This is a great story from the mySociety blog, Michael Houlsby from East Hampshire council has built an API to the councils database to allow users of the fix my street application to post issues directly into the councils own operational database.
I can only imagine how hard this was to achieve not from a technical point of view, but from this bottom up approach to delivering a IT system, which goes completely against the usual philosophy of delivering IT systems in government.
Many people view mash-ups only as a way of publishing information, but really mash-ups are just about providing open interfaces to your online services, so it brilliant to see such an approach used in the UK to contribute information, which in turn potentially improves the quality of life for the lucky residents of East Hants !
Kudos to Michael, an example of the value to web 2.0 I will be using from now on..
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
Looks like the first conference of next year for me will be a new one, The Geoweb and Digital Mapping Conference 2009 is a new conference for Europe along the lines of Where 2.0 or Location Intelligence, to be held in London, 13-14 January.
It’s great to see a conference like this in Europe, as much innovation in the Geospatial area happens this side if the Atlantic, there is huge interest in free and open source solutions projects including OpenStreetMap, GDAL and gvSIG started in Europe and some of the biggest names in the industry Nokia, Tom-Tom are of course European.
For all those Europeans who make the annual trek to San Francisco every summer, it looks like you now have something to keep you enthusiatic during the long winter, and it’s a great excuse to come to London !
Written and submitted from the Leader Hotel, Taipei using its free in-room internet.
UPDATE : Thanks Michael for pointing out my mistake, of course GDAL in not a project with a European start – my apologies to Frank but at least I did not accuse him of being an American !
OK so it’s a lot more limited than many other mapping API’s out there, and it has certainly taken a long time to reach this point but the fact that OS Openspace is now open for business is a huge achievement, and believe me I know personally what a great achievement getting to this point is.
For many the people the limited nature of the API will not be an issue, they and the users of the applications they build will get access to the high quality cartography OS is famous for. Yes of course this is not quite what I had opened Openspace would be, but given the constraints that the OS has supporting commercial partners with less functionality than you or I now have, what we have is a great first step and will hopefully lead to the much needed rethink on how OS data and services are licensed.
However, (you knew there would be a but…) why does the OS need to know so much about any potential Openspace developer, you get your API key you need to complete this form.
I don’t understand why the OS needs more than the url of the site that is going to be used, and it is unforgivable with the poor reputation of UK government in managing personal information that there is no promianate statement of how the data submitted will be managed and used or no clear privacy policy.
This needs to be changed immediately !!
Written and submitted from the BA Lounge , SFO, using the t-mobile wifi network.
The OS OpenSpace API has finally launched, just weeks before the deadline imposed by the Cabinet Office, with a alpha test phase with the system finally opening up early next year..
I’d love to see comments from anyone who is part of the alpha, but I guess they are under pretty strict NDA at the moment. [UPDATE 15/12 – There is no NDA, so I’m not sure why there are no examples]
One observation is the limit on the number of maps tiles which may be rendered for an API key, this is not something I have seen elsewhere, but I can understand it as a defence against accusations from commercial users of the data of unfairness.
Still is great to see something I put so much effort into during my time at the OS finally reaching the public.
Written and Submitted from the Crowne Plaza Hotel, Manama, Bahrain, using its wifi broadband network.
OK so just a little tongue in cheek, but the AGI team behind the annual UK GI conference would like input in bringing in the perspective of the “Neo-geographers” in planning next years event.
This is a great idea, let’s hope that enough people in the new world of users of GI find such organisations still relevant.. this years AGI event went some way to breaking down the boundaries between the two ages of geography , lets hope the paleo-geograpahers are ready for the guys in jeans for there is much to learn !!
Written and submitted from the Googleplex , Mountain View.
In another example of the overlap between neo and paleogeography Microsoft announced yesterday on their Virtual Earth Blog that they have rejoined the Open Geospatial Consortium the industry standards body for “professional” GIS. Along with the new support for KML in virtual earth, I would say the geoweb is beginning to develop quite nicely !
