Category: Thoughts

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Ordnance Survey Thoughts

Unlike LOST, the derived data saga continues

Not 300m from the site of one end of William Roy’s original baseline for the first Ordnance Survey of Great Britain, the modern Ordnance Survey yesterday held it’s annual business partner conference.

Well for me it was a strange experience, sitting in the audience at an Ordnance Survey partner event (although Google is not a partner) just a few months after it seems the world fell apart around the directors of the OS – talk about a LOST style flash sideways.

It became clear soon into Vanessa Lawrence’s presentation that the organisation is still recovering from these traumatic events, and that there is not a vision yet for the future of an OS that both produces commercial and free data sets.

OS Lost at Sea ?

There were 3 key aspects to the keynote;

  • The release of the free data was as many  suspected  forced upon the OS, and there is still some internal resistance to the whole idea at the top of the organisation.
  • The building of the new OS Head Office is going according to plan, although it always seems to rain when Vanessa is onsite !
  • The Queen will be opening the new building (Did I say the building was on time)

Key issues for the partner community in terms of complex pricing and licensing models remain, work on solving those has been delayed it appears as a result of all the “free data” nonsense, although a new more simple model is promised in the future.

The big issue of derived data also remains, although to his credit in the Q&A session, Peter ter Haar aimed to clarify things by reading out from his iPad a draft version of what OS view is derived data. This it is promised will also be released soon, but to paraphrase;

Derived data concerns the direct copying and manipulation of features which exist within an OS data product. If new data which does not appear within the OS data is captured with reference to OS data, then this data is inferred, not derived, so it’s OK !

Of course the free OS data has no “derived data” limitations..

I asked for the OS to communicate this on their website as some form of White paper, again we await this with interest.

Of interest clearly to OS partners in addition to pricing and licensing and the future role of OS Ltd, which was only briefly mentioned are products..

Here the OS seems to be making real progress the new VectorMap series is at last demonstrating the capability of the OS to produce products that are fit for purpose for electronic rather than paper mapping, John Carpenter delivered an excellent presentation on these new data products and the philosophy behind them, this truly was a breath of fresh air.

Clearly it has been a difficult year for the OS, the landscape has changed massively and continues to do so, Vanessa hinted that the new government spending cuts have already started to have a impact, perhaps as Thierry is suggesting a reduction in the subsidy promised to deliver free mapping?

More than ever the OS needs a new vision fit for such a radically changing environment, embracing the freemium model which has been imposed on them and establishing their role within a very different UK and global geospatial industry.

The new building deserves a new vision ?

Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)

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Thoughts

Zeitgeist – words of wisdom..

Last week I attended the Google Zeitgeist event, a kind of mini-TED the highlights of which are in the video. I’m the one with 8 screens of Google Earth goodness,  and after a ride I’m saving up for the Tesla !

Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)
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Thoughts

Like the map, can you make it less visible ?

As a Geographer and map geek one of the hardest lessons I have learnt, and what many in the web mapping field still need to learn is…

Eds law of mashups..

“The map is important, but not as important as the data you are publishing on top of it”

Yes the expensively created, well drafted work of art you have struggled to produce following years of effort, is actually just providing a background or context to the location of pizza restaurants or free car parking places.

You might not like that, but is true !

A number of web mapping companies have over the last few years experimented with a few different colour pallet tile sets, but last week rather buried by the other Google I/O announcements, the latest enhancements to the v3 Google Maps API was announced in the form of  “Styled Maps“.

Rather than just present a few fixed tile sets, styled maps allow you to dynamically create a map based on a custom colour palette so there is a huge range of possible map styles available to you.

Styled maps may be used to;

  • Make the background map less intrusive..
  • Conform to a website design, A orange map for easyjet ?
  • Make some features “invisible”, – remove minor roads for example !

So this is not a full computer cartography tool yet, but these enhancements we meet the needs of many map developers to make their maps unique.

Those in the know will realise this represents a whole new way of rendering maps online, the definition of a “map style” is stored as JSON matching map feature types to styles defined by  hue, lightness, saturation, gamma, inverse_lightness and visibility.

