Category: Blog

Blog posts

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GIS

Peter Cochrane’s Marmite presentation

Love it or hate it ?Peter Cochrane has posted his thoughts on last weeks CIO forum on his blog, as I blogged last week I think what Peter had to say was really important, and if you work in IT or are a customer of an IT dept ( I guess that is everybody) you really need to read it. Some of his key points that I think are “right on the money”

“Throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s people who knew deep technical stuff (nerds) were derided and discounted. The management attitude was that these people were irrelevant and a pain. Deep tech understanding was not seen as necessary to manage anything. How the world has changed” – and some!! however I don’t think generally the management attitude has moved far enough yet.. and in the UK in particular.

“The biggest universal mistake has been to take the old paper processes and transplant them to the screen, and then create even more paper!” – enough said !!!

“Everything is moving to the edge of networks and organisations – computing power, communication, skills, information and knowledge.” – This combined with a more mobile workforce means that we need to architect much more flexible systems with potentialy location awareness built in…

As Peter admits, his presentation was like Marmite.. you either loved it or hated it.. I guess its clear where I stand..

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AGI GIS Thoughts

AGI Student of the Year

Every year Ordnance Survey sponsors the AGI Student of the Year of the year award, this years closing date is on Friday (6th October) so if you are a Lecturer of/or a student of a GIS related discipline who has finished studies in the last year, don’t miss your chance and enter for the award.

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Apple

OS X – Do you really need to be admin ?

As a smug mac user, the one security point I often make to Windows users, is that I am not using a root level account by default, so unlike windows any malware on the mac (if there was any of course) could do only limited damage.

adminWhile my point is strcitly true, as this Mac Geekery blog post notes you are by default in OS X running an Admin account, which while not as scary as root, still offers more system level control than is really needed on a day to day basis.

The moral of this story is to change your user account to a standard account now, it’s very easy to do, as explained by Mac Geekery, taking just two minutes, and you will be that bit more secure..

Categories
GIS Thoughts

Eisenstein at a GIS conference?

Battleship Potemkin

It is rare indeed that you are treated to the famous Odessa steps scene of the classic Eisenstein film Battleship Potemkin at a GIS conference.. then Terra Future was not trying to be a normal GIS conference!

As I have often argued here, the GI industry is too insular in its thinking, and needs to look elsewhere to really innovate.. hence Terra Future.

Eisenstein’s classic silent film was presented by Daniel Erasmus, a fellow of the Rotterdam School of Management and co-founder and director of the Digital Thinking Network. He made the point.. that with most media we are familiar with today, the makers and the medium itself, is sophisticated enough to obtain a emotional response from their audience, who after-all could not be moved by the scene of the small boy trampled on the steps or the shooting of his mother by the Cossacks – but as Daniel pointed out when did you last see a website or digital content which prompted a similar emotional response in you ?

There is still some work to do.

Mike Liebhold is well known to the new generation of Geo hackers and the open source GI movement from his presentations at Where 2.0 and the Location Intelligence Conference. Mike focused in on the potential impact of both open source tools and data, and the importance of standards based, non proprietary storage of information, making the excellent point that it may be difficult to develop RDF based semantic web applications when the data is held in “closed” GIS systems.

Robin Mannings a returning speaker from last year, reflected on the convergence of ubiquitous computing, positioning technologies and geographic information to provide a platform for the next generation of GI applications – perhaps using the human body as an important part of the hardware of such a system. As might be expected,sadly, this was the only element of the whole day picked up my the mainstream press (The Daily Express) who described Robin as a “scientific astrologer” – Its enough to make you want to give up !!!

Daily Express

There were many more interesting workshops during the day which looked into other societal changes expected in the future and how the needs of the market for geographic information will change over the next decades. Look out for the Terra Future podcasts in the next month of so..

It is vital that as an industry we focus of better understanding the future needs of the market and continue the fundamental research in both Computer and Information Science. The innovation we have seen over the last year from the likes of GYM and the growing band of community driven mapping is after-all built on the work of the research of 30 years ago… GPS, Relational Databases, Network Topology, Remote Sensing etc.

I’d like to use this posting as a opportunity to thank everybody involved in another successful event and in particular to thank the speakers and delegates who really made the day the great success it was.

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

Categories
GIS

The Semantic web ‘lightbulb’ moment

Talk to most people in the GI industry about the semantic web, eyes glaze over or people try to move the conversation on to something else.
Why is this ?
The productive use of Geographic information online is an area where taking a semantic approach is useful, and many would argue vital, if we are ever to develop a true GeoWeb!

It does not help that trying to understand the semantic web involves understanding an impenetrable soup of acronyms and terms, RDF, OWL, SPARQL and ontology etc, however it really helps to have an expert to explain and there is no one better than Tim Berners-Lee who presented at yesterdays Terra Future event as reported by ZDNet.

