Category: Technology

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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.

Categories
GIS Google Earth Technology Thoughts virtual earth

A picture is worth a thousand words ?

Not when it comes to Geographic Information I would argue…

Adena very well I think identified the massive interest in imagery demonstrated by the vendors at this years ESRI UC exhibition in her latest directions magazine editorial. Imagery is great as context to other types of spatial information, but on its own I believe it’s value is limited.

There are a lot of innovative ideas in this part of the geodata business driven both by the massive demand of the new generation of geographic exploration services from GYM and now ESRI, and from the fact that for much of North America there is no large scale topographic information otherwise available.

southampton in 3D

While technologies like Pictometry are interesting especially when combined with tools like SocketSet and OpenFlight to produce 3-D city models (thanks to John Allan and Rick Mort of BAE for the Southampton example above) , they can only provide contextual information which need expert human interpretation to generate true information let alone ‘Geospatial intelligence”

Using the example above, without access to other geographic information, can you tell.. where in the city are we ?, what is the name of the street in the foreground,? what is the address of the red building?, who “owns” this property ?

To answer these type of questions and indeed to really carry out any type of spatial analysis you need detailed feature based information and I would argue for a lot of analysis up to date information as-well.

So until more feature based information can be produced (it’s expensive !!) new tools like ArcGIS Server at 9.2 and the increasingly popular OGC WFS standard will be constrained..

Have we have invented the equivalent of the CD player, but are still producing 78-rpm mono gramophone records.

And a semantic Geoweb based on imagery.. forget it !!

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

Categories
GIS OGC Technology Thoughts

edparsons.com.. now with added GeoRSS

Another one of those things I have been meaning to do for ages, was to implement GeoRSS in the feed for edparsons.com. This has been more frustrating that I would have liked, but it now works.

GeoRSS support

Why the frustration, firstly there are three favours of GeoRSS, Simple and GML which you will find documented at the GeoRSS website and the so-called W3C Geo standard which for historic reasons is also widely used.

So I started initially using the GML encoding only to find there are very few readers which work with it, so OK back to the simple version and a little greater success.

So I guess we are still at the walking rather than running stage for GeoRSS, buts its great to see the major traditional GIS vendors as well as GYM beginning to adopt this approach.

This has value way beyond blogging and putting pins on web maps however, I think there is great potential for GML encoded GeoRSS to offer a realistic alternative to the Web Feature Server as a mechanism for supplying changed feature data in a change only update service.

We often talk in terms of users subscribing to a service for updated data, well GeoRSS seems to be designed for just this purpose.

To learn more watch the GeoRSS blog and all credit to Mikel for his GeoRSS google map plug-in which was used to produce the map above.

Categories
Technology Thoughts

The Mobile worker..

In an attempt to reduce my Carbon footprint, well for a day or two, I’m trying travelling to work on the train and so far the experience is not that bad, but there is still some way to go before time on the train is truly productive.

I really need a power supply to plug the powerbook into, on some of the newer trains on the South West Trains network this is possible, but not the “Express” trains which serve the London-Southampton route.

My Vodafone 3G data card is struggling to get anyway near the UMTS bandwidth of 384 kbps most of the time it falls back to GPRS at the good old days rate of 56k. It’s strange that the 3G network coverage followed the motorway rather than the rail network, how many BMW drivers do you see browsing the web on the M3 – on seconds thoughts best not go there…

Still I think I could get used to it..

Written and submitted from the 19:00 Southampton – Waterloo train, somewhere between Fleet and Farnborough, using my Vodafone 3G network card.

Categories
GIS Technology where 2.0

Tim Berners Lee to Keynote at Terra future 2006

Terra FutureFollowing on from the success of last years Terra Future event, this year TBL will be the keynote speaker at Terra future 2006 the Ordnance Survey meeting focused on Research and innovation in the use of Geographic Information. We are very pleased to have Tim presenting as OS has had an active research group looking into the geographic semantic web for a number of years and are well respected.

