Category: opensource

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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.

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GIS opensource

OS NPE Maps online and copyright free(ish) !

Old MapAs Steve points out, Richard Fairhurst’s scanned database of OS New Popular Edition Maps on the 1930’s and 1940’s in now online at www.npemap.org.uk.

Although the mapping is now out of copyright, Richard is claiming copyright over the scans and is licensing the data using the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 license.

This is a fascinating collection which provides a unique view of England 50 years ago, an England without Motorways, Aerodromes with Grass runways, and with an Ordnance Survey which was firmly a military institution.

There is huge potential for this data to form the basis of many applications which don’t require either up to date or very accurate mapping, and it will very interesting to see what develops.. Already the mapping is forming part of a tool to collect an open source geocoded postcode database.

The groundswell of community generated mapping continues…

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

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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
GIS opensource Thoughts

UK Mash-up event

Mash up eventI blogged a few months ago in response to Charles Arthur on the perceived lack of UK mapping mashups. While I did not agree at the time with his position that lack of data was the major problem, I guess we must accept that he is right to note the lower profile of creating mash-ups in the UK compared to the USA.

This is a pity for whatever reason as the mash-up movement represents a potential hot spot for innovation in the Geospatial industry. To discuss the state of UK mashups the AGI, OGC and BCS Geospatial SIG are holding an event at the OS on the 20th October.

The Draft agenda includes the following topics..

  • What geospatial mash-ups are all about?
  • Background on Geospatial Mash-ups
  • Example Mash-up Application
  • Questions and Facilitated Discussion
  • Geospatial Mash-up Tutorial
  • How are we going to make use of geospatial mash-ups in the UK?
  • Enabling Data Sharing in Mash-ups
  • Panel Discussion: What does the future hold for mash-ups – single malt, blended or moonshine?

The event is primarily targeted at the existing GI industry – including those from commercial and non-commercial standpoints, and the expected audience will encompass both those with a strong technical perspective and those with wider strategic vision and market foresight.

We need to recognise that the concept of geospatial mash-ups is increasingly being discussed, but is not widely understood in the traditional GI community in the UK.

This event is designed to bring together the leading experts in the field, and to learn from them how the approach could be more widely applied across the GI industry.

As an industry we may well find this a challenging concept or simply characterise it as “putting pins on a map”, however it might also mark the beginnings of a wider trend where the ownership of information becomes much more distributed in the future…

To register visit this page

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

Categories
GIS opensource Technology Thoughts

Maps Kidnapped ?

DRG's are free !!

As both James and Jo blogged, the complete series of USGS Quad series DRG maps were taken hostage this week and then released following the payment of $1600 to the Free the Maps website.

Now we are thought the data was free right? – well yes but.. Some states made the data available free to download, some commerical operators charge for media (with some mark-up), most of the data is available on sites like Microsoft Terraserver. However as the site explains..

“..Because there are so many different web sites hosting bits and pieces of this data, it is often difficult to find.

When you do find it, there is often missing data, the files are difficult to download, or the site may use non-standard naming conventions for the files. In addition, there are still a significant number of States that have no DRG’s available for free download.”

So $1600 later all the data has been purchased and will now be uploaded to the Internet Archive. Great job Jared !!!

Unlike Jo (no surprise there then :-)), I don’t think this is the model for future funding for European Mapping agencies whose data is currently protected by copyright… but it may well form the model for exploiting and distributing OS maps as they reach the end of their copyright as the mapping will be of similar age.

The example DRG above is 35 years old, and out of copyright OS mapping is 50 years old.

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

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autodesk GIS opensource

Autodesk and the big opportunity..

Pete Southwood

I had a real flashback from the past when I received an email from Autodesk, inviting me to join in on a webcast to be presented by an old colleague and ex-pat Brit, Pete Southwood on MapGuide Enterprise. Despite a financially poor period a result of a downturn in the core AEC market ?, Autodesk is once again making a impact in the GIS market.

Autodesks support of OSGeo and the release of the Open Source version of MapGuide have got people talking about Autodesk again, and clearly Map 3D 2007 remains a strong data capture tool, but… and its a big but, the issue of CAD / GIS integration still remains a problem for many organisations and customers of Autodesk.

I would argue that most geospatial data actually resides today as design data held in DWG and DGN files not in GIS file formats let alone geospatial databases.

So there remains an opportunity for Autodesk to finally begin to migrate this data using their tools – perhaps the innovation which results from the open source development around MapGuide may provide some clues to opening up this difficult to crack market.

When I was involved with MapGuide at Autodesk, I often argued with anyone who would listen, that MapGuide had the makings of a excellent server of geospatial drawing data for AutoCAD Map clients – at the time there was never the engineering resource available to do it, of course today, there is a whole community of skilled developers looking for the challenge.

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

Categories
GIS opensource

Copyright free mapping is coming..

Like a spurned lover, I was beginning to feel neglected having been ignored last week by the Guardian’s “Free our Data Campaign”, but this week we are back to normal with a piece describing the efforts of the OpenStreetMap team to Map the Isle of Wight last weekend.

