Category: GIS

Categories
GIS Google Earth

Google Earth – A community GIS ?

Australian flying car project revealed

The latest Google Earth mystery to achieve fame has been reported by The Register , an apparent flying car spotted in Perth, Western Australia. What interests me most about this and the “black helicopter” spotting craze, is how these sightings rapidly travel around the community of Google Earth Users.

Perhaps we are all guilty of focusing too much of the neat globe user interface and unprecedented availability of data in Google Earth – in fact the thing which Google Earth may be remembered for is as the worlds first truly global community GIS, in which its long term value is making available really useful community derived data-sets.

After-all if you are like me, when I buy something now on Amazon, I always check the customers reviews – valuing this information at least as much as the manufacturers data.

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

Categories
GIS Technology

Postcodes go AJAX

Chris Lightfoot the smart developer behind the mySociety websites dropped me an email over the weekend, with details of his latest project Postcodeine an AJAX based application that dynamically maps GB postcodes. OK so it may not be very useful, but it’s cool and Chris is making the code available under a GPL.

And before anybody gets too excited his postcode database is licensed.

Categories
GIS OGC

OGC – Setting a new direction ?

Today I attended a meeting of around 30 UK based members of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), called by David Schell and Mark Reichardt who are in the UK to canvas the opinions of OGC members. This example of the OGC wanting to understand the point of view of members based this side of the pond is clearly commendable, many in our industry still see the OGC as a US-centric rather than a global organisation.

The OGC quite rightly see outreach as a key goal for the next year, and this was confirmed by the general sentiment of the meeting – indeed there was a very strong feeling that the OGC needs to concentrate less on the development and communication of technical interface standards, and focus on explaining the benefits of interoperability of geospatial systems in a business context.

“What does this mean for me.. ” is a core message to define in marketing any product or idea to potential customers and I guess we can all be guilty of concentrating on the technical details, leaving the poor customer behind. Are OGC guilty of this – well as somebody pointed out today, imagine if you were new to geographic information and you visited the OGC website.. would you be any wiser – I’m afraid not.

Full credit to David and Mark for taking these points onboard, the message from the UK seems to be – Concentrate more on the WHY not the HOW !!

Written and submitted from the Apple Store Regent Street, using its free 802.11 network.