A very good article by Jo Best at silicon.com, on how the balance of power is shifting between network operators and mobile phone manufactures following the announcement of the iPhone. 
A small shift perhaps and we could be replacing one walled garden with another ? I amongst others are hopeful that we seen some momentum behind the OpenMoko Open Source phone project, which is coming soon !!
Written and submitted from the garden at home ( 16°C !!) , using my home 802.11 network.
The image below tells us quite a lot about own the GI industry is developing.
Click on the image for a full resolution screen-shot of openstreetmap (OSM) data and OS ITN data in Cadcorp‘s SIS desktop GIS, which can now import OSM XML.
What do we have here…
1. Cadcorp a progressive but mainstream GIS vendor supporting open source data!
2. OK, it is Isle of Wight data, where OSM has particularly good coverage, but as one can see community generated open source data is comparable geometrically with “professional” Ordnance Survey data.
3. OSM data lacks the rich attribution of Ordnance Survey (e.g. classification A road, B road, Minor, path etc), which will restrict its use in many applications, but which will still meet the needs of many.
The story the image does not illustrate are the difficult problems of keeping the data current, and completing national coverage, areas which will be future challenges for OSM.
As I have blogged before the “Traditional” GI industry is only slowly beginning to wake up to the potential of community generated geodata, so full marks to Martin Daly and Cadcorp for recognising the potential.
One day very soon, community generated geodata will sit side by side with commercial professionally produced data for many GIS applications – as of today that day is a little closer.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
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.