathering of people who like to ride bikes …

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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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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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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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