Category: Blog

Blog posts

Categories
GIS INSPIRE SDI Thoughts

INSPIRE Day – First impressions

INSPIRE

A number of press releases including those from the Commission, the Finnish Presidency Website and the European Parliament all provide limited detail as to the final text of the INSPIRE directive, which was agreed late yesterday as a result of a formal conciliation process.

Although the actual agreed text of the directive does not appear to be available yet, it appears that organisations like OS will continue to be able to charge for access to data with some restrictions. Organisations supplying spatial data should be able to “to license them to, and/or require payment from, the public authorities or institutions and bodies of the Community”, but such licenses “”must be fully compatible with the general aim of facilitating the sharing of spatial data” and “be kept to the minimum required to ensure the necessary quality and supply of spatial data sets and services together with a reasonable return on investment”.

I would caution anyone reading too much into these early reports, the devil will be in the detail here.. and we should also not forget that INSPIRE is about a lot more than the licensing regime.

From now on the technical experts can get on with drafting the principles around which the infra-structural components that will allow spatial data to be shared can be built- in my mind the really important part of INSPIRE

– the creation of metadata
– the technology of interoperability
– the development of data services
– mechanisms to promote national co-ordination.

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

Categories
GIS where 2.0

Where 2.0 2007 needs you…

O’Reilly have announced the dates of the 2007 Where 2.0 again in San Jose, but now May 29-30 , no longer clashing with the ESRI UC – The online Call for Participation in itself is interesting reading as a good indicator of the range of topics the “undergound” GI Industry now covers.

Can’t help but think business models are going to be a big talking point – and perhaps some industry consolidation ?

Virtual Earth for the Xbox 360 anyone ?

Categories
GIS opensource Thoughts

MapServer in the Enterprise

This evenings BCS Geospatial presentation by Jonathan Lowe of IBM was a real eye-opener for architects of Enterprise Geospatial systems. Jonathan is working on a large geospatial repository for DEFRA, a major government department.

We are talking about a major project here managing temporal spatial databases containing national coverage of OSMM and hundreds of other business layers in a Oracle Spatial database. As this is an IBM solution the platform is 64-bit AIX and the application server WebSphere.. and here was the challenge –

What is the only web mapping application that will run in a 64-bit JVM – MapServer

Open Source GIS tools really are mainstream ready !!

A great presentation by Jonathan, if ever you want to understand life in Government IT, you can’t go wrong with Jonathan’s choice of Terry Gilliams film Brazil.

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

Categories
GIS Thoughts

Worldmapper: cartograms online

air travel map

Worldmapper a site devloped by a group of academics led by Danny Dorling is a great example of the power of maps or is this case cartograms to communicate information. With the current interest in global inequalities, a map such as the one above showing air travel delivers a very strong message.

Look at the relative size of the UK, the area represents all those easyJet and Ryanair flights we have grown to love so much…

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

Categories
GIS Thoughts

Where small is beautiful..

Today I made the keynote presentation to the Jersey GIS User Conference, organised by Digimap (an Ordnance Survey partner) and the States of Jersey Government, who together are really driving forward the use of Geographic Information.

Jersey

Much like OS Mastermap, Jersey now has a complete intelligent feature based geospatial database, with high levels of currency and consistency. Again like Great Britain, there is an active GPS framework network providing centimetre accuracy positioning.

In contrast to the rest of the UK, Jersey with a single layer of government, has just got on a built a single land and property address database which is widely adopted and has become the standard for government use.

Half of the possible 8000 government employees access the sole corporate geospatial Intranet and on the sister Island of Guernsey the utilities companies are beginning to publish their assets to single password protected website.

None of these things are technically difficult to do, but the contrast with the UK is interesting – this really is the case of the relatively small size of the channel islands and simpler organisational structures making the exploitation of Geographic Information much quicker to deliver benefits.

Written and submitted from the Hotel L’Horizon, Jersey, using the hotels wifi broadband internet connection.

Categories
GIS Thoughts web 2.0

Openspace.. and other mash up catch ups !!

I can’t believe it’s nearly a month since the UK Mash-up event, I have literally not had a chance to stop and catch my thoughts about the event. It was technically interesting and I think it had quite a big impact on some of the OS staff who attended, who for the first time in some cases, were exposed to the “non-professional” GI community.

openspace

OS announced our Openspace project, which hopefully we will be able to release in the near future subject to legal and licensing concerns. The Openstreetmap team demonstrated it’s first commercial application of its data with the Nestoria home finding site, best mash-up of the day was the real time train map developed by Matthew Somerville of mySociety.

