Category: Thoughts

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Data Policy Thoughts

A revolution in Whitehall

datagovuk

So be honest how many of us every expected todays’s announcement would ever come?  a day when the very conservative civil service of the United Kingdom made available very comprehensive government data sets available for free.  OK there are a few notable exceptions (OS , Royal Mail and TfL spring to mind) but as a starting point to have nearly  2500 data sets available and a community of nearly the same number of application developers is a huge success.

How often is it that the UK government can demonstrate greater openness that the United States, this is a far more impressive launch than the much admired data.gov portal.

The data.gov.uk portal also represents a huge shift in mindset for government in the UK, I’m very proud of a letter which I received while working at the Ordnance Survey almost accusing me of sedition and threatening me with the official secrets act for blogging and suggesting the OS could make data more widely accessible.

Culture change is a term much branded about within the civil service, what we see with the data portal really is culture change.

From a technical perspective data.gov.uk also represents the publish first and sort out the quality / metadata later paradigm which governments must follow, an evolutionary approach is vital in the fast moving world of web today, achieving perfection and accounting for all potential uses of data is not feasible and can no longer be used as an excuse not release data “as is”

The role of Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt in this change cannot be over stated without the “star” factor of these two individuals todays announcement would not have been possible. I look forward to reading the inside story of their activities in the next edition of  Prospect Magazine which promises to be a major scoop.

Also influential with government has been the campaigning of  former innovation minister Tom Watson among others, has been edging towards this move by holding such events as Show Us a Better Way, a competition with cash prizes for government data mashups.

Today of course is not the end of the battle, we need to keep the pressure on for all public sector data holders to default to making their information available, and there is still time to express support for free access to Ordnance Survey data by taking part in the current consultation process. Evidence for why this is important is illustrated by this example, just one of many issues caused by the current licensing regime.

To paraphrase outrageously, for Open Access to Government data, this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Written and submitted from the Google Offices, Copenhagen (55.683N, 12.571E)

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Thoughts

The Isle of White

Spent an interesting day making by way down to Southampton to give a talk to some 3rd year Computer Scientists, strange to be back near by old employers, I did not drop in however..

The drive down the M3 was particularly spectacular clear blue skies and a snow covered countryside is the positive spin of a country whose infrastructure struggles with a few cm of snow. However this winters snowfall is rather extensive e a fact brought home by a MODIS image acquired today from NASA’s Terra satellite.

Cool in both senses I think your agree !

UKSnow via Terra (click to enlarge)
UKSnow via Terra (click to enlarge)

Happy New Year BTW !

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

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Thoughts

My Christmas project

bookEvery year I give myself a little project to do that has the twin aims of providing an alternative to watching TV and keeps my “hand-on” skills with technology current. In the past I have built linux servers from scratch, learnt Ruby of Rails (remember that !!) and of course uncessfully tried to build a cheap remote sensing platform from an electric RC helicopter (not enough lift – too much vibration).

This year my projct is less challenging in many ways, completely inspired by John McKerrell and his now famous Weasley Clock I am going to learn how to build robuts using the Arduino Kit. So I have my book, a simple Arduino kit and some stuff from Maplin..

Our Robot Overloads will take their first steps…

Happy Holidays !!

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

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Thoughts

Guardian Tech : The end of paper

Yesterday marked the end of a era for many people interested in technology in the UK, as it was the last publication of the Guardian’s Thursday Technology supplement.

guardian

For many years I used to buy the Newspaper on a Thursday just for the tech section and it’s news from the IT industry and it’s IT and science job listings. Over the last few years the job listings disappeared replaced by online job sites, and of course we now get much of our news from blogs and the twitter.
It was the lack of advertising that killed the printed version, the Guardian still remains one of the best source of technology reporting online and out of all of the UK news publishers the Guardian is the most innovative in using new media, as demonstrated by the release this week of their excellent iPhone app.

Lets hope that the Guardian can continue its great work online, and I would recommend the weekly Guardian Tech podcast to anyone wanting to go beyond the 140 character version of tech news. Lets also hope that the campaigning element of the Guardian work continues, the victory of the Free our Data campaign in the UK, will have I hope a major impact on the UK Tech industry and the Geospatial Industry in particular.