To make life a little easier there is a rather neat web tool to define your styles.

Remember one day, no two Google maps will be the same…

Written and submitted from the Google Offices, London (51.495N, 0.146W)

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Technology Thoughts

The end of the era of complex machines ?

A week ago today I stood nearly ten miles away from the launch of Space Shuttle Atlantis, on its way to the International Space Station. Despite the distance I “felt” the launch in a number of ways. Unless you have experienced a launch it’s hard to describe the physical impact of such power, shaking the ground, vibrating every molecule around you, imagine a continuous clap of thunder lasting for more than a minute is the closest way I can attempt to describe it.

But the launch also effected be emotionally, I felt the same way watching the last three Concordes landing back at Heathrow together when they were retired from service.

As a child growing up in the seventies I expected my adult life to involve jumping on and off supersonic aircraft, perhaps flying to a spaceport somewhere to fly into orbit, instead I got the 8:20 South West Trains Service to Waterloo.

Perhaps it was always science fiction, but as a boy growing up watching Thunderbirds and Tomorrows World, if you had told me that society would develop and then lose supersonic transport and that by 2011 NASA would no longer be able to put Americans into low earth orbit I would not have believed you.

My hypothesis to this rather sad state of affairs for a geek, is that we allowed ourselves to over engineer solutions producing an era of machines that are so complex that economically they are unsustainable.

For example to launch Atlantis required tens of thousands of people to work at facilities all across the United States for four months to service the shuttle following it’s previous mission. This means that each shuttle missions in pure operational expenses costs hundreds of millions of dollars. Concorde was also a “hanger queen” requiring far more maintenance than conventional airliners.

Both Concorde and the Shuttle will not be directly replaced, instead in many ways less capable and simpler systems have and will take their place.

In the field of geospatial technology will we see the same trend ? Complex highly engineered solutions replaced by less capable and simpler systems, there is some evidence to suggest that trend, on the other hand Arc/Info in it’s various forms is only a year younger than the space shuttle programme and looks like it will outlive it with ease…

Is Google to ESRI as Scaled Composites and SpaceX are to NASA? I’m not sure but the old guys can always learn new tricks, while for the new guys there is wisdom to appreciate.

Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)

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LBS Thoughts

LBS Are we there yet ?

Last week I presented at the “Location Business” summit in Amsterdam, and it was interesting to reflect on just how far the LBS market has developed over the years.

One of the points I made was that we are on familiar ground, it seems every year since about 2001 has been the “year of location”, so I posed the question – this year “are we there yet?”.

Well clearly a lot has changed in the last ten years, devices are now very powerful, despite what they may think the mobile networks operators are no longer major players (bottlenecks) in the value chain, and with hybrid location technology from the likes of Google and Skyhook location determination is straightforward and ubiquitous .

More than anything else this last point and the fact that location is exposed through simple operating system level functions or via modern browsers means that it is trivial to add location to any application almost for free. This has fuelled the massive interest in bringing location into social applications, from Facebook to Twitter, foursquare to yelp, people are at last central to location based services.

I tried to make the point that actually places only really exist as a reflection of society..

Place = Location (points of interest) + People

As Gary Gale pointed out in another one of his seminal presentations there is still a “lot of stuff” we need to better understand about managing places.

Surprisingly there was little focus on the years “hot topic” of Augmented Reality, other than an inspirational presentation from Claire of Local AR stars Layar.

Overall a very enjoyable conference, in many ways not so different to ten years ago but now with a few clear areas of areas of agreement.

  • Location is now mainstream – no really.
  • “social” is as an important contextual signal as location.
  • There is little money to be made with pure location outside a few niche vertical apps, it’s real value comes from it’s ability to better customise content specific to individual users.

Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)

Categories
Thoughts

Germany and the soul of the web

Jeff Jarvis author of “What Would Google Do” and co-presenter of the This Week in Google podcast, has a great blog post today on his Buzz Machine blog, on the German perspective on privacy.