Semantic tube map

For many people attending i think the real “lightbulb” moment in understanding what the semantic web was all about, was Tim’s slide of the semantic web as represented by a Tube map; after-all GI people love maps..

This really does encapsulate the need to link different types of data (the lines) semantically to extend the usefulness of particular types of application or user need (the stations).

Using the example above, a photo taken by Tim at the Ordnance Survey can be linked via its embedded time stamp to his calendar, which in turn can then be linked to the Terra future event he was attending which in turn could be linked to the address of the Ordnance Survey.

While each of these applications and their associated databases have been developed for specific purposes, by describing and making their contents available using an Resource Description Framework (RDF) description of their meaning (ontology) we can join up these databases.

You cannot underestimate the challenge or importance of a semantic approach to solving the problem of linking geographical databases, an approach of linking databases based on a single view of the world as characterised by the DNF approach can only take you so far.

My thoughts from the other excellent speakers who presented at Terra Future tomorrow..

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

Categories
GIS opensource

United Kingdom – OSGEO

osgeo
Following on from last weeks FOSS4G2006 conference in Lausanne, OSGEO the foundation behind the development of open source GIS software is establishing a UK Chapter.

This is great news, as the UK GI community is not a great user of such tools (The OS included it must be said – at least at the moment) and increased awareness of the value of open source tools was one of the main messages to come out of the AGI technical SIG meeting on Open Source earlier this year.

For more details contact Chris Puttick at Oxford Archaeology.

Categories
AGI GIS

GIS Show Tat.. (Swag to our US cousins)

Mike at the Journal of maps is collecting peoples recommendations for best and worst trade show gifts following his trip to this years AGI. Afraid the plastic TOIDS of the OS don’t rate very highly!

Categories
AGI GIS Thoughts

TBL@OS

Tim Berners-LeeAs a contrast to a rather depressing AGI conference review of the failure of the UK GI industry to come up with a viable GI Strategy, in which Mike Blakemore compared efforts so far to Little Britain’s’ Vicky Pollard..

“No but, Yeh but, No but, like there is this spatial data – no shutup..”

I am looking forward to next weeks Terra future research event at the Ordnance Survey, at which Tim Berners-Lee is to provide his insight into the place geospatial data has in the web of the future.

There are still a few spaces left, so if you would like to attend email the conference office.

I’m sure a wider industry insight is vital, the UK GI industry needs to accept that the future development of geographic information will not be decided inside the confines of the current inward looking industry of today or for that matter any government generated strategy.

The use of GI is already pervasive… it has become so almost despite the attempts of the last 20 years of industry strategies, instead technological developments like the web developed by Berners-Lee have provided tools to connect users to geospatial data and is now allowing them to become data creators themselves – now that is really exciting !!!

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

Categories
Apple

Nice iPod Steve, but where is the content?

IPodSo the new iPod sports a 80Gb Hard disk, enough to store many hours of Hollywood Movies, TV shows, and of course your videos and music all purchased from the iTunes music store.. except if you happen to live outside North America.

The rest of the world is still waiting for Apple and the content owners to get together and work out how to license their content to geographies outside the USA, I don’t completely blame Apple for this – I know from personal experience the complexities of licensing content – and how slow traditional owners of content are at releasing the value in their vaults.

So the rest of the world will wait until next year for movie downloads, I don’t understand why Apple has not managed a deal with the BBC yet, I really can’t wait for the Monty Python Fish slapping dance.. but in the meantime, Mr Jobs.. I’m sorry no new iPod for me until I can get the content.

Can’t help but think there are lessons here for the GI industry…

Written and submitted from Starbucks, Upper Street , London, using the t-mobile wifi network.

Categories
AGI GIS Thoughts

Heavy lifting – The boring stuff behind Google and Microsoft ?

Reflecting on yesterdays plenary presentation at the AGI, and the report of it at ZDNet which completely ignored the presentations from the boring old vendors ESRI and myself!!, you would expect there to be much upset and insecurity as we all wave farewell to the GIS industry of the past replaced by the mainstream vendors…

I do sense a little bit of a wobble, but –

Of course the reality is that all the “new” exciting vendors Google, Microsoft, Yahoo etc are all reliant on the data produced by the primary data providers, who in turn need to use the tools and models created by the boring old vendors. This has become know as the “heavy lifting” part of the industry, it may not be glamourous and may be missed by the mainstream press but it represents the vast majority of activity undertaken using geographic information.

So thank you Google, Yahoo and Microsoft for doing what the GIS industry should have done, in making Geographic Information more accessible with simple, well designed tools – the rockets of the Geographic information, but the “professional” industry needs to now work even harder in providing the fuel !!!

Written and submitted from Starbucks, Upper Street , London, using the t-mobile wifi network.