Does this mean all printed media is ultimately doomed, of course not, however it does bring into stark  focus the business models of business that in the past have been based on the scarcity of information. When I started reading the Tech section, or Guardian Online as it was in the late 1980’s it was about the most up to date source of news, as it was published not monthly like most magazines but weekly ! Now via Twitter, I can learn of a new product announcement within minutes, and then read more in depth opinion of the news over the following hours and days via blogs.

While there was no alternative to printing on paper and having a distribution model of trucks and corner shops the inherent latency in the system was not a problem. Now of course that distribution mechanism has been replaced by the web, and as users we expect to see information delivered more quickly and a lower or no cost because the information is no longer scarce.

I expect we will see a similar shift in the provision of geospatial information to people over the next few years, the same web based distribution mechanism is already reducing the importance of paper maps and thanks in no small part to the efforts of the Guardian Geospatial infomation itself we become much less scarce early next year.

I hope to see by the middle of next year a whole range of alternative mapping products delivered online and in particular to mobile devices based on free OS mapping but showing real innovation, after all walking maps for use on my iPhone don’t have to look like the Landranger maps designed for paper 50 years ago.

So perhaps the end of paper for the mapping industry in the UK will actually mark the beginning of a creative renaissance in cartography, as with newspapers its ultimately not the medium of paper that is important,  but content.

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

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Thoughts

Data the key to the climate change debate : Part 3

Final post on the subject, John Graham Cumming demonstrates in this YouTube video, what bedroom climate science looks like . Marvelous !!

The source code of his perl program is here

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

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Thoughts

A lesson in technical product marketing

In his rather influential book on Google, Jeff Jarvis describes how successful companies on the web need to “bring their customers into their processes”,  and by using open and transparent communications when things go wrong, companies will not only maintain but enhance their users trust.

Problem solved..In a really inspiring series of posts to his blog, Martin Daly has described the efforts his company Cadcorp has gone through to deliver a robust and high performance web system to one of their customers.

Very few GIS companies  would have opened up in such detail to describe the difficulties and problems associated in delivering a solution to meet a challenging set of requirements, and to be so frank about the process.

Cadcorp and Martin emerge very well from the exercise, OK so our software may a few problems but we know how to fix them and will work hard to do so, and we will show you how we did it in public.

A example for many others in the GIS industry…

(geek test : Recognise the engineering solution in the image ?)

Written and Submitted from the San Francisco Airport (37.613N, 122.390W)

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Thoughts

Data the key to the climate change debate : Part 2

As the thinking world watches the activities in Copenhagen rather than the latest news of Tiger Woods, the value of making climate change data more accessible a point I made last week, is gaining some momentum.

This week the UK’s Met Office released a subset of HadCRUT data-set, just about the most comprehensive data-set of historic climate data. Already  John Graham-Cumming yes he of The Geek Atlas fame, is working on analysing and visualising the data.

Yes early days, but a confirmation of the value of making this information accessible..

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

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Data Policy Thoughts

Data : the key to the Climate Change debate ?

Over the next week or so the media will be full of stories from Copenhagen as the world’s leader fly into the city for United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP-15. There will no doubt be limited progress towards agreeing to reduce greenhouse gases emissions globally, getting international governments to agree on anything is difficult, and to agree on making such potentially major changes to their economies is difficult despite the dire consequences of doing nothing.

The debate is not helped by lingering doubts among many people that climate change itself is no more than a liberal conspiracy or at least there is little evidence to support that mankind and increased CO2 emissions are actually responsible for the changes.

Of both sides of the arguments there are powerful interest bodies, who are actively working on providing their interpretations to the evidence without necessarily being fair and open minded, even respected academics it appears have felt it necessary to manipulate information to fit their world view.

Ultimately if we are to get politicians to act with conviction on this matter, they need to believe it is something for which there will be a domestic political cost for not doing so, and this only results from the issue becoming something that the mainstream population has a firmly held opinion of.