Without doubt,within Europe, Germany seems to have the greatest concerns with regards to privacy and so far much of the debate has focused on “what you potentially lose” by making information about you or your street public. Jeff counters this with the opposite opposite argument “what you gain” from making knowledge public.

This will remain one of most important web memes of the next few years as it goes to the heart of what has made the web so influential to our lives so far, but also how that may change in the future.

This is nothing less than a battle for the soul of the web.

The open web based on the concept of open access to information, ideas and knowledge is not guaranteed by any means, and we may need to do more than just watch the traditional holders of power in society start to shut down the elements of the internet they feel threatened by.

The appalling Digital Economy Bill passed in the UK is just the one element of this, the move to accesses information through applications and portals only threatens a return to the world of walled gardens we thought we had moved beyond with the closure of AOL and CompuServe, is another.

The danger of regressing to a world where access to  information is again controlled by a powerful few is increasingly real !

Written and submitted from Newark Airport  (40.712N, 74.164W)
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Thoughts

Clever Adwords at Stanfords

Great to see Stanfords one of the great tradtional homes of cartography embracing the web as a channel and making the most of the recent changes at Ordnance Survey. Like many of you this Adwords campaign may be appearing alongside your gmail, or web search results.

Not all OS Maps now free – brilliant.

To better understand how to use similar Google tools and to make sure your website is well placed in organic search results, check out fellow Googler Matt Cutts blog.

Written and submitted from Heathrow Airport  (51.478N, 0.491W)
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Thoughts

This is not an April Fools Joke

Not a normal day in this office then…

A very important day in the history of Ordnance Survey, from later on today it really will be possible to download free OS geodata from www.data.gov.uk, and www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/opendata. This is close to the “Goldilocks” option presented in the recent consultation and contains “mid scales” datasets which are detailed here in the official government response to the consultation.

Importantly this data is usable without restriction and therefore removes the issue of derived data.

Large scale data remains fully commercial and licensed conventionally, although we are promised a solution to the derived data problem for this data in the near future.

This is a massive step forward for the use of geospatial information in the UK, and although as a compromise it will leave some people disappointed, it will meet the needs of many people who have not had access to OS mapping before.

This has been a traumatic experience for Ordnance Survey, and I can only imagine the internal crisis this decision must have caused, but as it is often said, a crisis is the opportunity to push through the necessary changes that were too difficult during stable times.

Just in case you missed it, the 3D streetview is an April Fools Joke !

Written and submitted from The Residence Inn, Palo Alto (37.392N, 122.095W)
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Thoughts

How “U” shaped is your valley

Something that will either bring make warm memories or horror to people who studied Physical Geography at School is the creation of valley profiles, in particular to illustrate the erosional effect of glaciers in the recent Geological past..

OK, so that’s at least 50% of my readership which have clicked away.. the rest of you, welcome you are true geographers – be proud !!

Well now the process has become a little easier, a few weeks ago Google announced the latest extension to the Maps v3 API which provides programatic access to the underlying global terrain model used in Google Maps/Earth.

So now a profile across Snowdonia for example is easy..

From a techie point of view as well as the familiar  javascript API interface to this, there is also a RESTful web service API that provides output in JSON or simple XML.

Written and Submitted from the Googleplex (37.426N, 122.070W)

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Thoughts

A little perspective needed..

Who is watching who ?

It’s amazing how much copy a Lib-Dem MP on the run up to the general election can generate by calling up the press and mentioning street view in the UK has pictures of the “secret” SAS base.

There is actually a serious and rather worrying point behind this nonsense, there seems to be evidence of an increasing number of  innocent photographers being interview by constables or any jobs-worth wearing a day-glow jacket, sighting anti-terrorist legislation which make taking pictures of public buildings a security threat.

This is from the country with the highest concentration of CCTV cameras in the world.

By the way, I won’t tell you whose building is behind the CCTV array (for the congestion charge actually) but if you watch the 1999 James Bond film, “The World is not Enough” you might just get a clue.

Written and submitted from London City Airport (51.503N, 0.049W)