Category: Thoughts

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.

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
Thoughts

YouTube copyright problems

You can feel the pain… somebody at the cabinet office has fallen foul of copyright issues with last weeks release of a public information film, silicon.com reports..

Another oil tanker with steering problems ?

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 Thoughts

Calling UK Geobloggers

Dominic has a very interesting post over at geometrybag, noting the lack of UK centric content in the dozen or so UK based blogs that deal with Geography and GIS. Dominic is on to something here, there are many topics that are of interest to a UK specific readership beyond OS bashing of course 🙂 , but maybe the point is that the technology issues we deal with are global ?

Maybe it is just a problem with the “traditional” GI industry, I know from personal experience that UK organisations are less receptive to blogging than those in the United States for example, and to be fair the OpenStreetMap, and geowanking mailing list communities have very active participation from Brits.

Are we in the UK a year or two behind the curve on this ?

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

Categories
Google Maps Thoughts

The best Google Maps hack yet ?

Goggles

Goggles is a flash based ‘Flight simulator” that lets you fly around Google Maps imagery.

Great fun, don’t fly to low, but who knows what licensing issues this throws up 🙂

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

Categories
GPS Thoughts

Bye-bye Road Atlas !

Silicon.com reports the latest findings from analysts Canalys, who note that sales of GPS navigation systems (Satnavs) have again grown over 100% in the past year, with Tom Tom and Garmin the major players.

Doubling market share soon moves a market, so the road atlas may soon go the same way as the eight track stereo – I’m still to be convinced about smart phones as navigation devices, although clearly off-board navigation and the required wireless capability will be important over the next couple of years, the form factor is still all wrong.

The big deal will be the first sub £100, €100, $100 device..the race is on!

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

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
Thoughts

A new look..

Hope you like the look of the new edparsons.com, based on a WordPress theme designed by Lisa Sabin of the E.Webscapes design studio, it features a Surveyors Compass, an appropriate icon giving the topic of the blog.

I just felt like a change !! and had time on my hands awaiting a long flight home to the UK, more details to follow..

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