Also speaking is Mike Liebhold of the Institute for the Future who keynoted at this years where 2.0 conference in San Jose.

Categories
Technology Thoughts

A Powerbooks adventure in the hold..

Fragile laptop in transit
So I waved farewell to my Powerbook in its bag at the check-in desk at Los Angeles Airport, with nothing more to protect than a British Airways fragile label, and watched as it disappeared down a baggage conveyor on its way to the hold of a Boeing 747 along with cases, bags, pushchairs and the gentle touch of the baggage handlers.

15 hours later, that’s 10 hours flying and five hours of general waiting, down the baggage carousel at Heathrow crashed my bag, rapidly followed by a large Samsonite and a North Face duffel bag.

So did it survive its Disney like adventure into the underworld of hold baggage… well I’m writing this entry on it, and there was not a scratch!!

So how did it survive? Good fortune.. and a few tips you might find useful if you are travelling to the UK..

  1. Make sure you have backed up your personal data (but you do that anyway)
  2. Switch you laptop off completely, putting it to sleep or stand-by is not enough, as you want to make sure its hard disk heads are safely parked.
  3. Wrap the laptop in as much soft material as possible, I was lucky to have been given a few t-shirts at the ESRI UC which worked very well.
  4. Make sure there are no hard objects in the bag, things like power supplies which could be forced against the screen and cause damage, pack these in your other bags.
  5. Check your insurance !!

Ideally you would not chose to travel with your laptop in these conditions, but life must go one..

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

Categories
Aviation GPS RIAT Technology

Where did I park the car ??

So this weekend, I indulged my passion for Aviation and went along to the Royal International Air Tattoo at RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire. Arriving just after the airfield opened, I was directed to park, as is usual at airshows, in a field alongside 20,000 other cars in an environment with no real landmarks – how was I going to find my car again at the end of the show ?

The Problem

As a geospatial expert of course I had the solution to the problem in my bag, my trusty garmin GPS receiver within a minute or so I knew my car was parked at 51.67922,-01.81322.

Great I could now navigate back to my car at the end of the day, and be talked in by my Garmin.

The Solution

BTW My car if you are interested, was parked here as shown in Google maps..

And the show.. excellent, star for me was the Boeing MV-22B Osprey tilt rotor. As a child the major influence on my understanding of technology was the TV series Thunderbirds, so I’m really pleased to see a design of aircraft that Gerry Anderson would appreciate.

Boeing MV-22B Osprey

To see my other pictures from the event just click on the picture above…

Categories
GIS GPS Technology

TomTom and Microsoft take-over rumours

Silicon.com picks up on market rumours that Microsoft are viewing the Amsterdam based portable SatNav maker as an acquisition target…. If true, it would mean that Microsoft are really jumping into the consumer GI marketplace, are they after the great software platform or are they thinking of a new hardware business line ? Other than the Xbox MSFT don’t have a great track record with hardware…

Categories
LBS Technology

And the walls come tumbling down..

Silicon.com reports that the international mobile operator 3, is to allow access to external websites, intially using Yahoo rendering technology.. This is a start, however it is not clear if the location platform component that 3 lead the market in developing will also be opened up – lets hope so

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

Categories
GPS Technology Thoughts

Innsbruck in a day… thanks to Tom Tom

Just on my way back from a whistle stop trip to Innsbruck – there are still a few places in Europe where it is still only just possible to visit in a day.. I was there to present to some of the team drafting the technical details that will make the Inspire directive to share environmental information in Europe work… well as soon at is passed in a form acceptable to all 🙂

My Journey was only just possible because i was trying out one of the new Tom Tom navigation systems, which came fully loaded with no only the full European road network but North American roads also.. This really is the ipod of navigation systems !

So a round trip of 450Km later I’m back at the airport in Munich and I did not get lost once !! – Now if only my flight was not delayed…

Written and submitted from the Delta Crown Room Lounge, at Munich Airport using the t-mobile wifi network.