Written and submitted from the IRLOGI Conference 2007, Dublin, using the bitbuzz 802.11 network.
Just got back from the 2007 AGI conference, which I thought was a massive improvement on previous years events. Steven Feldman and his team at the AGI have done a great job downscaling the event, and taking a new direction as a residential conference for the GI industry to talk to itself.
The GI industry in the UK is now well beyond the stage in its maturity where there is a need for a big conference and exhibition to attract new users – today if you need GIS, you are already a user.
So this years conference was really an opportunity for the industry to meet and discuss issues and developments, and to help develop a sense of community.
This year the recurring theme seemed to be the impact of Neogeography (Andrew Turner has a lot to answer for !!) on the traditional GIS industry or Paleogeography as I called it in my keynote.
I think, there is still someway to go for the GIS industry to fully come to terms with the potential that a neogeography approach to providing solutions to users has, and there is still a large amount of scepticism, but I was really pleased to see a programme which contained a number of “neogeo” presentations.
Of particular note for me, Ian Holt and John Abbott of Widr gave two excellent practical demonstrations of building mashups using location aware API’s, Ed Freyfogle of Nestoria was impressive as ever and Nick Black opened many peoples eyes in the audience to OpenStreetMap, many of whom it would appear had not come across it before.
Nick introduced Cloud Made a new project in collaboration with Steve Coast to offer commercial support to organisations wanting to use OpenStreetMap data – Cloud Made is only just getting off the ground, but think Redhat and Linux.
There really are two ages of geography at the moment, the established GIS industry is great at serving the needs of organisations for which geospatial data really is core and for creating core large scale geospatial data. This will not change fundamentally, although there are important lessons in particular around simplicity of tools and licensing models that can be picked up from neogeography !
On the other hand Neogeography offers a better approach to communicate and engage with communities of users who need to use geography to put whatever data they are interested in, in context. This is potentially everybody !!
Vanessa Lawrence in her presentation confirmed that the OS will be releasing the OpenSpace API before Christmas!! I have a couple of bottles of Champagne I promised the team once upon a time, that I can put back on the ice !
In many ways this year the conference also seemed to represent to some extent a handover to a more relaxed and down to earth view of the industry, no better demonstrated than by the soon to be infamous AGI party, partly captured on my camera phone !
GIS professionals dressed up as village people… that would never have worked 15 years ago in Birmingham !!
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
So once again we find ourselves facing an outbreak of Foot and Mouth, hopefully this time around the importance of the geographical information in fighting the spread of the disease will be recognised early on. Things look hopeful, Defra have already a map of the initial outbreak on their website, and of course today the tools to communicate this information are very different from the last outbreak in 2001.
I was able to create this KML file in 5 minutes from the details on the Defra website.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
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.
Here are my slides from the State of the Map Conference in Manchester, as is my way I’m afraid on their own they don’t mean a great deal, but in due course all the presentations will appear as podcasts, so you can follow along.
For me I got the feeling that the momentum behind OpenStreetMap is really building with interest from “Professional” GI companies increasing and in some cases beginning to either use OSM data or adopt similar methodologies. Which reminds me, Dominic over at Geometrybag has a great script to import OSM into ArcGIS.This week I’m at the Cambridge Conference, an invite only conference aimed at senior people from the worlds National Mapping Organisations. (update – there are podcasts of many of the presentations here ) This evening the prestigious Hotline Lecture was given by Martin Sweeting, of SSTL the guys who are having amazing success building micro-satellites, built from commercial off the shelf components which are competing successfully with the traditional large and expensive satellite systems.I could not help but think of the obvious parallels now with mapping.Written and submitted from the Cambridge Conference, Cambridge, using the free CC2007 wifi network (Great Job Mr Bridges !!!).
I can only imagine how hard this was to achieve not from a technical point of view, but from this bottom up approach to delivering a IT system, which goes completely against the usual philosophy of delivering IT systems in government.
OK so just a little tongue in cheek, but the 
