Category: Blog

Blog posts

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Google Earth Technology

Backyard Space Photography

Picture from 30km

From the excellent Google Earth Blog, Frank links to another great example of what the process of democratising technology has achieved.

A group of guys launched a fully instrumented sensor package below a helium balloon, which was tracked in real time using google earth and produced some stunning images. The video on their site of the launch and recovery of the balloon, are great fun – you can just sense the excitement !!

Ok so this may not be a practical remote sensing application yet, but it’s amazing.. pictures from 30 km high, a third of the way to space, taking with a Canon Digital camera you could buy on the high street.

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

Categories
Data Policy Thoughts

Whitehall and laptops..

An interesting news story from silicon.com, noting that government staff are to be banned from removing laptops containing personal information from their offices.

Is it just me, but should we not be asking why they have such data on their laptops in the first place ? Surely all such information should be held only in databases on the government secure network, where they use can be monitored and protected.. if this needs to be accessed from home or on the road then VPN into the network ?

For too long this has been reported as Government being careless losing laptops, the real story is a complete lack of information management. If this type of debate gets your interest, take a look a Cory Doctorow’s article in the Guardian last week.

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

Categories
Data Policy Ordnance Survey web 2.0

Zillow move should allow other small scale experiments

Last weeks announcement on the Zillow blog that is was releasing its neighbourhood boundary data to the community in Shapefile format is the story of the year so far… (ok so we are only a few weeks in… but this is important)

Zillow.com

Zillow is the US Real Estate web site that uses much web 2.0 goodness to actually carry out simple analysis of the housing market, a largely geographical phenomena of course, and allows the user to produce simple hotspot maps of the relative activities in house prices in different neighbourhoods, amongst other things.

This is where the Open Source boundary data comes in… the best people to help define and keep the neighbour boundary data “up to date” are the people themselves, and as the OpenStreetMap guys have found there is a growing community of people willing to do so.

I would be really interested to see how peoples perception of their neighbourhood compares with the “official” data, there is of course much folk-law as to the practices of Estates Agents in London calling Battersea an a rough area when I grew up “South Chelsea”, of course it is gentrified now…

We are only just developing the tools which allow users to express their own sense of place, this is an exciting first step in many ways, and will no doubt point the way to more collaborative mapping applications.

Again ,of course, this raises the question as to other data sets which could be maintained by the community in such a manner, the completeness of OpenStreetMap in the UK (shields up) could be improved overnight if data could be open sourced in this way as it has in the Netherlands for example.

The OS spends relatively little keeping its small scale business geographics data products such as strategi maintained, and it returns similarly modest revenues… worth a small-scale experiment perhaps ?

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

Categories
Apple

Genius MacWorld Keynote in a minute…

Credit to the Mahalo daily, no great surprises and nothing for me to run out and buy.. although I’m looking forward to the free firmware update for my Apple TV !

I got four on my keynote bingo game however !

Written and Submitted from the Google Office, London.

Categories
Data Policy Technology

In praise of the iPlayer

iplayer

In the past I have been very critical of the BBC approach to making their programmes available online, which until December required you to use Microsoft DRM, and hence was PC only. However in December the beeb released the streaming version of
iPlayer using the latest Adobe technology to allow users to watch selected programmes online for a week after they are broadcast, and this is a cross platform service.

I must say this is really well down, the interface is simple and well designed, the quality of the video is very good and the flexibility such as service offers the viewers of the BBC is massive, along with on-demand services offered by virginmedia my cable supplier, my household rarely watches live broadcast TV, other than the news, choosing what to watch, when we want to watch it.

We are not alone the BBC reports today that 3.5 million shows have been streamed or downloaded since Christmas Day. Interestingly the number of people streaming the programmes outnumber those downloading using the Microsoft DRM by a factor of eight.

This could be interesting in context to the expected announcement from Apple that they will now support movie rental from itunes, is it that the video market unlike music is one where we don’t feel it necessary to “own’ the media, or is it now the fact that access to the cloud is so pervasive we don’t mind accessing information when we need it and then throwing it away.

Either way again, you can’t help but draw comparisons with how geodata is licensed, and ask similar questions, for example as a developer building some new houses, would you not want to license the data for just the period of build ?

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

Categories
AGI Apple Thoughts

Eyes down for Macworld..

The annual Applegeek fest known as MacWorld is coming up next week, and I’m all ready to play “keynote bingo” crossing off the expected phases as Steve says them.

