Category: Blog

After a massive amount of work behind the scenes involving many Ordnance Survey, ODPM, Local Authority and Royal Mail staff a solution to the creation of maintaining a national address database has been announced.

For those not aware of the scale of the problem, many places in Britain that don’t get mail delivered to them (e.g. Churches, Sports pavilions etc) don’t have a recognised address. A real problem if you need to get services delivered to them.

In the past, attempts to build a definitive address database have failed because they represented the view of a single organisation or industry – key to this new effort is partnership.

All the main stakeholders will be involved in the creation of the National Spatial Address Infrastructure (NSAI), insuring it meets the collective needs of the country.

There will be for sure some interesting technological challenges to solve to deliver this database as a maintained operation system, but across the stakeholder community there is a combined expertise which will ultimately deliver success.

I hope an example of joined-up government in action!!

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

Hats off to the Snowflake gang, who as part of their moving card have let us know their new TOID !! One day we will all know this information – well OK maybe not 🙂 but its good to see the idea of using feature identifiers communicated in a fun way.

Written and submitted from the BA Lounge at Manchester Airport, using BT’s Openzone 802.11 network.

I lead a session at the Ordnance Survey Partner conference last week discussing our future geoweb services plans, and not surprising the main topic of discussion was business models.

Nobody in the industry today really knows what will happen in the market, I in the past have often drawn parallels with the download music market and with the recent launch of the Yahoo Music Unlimited service it’s interesting to watch this business model dynamic as a potential indicator for future geoweb services.

The established market leader here is Apples’ iTunes Music store which sells tracks at £0.79 or $0.99 each – the transactional model. Once bought the tracks are available for use on a limited number of computers and your ipod forever.

The alternative business model of subscription based pricing has been supported up to now by Napster and Realnetworks but they have been eclipsed by the new Yahoo offering.
The yahoo offering provides unlimited access to an online music catalogue for an amazing $6.99 a month ( the service is not available outside the USA). Tracks may be downloaded to other devices but will only be playable as long as you keep paying the subscription.

Which model will win? The industry pundits are falling over themselves with contrary predictions, nobody seems to think both models will survive, but I’m not so sure!

I think it depends too much on the very different buying habits of consumers, regular buyers may go for the subscription model for example, while less frequent buyers like myself will chose to buy each track. There are big differences for the service provider in terms of the cost of service of course, however the past ten years must have taught us that the customer is now in charge and will vote with their feet.

I think the same will also be true of geoweb services.

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

Its interesting to observe the amount of concern, it appears, has been generated by the BBC TV decision to change how they display their weather maps.

Comments have focused on the use of brown rather than green to represent “Land” on the graphics, the use of animation rather than symbols to represent rain or snow events and the use of a perspective or globe view form of representation – something becoming increasing popular in mainstream GIS tools such as ESRI’s ArcGlobe.

What is most interesting is that none of this technology is new, and many other TV stations have been using interactive graphics for more than a decade, it appears that an organisation like the BBC will always draw more attention because it is so much part of everyday life – and you and I, the general public, really don’t like change.

This is something we at the Ordnance Survey recognise through bitter experience, you change the look of a national icon with great care – but you do have to make changes!

It is important to really exploit the potential on animation and interactive graphics to display complex information, and when used well, this technology has many advantages over static graphics, not least that it is possible to communicate more information in a short period of time.

Personally I’m a sucker for something new and quite like the new BBC graphics, but then I liked the ethnic tail designs British Airways tried a number of years back!

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

Nokia this week released a mobile phone application that perhaps paves the way for other ‘Sentient Computing” applications. Sentient Computing uses location as the underlying framework to deliver user centric applications – the key here is that location information is implicit not explicit as in traditional LBS applications (there are no maps !!!).

Sentient Computing applications tend to work is personal space rather than the larger areas that LBS might work, so if your LBS application works over a number of city blocks the sentient app works within a building or a room.

Nokia’s application “sensor” is a “friend finder” which uses local bluetooth networks to allow users mobile’s to communicate to each other without direct user input, allowing your phone to send messages on your behalf to other phone users which meet criteria you set.

The requirements for data to power these applications is also clearly different to LBS, but no less important – early applications such as Sensor are restricted by not having geodata available to them – for example you might want to automatically turn off the application when you are at the office or on the train, but have it switch on when you are in a restaurant or club.

Sentient computing applications I believe will be far bigger a deal than LBS simply because of their ease of use, but their requirements for geodata means a whole new ball game.

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

Just listened to a great radio programme which talked about the Soviet Military efforts to map the UK in the Cold War. The BBC are streaming the programme here for the next week. The story was also picked up by The Times.

Here is an example of the type of mapping the Soviets produced for major cities, in this case a 1:10,000 map of Granton harbour in Edinburgh.

It seems that Blackpool Bus Station was a primary target !

So Autodesk makes other acquisition to add to its GIS portfolio, in this case C-PLAN the Swiss developer of municipal applications built on Oracle Spatial. In my time at Autodesk C-PLAN were an excellent partner in the German speaking parts of Europe, with very good solutions using Autodesk Map and MapGuide linked to a single corporate repository in Oracle.
So what now happens with the other big Autodesk technology acquisition, the Autodesk Design Server which came with VISION purchase – a product with now very little visibility in the market.

Acquisitions of technology companies is seldom easy, and Autodesk has not had the best record in the past few years – who remembers Autodesk World ? the product of Automated Methods (Pty) ltd an acquisition of now 10 years ago.
Why is it so difficult – well for Autodesk I think the issue has been and may still be the focus on Autocad based solutions, particularly in the Autodesk partner channel which makes the marketing and successful exploitation of something “different” difficult. With an established portfolio of products, the introduction of a new ‘alien” technology needs careful management to achieve sucessful integration – a very simple question needs to be answered – WHERE DOES IT FIT ?

Autodesk is not alone in suffering from this technology indigestion, but I wish them better luck this time.

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

We are running a number of large Oracle Spatial projects at Ordnance Survey, which are part of our major investment programme to update key elements of our back office systems for managing our geodata.

This week it appeared that one of our Oracle contractors was to be pulled off the project to work elsewhere (you get used to this working with vendor contractors) – now this guy has really detailed knowledge of how Oracle Spatial works at the database level – he is one of that rare breed an Oracle Spatial DBA.

Now we have fortunately a very good strategic relationship with Oracle and we were able to get them to change their mind and the guy is still with us – but there is a deeper underlying problem here – where do you find skilled people who understand Oracle Spatial ?

There is a massive skills shortage in this area, Oracle itself has limited resources, there are a few independent consultants with some knowledge at a architectural level, but we really need people who understand the unique nuts and bolts of partitioning a spatial database !

And don’t rely of these people coming out of universities very few MSc courses seem to have caught up with the fact that increasing GIS is a corporate database activity, not a cartography specialism, and few courses expose they students to spatial database technology.

This really has to change !

I have just returned from the Informed Solutions international conference held this year in Estepona, Spain. I presented an overview of the Ordnance Survey and a stab at the dynamics of the future Geodata market.

This was my first time at this conference and I must admit I was rather impressed by the format, a few industry figures, a few of Informed customers and a large proportion of Informed Solutions staff spent a couple of days discussing GI strategy, enabling technologies, organisational issues and successful case studies. What I think stood out was the lack of “hard sell” and the spirt of openess that resulted, I got the feeling that everybody there, was there, with the expectation to learn something!

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