As pointed out by Jo much of the afternoon debate facilitated by Peter Cochrane focused on the big topic of business models and data licensing issues. Well I guess my views of licensing are well known, simply put… “somebody has to pay !!”

The business model question is more interesting..

Other thans Google’s clear advertising model of today it is not clear how others will make profits or even cover their costs. I made the point however that this might not be as big a problem as it might seem, successful business models will either emerge or the phenomenon will disappear as an unsustainable activity brought into brief existence by the development of web 2.0 technologies.

These technologies and their impact on how systems are developed, and the close relationships with users established, will survive however… whatever else happens as an industry we can ignore user generated content no longer.

Written and submitted from the City Inn Express, Birmingham, using the hotels free (yes free!!) broadband internet connection.

Categories
GIS web 2.0

Web 2.0 for the suits

Tim O’Rilley has successfully developed the Web2.0 label, and is now exploiting the interest of “Big” Business  by writing a report Web 2.0 Principles and Best Practices: ” with John Musser of ProgrammableWeb.com

The report based on the now classic web2.0 paper is aimed at a market beyond the normal “alpha geek”, instead O’Reily are for the first time really targeting business strategists, investors, and well.. suits !

For the comments to the original posting of this announcement the reaction has been rather negative to say the least, attacking the high cost of the report. The critism I think misses the point here, this is the type of audience that Gartner or Meta Group sell reports costs thousands of dollars to, and who an wiling to pay from quality foresight.

O’Reilly is a business after all !!

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

Categories
GIS Google Earth Thoughts

TBL on Blogging

Tim Berners-Lee makes another of his rare and insightful postings on his blog commenting on the media’s view of his new Web Science Research Initiative.

I’m not alone I’m sure, in thinking that the WSRI, a joint initiative between MIT and the great people at Southampton University, which looks to view the growth of the web from a societal as much as a scientific point of view is especially important when looking to the development of the GeoWEB.

Earth riseThere is I’m certain for example a important piece of research to study the impact of exploration tools such as Google Earth and ArcGIS Explorer on users understandings of the physical, social and political environments. Could such tools have a similar but smaller effect to the famous Apollo 8 Earthrise image on todays geographically illiterate generation.

It’s also nice to know that I am not alone at occasionally getting misinterpreted in the Guardian – Sorry Charles 🙂

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

Categories
GIS OS Research Thoughts

Research Labs project reported in New Scientist

As a A-Level Physics student, I used to love reading New Scientist in the School Library – I could at least understand it.. maybe reading too much of it, resulted in my spectacular failure at the subject ?
Map Snapper Still its good to see Ordnance Survey Research Labs joint research with Southampton University making this weeks New Scientist as well as Computer Weekly.

Map Snapper is a demonstration of technology that brings together the best characteristics of paper mapping and geospatial databases. Using a camera phone a photo of any feature on the map is sent to a server application which “recognises” the feature using pattern recognition and return up to date attribute information..

So take a picture of a hotel, and find out its telephone number, rates and this evenings reservation information, or take a picture of a train station to find out the time of the next train.

One way to think of this is a mash-up tool for paper maps !!

Map Snapper is a great example of collaborative research, the real challenge now is to find partners to commercialise the idea…

Categories
GIS Thoughts

GeoDRM data protection will it ever work ?

As I have noted before, OS is interested in GeoDRM activities as a way of standardising how rights to access information and the transfer of those rights between individuals and groups is standardised as much as possible.

Of course we also need to track developments in the more contentious area of data and IP protection techniques, and today I have been visiting some people who have a solution in this space.

As I expected, at the moment, this type of technology is not fit for purpose for geospatial data, not taking into the account the “spatial” nature of geographic information and imposing unacceptable restrictions on the users computer platform (windows & IE only just does not work anymore !!!)

This raises a more fundamental question in my mind, are such protective technologies really worth the effort, sure they reduce the perceived risk of data leakage in the mind of the data owner, but as DVD Jon has proved such systems can nearly always be broken. We don’t currently protect data in this way, and I would suggest continuing not to and relying on other legal means may be the best route forward.

Written and submitted from Starbucks, MK Centre , Milton Keynes, using the t-mobile wifi network.