Keynote Bingo

Me I’m prediciting as with everybody else, some sort of sub-notebook device related more to the iphone than a macbook, with a docking station for power, keyboard etc.. lots of talk about the iPhone SDK and more media coming to iTunes/Apple TV.

I like the bingo idea, perhaps I will put one together for this years AGI conference in the UK, anyone like to suggest the key phases beyond “Master-Map of the Nation” ?

Written and Submitted from the Google Office, London.

Categories
Data Policy

Power of Information BarCamp

barcamp logoThe Power of Information Report continues to have its impact around Whitehall, following the hell frezzing release of OS Openspace (alpha) just before the deadline of December last year, the Office of Public Sector Informtion (OPSI) has announced plans to run a barcamp a week on Saturday (12th January).

The BarCampPOIR8 will have as it’s subject the creation of web-based channel to support requests for the publication of specific public information datasets. This was recommendation 8 of the report hence POIR8 !

It’s rather short notice, but great to see Government bodies reaching out to the information policy and developement community in this way.

For those not familiar with the tradtion, this article explains what a barcamp is 🙂

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

Categories
GIS

Here comes 2008 !

So roll on 2008, it’s a great time to be involved with geospatial technology in all it forms, and for its great to be part of an industry that is touching so many more peoples lives…

Part of the excitment I feel is due to the fact that the industry is changing to finally better suit the needs of a wider community of users rather than just the professional GIS users. Some indication of this rate of change can be seen in a simple analysis of the search terms used in our favourite serach engine and how these have changed over the last few years.

Using the Google Trends tool it is possible to track how often a term is searched for, and to compare this over time.

OS Trends
Search for “Ordnance Survey”

For example it is interesting to compare the decreasing trend for “Ordnance Survey” with the increasing trend for “Tele Atlas” and “Navteq”.

navteq_graph.png
Search for “Navteq”

The change reflected here I would suggest is the change is focus of users away from local data provders to international suppliers and of course the move away from paper mapping to electronic mapping for many consumers.

Of course it’s easy to read too much into these trends, but as a measure of interest or attention amongst internet users these trends are interesting, I’ll leave it up to you to stop other geospatial search term trends, but look forward for another 12 months of upheaval as the structure and focus of the industry concerned with geographic information continues to change and broaden its appeal beyond the professional (paleogeography) market.

Happy New Year !!

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

Categories
GPS

The Knowledge beats Sat-Nav even South of the River..

An excellent BBC Click Online show which puts a sat-nav equiped car up against a London Taxi Driver to navigate around London. As you would expect the Cabbie wins, but it’s an excellent explanation of how satnav works warts and all.

Satnav challenge

At the end of the day like many other applications of Geospatial technology, it the data that makes all the difference.

Although this show is a lot better than many others I have seen, comparing a satnav to local knowledge is always unfair, local knowledge will always win, a better comparison is between satnav and a road atlas, or even asking people directions.

My Advice re choosing a GPS, never waste money on a factory fitted system, they are too expensive and are often a year or two behind the capabilities of modern Tom-Tom or Garmin system, however I just love the Ozzy Osbourne instructions driving instructions !

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

Categories
Data Policy opensource

OpenAerialMap – Think Open Street Map for imagery..

Open Aerial Map

As happens in this world of constant communications, I heard of the new OpenAerialMap site via an IM chat with Jeff Johnson of PictEarth on Sunday lunchtime !

The idea behind OAM is for it to become an online repository for community generated aerial photography, sourced from Kites, Low cost UAV’s , etc. I’m sure many still see the creation of Open Source imagery captured by amateurs as a Joke, but then people were not serious about OSM !

It’s true that OAM cannot really replace the global systematic cover offered by satellite imagery or the professional aerial photography producers, but for applications where discrete imagery is required of a particular location at high resolution, or to cover a specific event or activity (high temporal resolution) there is a niche which can be filled by this imagery, and the services like OAM which distribute it.

As with OSM, OAM can work because the tools to both capture and distribute this type of Geodata have become democratised to the extent where it is possible for the amateur to respond to events faster than the professional,and to make that data available without the restrictions of conventional licensing. Although the distribution of large amounts of imagery represents all sorts of new challenges in developing a robust operational system.

As with traditional mapping, we are not looking at a replacement to the traditional top-down centralist approach to the creation of Geodata, however there is now at least an alternative, that may become more significant over time.

I wonder if there are plans to use include Geobase SPOT data set of Canada ?

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