In the past I have made it clear that I am fully behind the efforts of Steve Coast and the OpenStreetMap movement to create copyright free mapping, the technology is here today and with some bright people and organisation it is completely practical to produce a national street database for Great Britain.

As Jeff points out in his blog, National Mapping Agencies such as the OS need to wake up to these community driven developments, however I really think we must see them not as a threat, but as an opportunity.

Will Steve Coast be the Linus Torvalds of open source geodata ? time will tell, but I believe OpenStreetMap is every-bit as important a development in Geospatial data as the development of the Linux Kernel was for operating systems, and I suggest ultimately a similar commercial model may develop around open source geospatial data.

There is without question a place for open source “small” scale data, without the high spatial resolution, rich data models and high levels of currency which characterise products like OS MasterMap.

Open Source geospatial data products will meet the needs of many users who just need to be able to produce simple location maps and which need to be updated less frequently. But even these maps will need to be updated..

Keeping such datasets up to date, is a lot more difficult but potentially possible.. however it may need a more robust long term funding stream to support the process, keeping servers running and bandwidth costs real money.

This does boil down ultimately to the old “Free as in Speech” or ‘Free as in Beer” debate, copyright free or open source mapping may well ultimately migrate to the former position – copyright free but commerical supported in some way, this I think is still very positive for the Gi Industry, with many opportunities for commercial support and value add services.

Such a “free as in Speech” dataset supported by a robust commercial model may well meet the needs of the user community, but I not sure it will go far enough for the “free our data’ campaign which is more politically motivated.

In conclusion we must recognise that open source geodata is here to stay and is real, Mapping Agencies such as the OS must learn to adopt it’s values and meet the needs of a user community not fully served today.

Actually I really do see a role for the OS in contributing to open source databases in the future, copyright free street maps are a great starting point, but it would be great to have urban area boundaries and a coastline, for example, contributed by the OS?

btw – I appreciate the efforts of guys last weekend to make sure they were not using “in-copyright” maps of the Isle of Wight, but I think the Map of Namibia used by the guys in the articles photograph is taking things a bit too far !!

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

Categories
AGI GIS opensource

Perceptions of Open Source

Last week the AGI Technical SIG, ran a one day workshop of Open Source in GIS, and although I very much enjoyed the presentations I was most interested to judge people’s perception of Open Source.

The day started with Martin Daly of Cadcorp debunking some of the myths of open source software, including

– Open source does not mean free !!
– Open source means I can get access to the source code, different to “freeware”
– Open source developers are not cola fuelled communists operating from their bedrooms, but mostly professional programmers employed by commercial companies to contribute to open source projects.
– In many ways open source licensing is as complex as commercial closed source licensing !!

There also seemed to be some confusion or a least frequent use of the terms “open standards” and “open source” in the same sentence. Open Standards are all about delivering interoperability between applications developed by different organisations (think AA batteries – always the same size, voltage etc) – such applications may be “open source” but may also be closed source.

Likewise some open Source applications may be proprietary in nature, offering a private way of transferring data across a network for example.

Of particular interest to me was the business case for selecting ‘Open Source” solutions rather than the more traditional “Closed source” Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) route.

From the user perspective this seems clear, lower initial capital outlay in terms of licensing although the overall Total Cost of Ownership may not be that different with potentially higher internal and external (if available) support costs.
A very unscientific poll of the people at the workshop actually using “Open Source” did seem to be made of largely academic and research users – who are perhaps capital poor but geek rich and are therefore able to work through the maze of compiling using the right code library versions etc.
It was notable that local and central government were poorly represented, it this because the issue of ongoing support is more of an issue – I’m really not sure ?

From the application developer perspective the motivation to go “Open Source” is less clear, the “many eyes” argument of a wide and skilled developer resource looking at your code was one of the arguments put forward, and although this makes sense for the small dispersed development team, I’m not sure this is so much the case for a company like Autodesk.

I have a lot of time for Autodesk and Mapguide in particular, the new open source version demoed by Giulio Pagan looks great, but it is interesting Autodesk chose to experiment with open source with MapGuide rather than Inventor or even AutoCAD ?

It appears that there is little focus of Open Source GIS client development, while MapServer and PostGIS offer a real alternative to closed source software like ArcIMS, there is no open source ArcView or MapInfo, tools like uDig are moving in the right direction but GIS open source does appear to be server centric at the moment.

And yes I do run OpenSource myself, I have MapServer running on my Powerbook !!

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

Categories
GIS opensource

AGI ‘Open-Source in GIS’ Event – next week !!

Warning outrageous plug follows ;

A Last minute reminder, the AGI Technical SIG ‘Open-Source in GIS’ Event is next week in Cambridge, it’s not too late to book a place with the AGI to attend.

Find out why there is such as buzz in the industry for PostGIS, MapServer, MapGuide Open Source and the Open Source Geospatial Foundation, hear from professionals who are deploying real industry solutions using open source GIS tools !!!

OK plug over !!

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

Categories
GIS opensource

Mapchester – The open source mapping movement continues

The effort to create a copyright free streetmap continues next month with a dedicated weekend of mapping the streets of Manchester. Sounds like it’s going to be a great weekend ..

It is going to take a while, but I firmly believe one day they will be national open source datasets alongside the existing closed source datasets of today!

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