Blog posts
A Great example of community mapping and the immediacy of tools like the My Maps feature of Google Maps is this map by Oliver Williams who is collating images, videos and reports relating to the current river floods in England.
When I looked this maps was less than a hour old !!
Not only is this a potentially powerful way of communicating up-to-date information quickly, it is also great at telling the human story of such events.
Written and Submitted from the Google Office, London.
Just listening to the conference call on the Tom Tom acquisition of Tele Atlas one of the major drivers behind the deal is the recognition of an ecosystem between PND’s capturing geospatial data and traditional “professional” GIS data capture techniques.
Without community generated content, in a online future if will not be possible to provide the expected level of currency of data – Strong stuff but hard to argue with.
If this is not a wake-up call for the traditional mapping organsiations I don’t know what else is !!
Written and Submitted from the Google Office, London.
If you really want to take the temperature of the wider GI community this weekends The State of the Map meeting in Manchester should be well worth the trip.
The potential for community generated geo data is now recognised by many of the major commercial providers of Geodata, and I’m hearing rumours that the much delayed OS OpenSpace API will be released soon.
Hope to see you there !!
Written and Submitted from the Hotel du Lac Hotel, d’Enghien-Les-Bains, France using the in-room broadband network.
Imagine waking up in the beautiful Portuguese city of Porto and finding out the past two years of your life were a dream… All that talk of GeoRSS, Map Mash-ups, KML, User generated My Maps, The GeoWEB and Paris Hilton were all part of a dream.
We it felt a bit like that on the first day of the annual European Commission GI and GIS Workshop. Over 200 hundred GIS users from Public Sector Organisations and a few private sector ones are together meeting to discuss the impact of the INSPIRE directive now that it has been passed by the European Parliament.
During this first day the web 2.0 buzzwords of neogeograhy were notable by their absence.
Now I am actually less disappointed that I might have been, let me explain why…
INSPIRE is, contrary to all of the fuss last year drummed up by some in the UK, quite tightly focused on the supply of harmonised environmental geospatial data to the institutions of the European Commission, by public sector organisations in the member states. – There is no “public” interface here and the citizens are not seen as major customers for INSPIRE services.
As such you can think of this as a complex back office system for European Government, as much an Enterprise GIS for Brussels as a Spatial Data Infrastructure. So key to success will be clear definition of requirements and well specified system design.
Now here is the rub, despite the fact that much of the INSPIRE directive is not expected to be implemented until at least 2010, it is been designed now and must used well specified and recognised standards – things like the ISO 19100 series of standards developed by the Open GeoSpatial Consortium.
It’s not difficult to appreciate the problem, REST based interfaces, KML, GeoJSON, GeoRSS etc might actually be the best technologies to use today and would be the tools of choice of many, however like many other Government IT projects INSPIRE needs to follow the low risk route of SOAP, WSDL, WMS, WFS etc.
So we may find that organisations will use OGC style interfaces to communicate to other public sector organisations and the commission, while using lighter weight technologies to publish information to their citizens. This is no bad thing !!
I am however disappointed by the continued focus on metadata driven catalogue services as the primary mechanism to find geospatial data, I don’t believe this will work as nobody likes creating metadata, and catalogue services are unproved.
INSPIRE needs GeoSearch !!
Written and Submitted from the Le Meridien Hotel, Porto using the in-room broadband network.
Second, in I think a potentially long series of examples, where I have come across our favourite operating system causing a few problems. So after the South West Trains ticket machine, I give you the new London Underground video advertising display.. or not !!
Written and Submitted from the Terminal 2, Heathrow Airport, London using the BTOpenzone wifi network.
This week I sat in on a course run by the Royal Geographical Society to train teachers to use Google Earth in their classes. The course was excellent and will run again in October and is highly recommended. In talking to some of the teachers we soon got on to the topic of the impact that Google Earth has had in exciting their students, and the extent to which their preferred images to Cartographic view of the world.
As a teaching tool just creating a tour and visiting places without any labels displayed is very powerful, asking students to describe the shape of the landscape, patterns of settlement and of course trying to recognise the locations is fascinating.
Last week I saw this same effect in a different environment visiting the Swiss Museum of Transport Swiss in Lucerne. For an aviation anorak such as myself, this is well worth the visit, but for all geographers you must visit the swissarena, a 1:20 000 scale photo mosaic of all of Switzerland on the floor of a dedicated building.
This is just amazing.. constructed from nearly 8,000 images and detailed enough so that you can see individual buildings it is a huge hit with children visitors and is a brilliant tool to understand the geography of Switzerland.
We really must make the most of this opportunity, new technology has made geography interesting again.. lets make the most of it and move beyond the LandRanger extract !!!
Written and Submitted from the Terminal 2, Heathrow Airport, London using the BTOpenzone wifi network.
Well clearly a rhetorical question if you don’t live in the US, but I might for the experience.
What do I mean, well you meet a different type of person than in your average supermarket line, case in point Robert Scoble reports on meeting Bill Atkinson in the line outside the Palo Alto Apple Store.
Bill was one of the original Mac team and created MacPaint and Hypercard. I absolutely loved Hypercard, and could spend weeks developing stacks, embedding tiny 160×80 quicktime movies and sounds. Before web tools, Hypercard established the principles of hypertext and multimedia applications we are now so familiar with.
I even used Hypercard as one of the main tools of the PhD I did not get round to finishing…
It would be worth joining the line just to meet Bill !
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
Despite a few hiccups with the latest Plazer client, I’m sticking with my experiment of using Plazes to track my presence and location. I’m glad I have because, the very interested data behind plazes has now been exposed in the form of a plazes KML file. This is really neat, by logging in you can view your own locations, without logging in, you can view the global plazes database and see a real time feed of the latest plazes registered by users. Credit to Tim at Plazes for a really nice use of KML !!
Like the recent twittermap, in can be almost hypnotic watching the geeks of the world posting their locations, and the experience is all the more interesting in Google Earth.
The plazes KML is available for download at www.plazes.com/kml
Written and Submitted from the Google Office, Zurich.
Projects like OpenStreetMap have proved that it is possible to replicate professional ground survey using low cost consumer grade GPS to create vector data sets that have the potential to complete with commercial datasets. Today I came across a website which describes a technology that could do the same for aerial imagery. Pict’Earth describe combining low cost devices which many of us already have to develop a very low cost real time aerial surveillance platform.
Using a Nokia N95, Imagery and positional information is captured and sent to the ground live during flight on a low cost model aircraft and displayed in Google Earth in near real-time. This imagery can be shared via the web with any internet connected google earth client, anywhere in the world.
Alternatively the same information can be post-processed to produce geo-referenced photo mosaics.
This is just amazing !! Ok so its not orthophotography, but then for most applications that’s not needed, key other than some good software, is the use of the N95, a 5 megapixel camera, a commuincation device and a GPS is a small cheap package – and you thought it was a phone !
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
Increasingly a topic of discussion in both the neogeography and mainstream GI communties are the legal aspects of what we do, from privacy to liability this is becoming the hot topic of the year. So its great to see Kevin Pomfret, well known from a number of conferences presentations starting his Spatial Law blog which has gone to must read status on my blogroll.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.