Unfortunately people have lost confidence is both politicians and I’m afraid scientists to provide unbiased analysis of data on Climate Change, perhaps we now need to better educate people as to how to look at climate change data themselves  and to make this data available without spin or interpretation so that people can make their own minds up.

Last week I visited the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission in Ispra, Italy and meet with some scientists who are analysing greenhouse gas emission data over the last 25 years. The EDGAR project latest analysis is to try provide a granular map of the distribution of greenhouse gas emissions which they have visualised using Google Earth.

This is no doubt a powerful image, and an interesting talking point to the debate, but it is also the results of a model, a manipulation of raw data to paint a picture.

edgar-europe

There is of course nothing wrong with this, as it makes a particular point, and because in this case the  raw data behind the analysis as well as the well documented model are also easily accessible for bedroom scientists to analyse themselves.

And before any climate scientists out there claim that this is ridiculous and that the general public cannot be expected to deal with such complex tools and concepts, ask a surveyor or cartographer if they expected that the general public would be building the only detailed global digital maps a few years ago ?

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

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Ordnance Survey Thoughts

Now why was that so difficult ?

Yesterday the Prime Minister announced that many of the data products produced by Ordnance Survey are too be made “open data” free for download and use by both indivuduals and commerical organsiations in the UK.

Our data has been freed ?

Well of course we will still have to see the details but this is a massive step forward and huge kudos needs to be paid to all those who have worked behind the scenes lobbying for this change and of course those who have been much more visible in their campaign. Congratulations Charles !!

The impact of Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt is raising the value of free data on the political agenda was also clearly important and perhaps was the final push in the finally balanced arguments between the treasury and cabinet office.

Is the world about to end now in Southampton?

Of course not, many myself included have often made the point that there are in actual fact two data businesses at the OS. The one which produces large scale detailed and up to date data for use by government and customers in the utility sectors and  the other which produces the rest and which actually accounts of a relatively small proportion of the revenues of the OS.

It is this second business that is impacted here, the people who continue to license OS Mastermap and Address Layer will not be impacted by this move, and the OS will not see a massive fall in revenue as a result.

On the other hand at least some of the following datasets should be made available for free, and we can expect to see many new products and services appear as a result..

  • Boundary-Line™
  • Code-Point®
  • Code-Point®  with polygons
  • Land-Form PROFILE®
  • Land-Form PROFILE® Plus
  • Land-Form PANORAMA®
  • Meridian™ 2
  • OS VectorMap™ Local

Make no mistake this is something that has been forced on the OS by Government, the OS did not appear to be represented at the announcement yesterday and there is only a terse statement on the OS website reflecting this change in direction.

This is a shame, the leadership of the OS could have been more proactive in realising the value of their information came from its wider distribution not from following a business model based on its scarcity.

Written and submitted from Pan Pacific Hotel, Singapore (01.293N, 103.859W)

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AGI LBS Thoughts

The Weasley Clock and Google Latitude a mashup waiting to happen

In the UK there is a saying about waiting ages for a bus and then two come along at the same time. In the world of location based or context based computing it’s not exactly the case that there is little happening, but yesterday produced two interesting stories.

I had the pleasure on presenting at the AGI North Where2.0now event in Harrogate. It was a great event, but there was much joking from those who travelled from London and Southern England how far we had travelled.

Well now it’s possible to track exactly how far if you should choose too, as a Google Latitude user I can look at my history and see where I have travelled over a period of time.

As you would expect this is a service you need to opt in to, and by default your history will not be kept. But if you chose to store you history is makes a fascinating record of your travels here for example is my trip to Harrogate yesterday.

latitude

Tracking and storing you location is nothing new, John McKerrell has been doing so for a couple of years using his mapme.at service.

At the conference yesterday he showed the coolest piece of geo hardware seen since the Garmin GPS45, a location clock powered by mapme.at

If you have ever read any Harry Potter you will be familar with the idea of the Weasley Clock, a magical clock owned by the Weasley family which shows not the time but the location of members of the family and if they are in “Mortal Peril”.

Visit Johns blog to read how he has built a working Weasley clock using a Arduino kit, mapme.at and great imagination.

So cool !!

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