Blog posts
I am impressed by the work that the Power of Information Task Force are doing, to drive forward the recommendations of last years highly influential report. Their latest initiative is Show Us a Better Way a £20,000 competition over the summer to identify the most useful new service which could be developed if public sector information was made more accessible.
So if your are thinking of developing a new mash-up, this is a great opportunity..
Written and submitted from the Google Office, Zurich.
Last week Google introduced Map Maker a set of online map making tools to very positive… but not universal acclaim.
I can understand where SteveC is coming from, but I think it’s important to clarify a few points.
Map Maker is clearly not an open source project, and as such is not in competition with openstreetmap and does not I believe represent a forking opportunity for the creation of open geodata. If you wish to help build an open geodata based global map then openstreetmap is the project for you.
What Map Maker represents is the public exposure of the tool Google has been using internally for a while to “fill in the gaps” of our global mapping coverage, specifically mapping areas not currently covered by the commercial map data providers. We are now asking the users of Google Maps to help us by providing mapping data using the same tool. The data submitted is licensed by contributors to Google to eventually become part of Google Maps/Earth following moderation by Google.
This is a key difference in approach to openstreetmap, most end users of Google Maps/Earth etc. and most developers using their api’s don’t want or need access to the raw data, for them such information is most usefully made available as pre-rendered tiles.
Although not currently an open source project, it does produce data that is free to users, the information contributed by the community becomes freely available to them via Google Maps and the Maps and Earth API’s
At the moment, I believe this is the best way to rapidly expand the availability of mapping and to provide access to detailed online maps to communities which up until now have just not had access to something most of use take for granted.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
Over the past few months Crime Mapping has floated up the political agenda, reaching the mainstream with Boris Johnson’s recent call for crime mapping, echoed by the Guardian’s Free our Data campaign, and this morning followed up by the reporting of Louise Casey’s Cabinet Office report.
You would think from the media, that this is something new in the UK, but in fact Crime Mapping has been taking place for many years, and the UK has world renowned expertise as demonstrated by the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science at UCL who next month are running the 6th, yes that’s the 6th National Crime Mapping Conference in Manchester.
What is new, and what should be applauded, is at last a focus on making much of this information available to the public- until now the efforts have concentrated on producing crime maps for internal consumption by police forces themselves.
As a matter of principal, making information public is always a good thing, when the information allows citizens to make decisions, and to independently monitor the services provided to them by Government.
We should not have to rely on maps like the one below created by Keir Clarke, who scraped local authority websites to build this mash-up.
If I can use this website to monitor the performance of British Airways, should I not be able to monitor the effectiveness of my local police force.
There is often a disconnect between peoples perception of crime and its actual occurrence, a map with a few push-pins representing successful neighbourhood policing will be much more valuable than the next crime survey report finding.
Of course there must be mechanisms to protect the identity of individual victims of crime, but is the situation really much different from the crime reporting in Local Newspapers ?
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
I’m afraid I won’t be able to attend this years State of the Map Conference, but the schedule looks fantastic and I’m sure Limerick as a location will provide great craic. If you have not already registered, this is a conference I would really recommend attending, without question crowd sourced geodata will be an important part of the Geospatial Industry of the future, and this is the event to hear from the pioneers.
Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.
There is a great story behind this map, which illustrates why the Geospatial Industry is just so exciting at the moment, and hints at the potential of the geoweb as a global phenomenon.
Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.
Actually, I’m not that excited about the GPS, and the speed of UMTS is great but for me the most important part of the new package is the UMTS network itself and its coverage.
In the UK O2 never really invested in a EDGE network as a result, most iPhone users in the UK were limited to basic GPRS networking. The 3G network of O2 is much more extensive, so I expect to be able to get faster wireless access more often.
The combination of both Cloud and BT Openzone wireless access as part of the deal, may also mean that I spend more time on wifi anyway.
And yes of course I will be picking up a new iPhone on 11 July !
Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.
Digital Urban and the guys at CASA announce the latest iteration of their brilliant tool to fill the gap between traditional GIS data and Google Maps – MapTube.
There can’t be a better way at the moment to publish results more quickly and easily, this is a key tool in publishing the results of GI Science to the mainstream. It will be interesting to compare this approach to the upcoming ArcGIS 9.3 functionality.
It’s worth thinking carefully how you use this powerful tool, if you have not already, make sure you catch up on the basics of thematic cartography, This was the key textbook in my day !
Written and submitted from the Ottawa Airport, using its Boingo 802.11 network.
This took about the time I thought it would, I was joking at Google I/O last week with Brady Forrest how long it would take someone to create a simple Flight Sim using the Google Earth Plugin !
As reported by the wonderful www.barnabu.co.uk
Written and submitted from the Ottawa Airport, using its Boingo 802.11 network.
The principle success criteria for a good developer conference, great food !
Ok there is more…
A commitment to open up interfaces to allow the developer community to really exploit the functionality that you develop, and an opportunity to share experiences and communicate with your peers are also really important.
Written and submitted from the Hotel Adagio, San Francisco, using its free wired broadband network.
Talking to the developers who attended this weeks Google I/O conference in San Francisco, the opportunity to sit and chat to the Google engineers who develop the API’s they use was really appreciated, and something Google is slowly getting better at.
Developing a successful geoweb API is an incremental process, a product of the natural tension between adding new functionality and data and making that functionality available to developers, in that context it should become clear that the big announcement of the Google Earth plug-in, is more about adding a API to earth, than bringing 3D functionality to the browser.
I can’t wait to see what the hugely active developer community makes of the Earth plug-in, no doubt we will see 3D with everything over the next few months as perhaps the functionality is used is places where on balance it’s not really appropriate but cool.
In time however truly innovative new applications will appear, and it’s really fitting that Paul Rademacher the guy behind the first map mash-up got to introduce it to the developer community.
On and another thing…
Entertainment – flight of the conchords better than Steve Ballmer any-day 🙂
As someone points out in the comments of this Free Our Data post, the definition of the Ordnance Survey’s public task was clearly written by the OS, I would suggest maybe even Vanessa Lawrence herself.
But if you were the CEO of a large commercial organisation would you not want to write your own mission statement ? Of course you would, but in most public companies this would be done with reference to your shareholders and discussed by your executive board with the input of your industry experienced chairman, well at least in theory anyway.
The problem here is the lack of knowledgeable oversight of the activities of the OS, the public task of the OS was defined by the OS because nobody else within government was either qualified or interested to do so, things are certainly beginning to change post the Power of Information report, but still the underlying value of geospatial information; and it’s huge potential if made more accessible, remains hidden behind bureaucratic processes.
Perhaps the mythical UK Location Strategy might suggest a way forward, I wonder who wrote that…
Written and submitted from the Iberia Lounge, Madrid Airport, using its 802.11 network.