Category: Thoughts

I spent yesterday attending the second day of the 12th European Commission workshop on Geographic Information and GIS. The major topic of discussion is the ongoing development of European SDI’s – Spatial Data Infrastructures.. In the UK it is a topic rarely discussed, so to paraphrase the Monty Python classic – What does a SDI do for us…

In some ways one can think of an SDI as a cross organisation / cross border enterprise GIS, so GIS tools working on a common view of shared data. It is more than just the technical solution to interoperability however, an SDI also requires all the organisational and operational processes and agreements to be in place so that the common shared view of data is truly dynamic and more than a data snapshot.

Across mainland Europe there are both regional and a few national SDI’s operating today, and there is continued debate in the United States about a National SDI, in the UK it seems that we have been quite good a developing vertically integrated data sharing applications like Magic, and clearly have excellent and consistant base data, but have not gone much further…

Why is this… why has then been so little progress towards a UK SDI ?, my own view is that this maybe because culturally we don’t really like sharing, and crucially there is no central organisation promoting the benefits and providing co-ordination. Perhaps this is something that todays meeting to discuss the formulation of a UK GI Strategy will address.

Because going back to that scene from “The Life of Brian”, as Reg said..

“All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”

Sounds like GIS to me…

Written and submitted from the Hotel Grauer Bär, in Innsbruck using the hotels broadband network.

mySociety have put the analysis of geographical information into the mainstream press, with the London evening newspaper, The Standard running a report today on the Travel Maps they have created working with the Dept. for Transport in the UK.

This is great to see, and again compliments to Tom and Chris for the work they are doing, but don’t you think it is strange that the usefulness of this type of spatial analysis has been popularised in the eyes of the media by the guys at mySociety and not the traditional users of GI who have had access to this data and the tools to produce isochrones for many years.

BTW I live right between the two red vectors to the west of London indicating faster travel times.. ah well 🙂

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

Wired reports on progress in the US on E911 legislation which requires mobile operators to pass the location of emergency calls to the emergency services. Despite a 2005 deadline most providers it appears are only now getting to the position where location data is available and unlike in Europe the route adopted has been through the use of GPS enabled phones, rather than network based analysis.

For the benefit of public safety the faster this and the equivalent E112 rules in Europe are met the better, but remember this will also provide a major boost to the reawakening LBS market.

As I have noted before however knowing where you are is only part of the answer for the development of the LBS market, we still need richer geospatial databases and most importantly really compelling applications.

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

Last week I was asked to make a presentation to the Ordnance Survey Partner Conference, and I took as my topic the innovation that is taking place under the banner of “Web 2.0”

My first surprise was how few of the attendees had heard the term “web 2.0” before, I wonder if this is representative of the inward nature of the industry in general or of the UK in particular ?

Anyway I covered in my presentation the seven elements as identified by Tim O’Reilly as central to the web 2.0 approach, and focused in on the areas I thought of special interest to the GI industry.

So hear with due respect to Tim are the key elements I believe are relevant to the GI Industry;

Simple services

Today’s consumers of geographical information both “amateur” and “professional” require much simpler task orientated applications preferably delivered across the web to browser or thin client applications. Only very few specialist “high end” users, and I would include the OS in this group, need traditional tool kit based GIS software.

Data included

As a one time system vendor I can well remember the days of manning a booth at an industry show showing fantastic GIS software, when a member of the buying public came along and asked to see a map of their house/office etc. Of course I would have to say that we did not have that data loaded on the demo, and that they would have to find a third party willing to provide them with data at additional cost, once they had bought our software – funny enough many did not come back !! If the GYM club has only taught us one thing it is that data must be included, and its quality will increasing be a deal making factor. – As O’Reilly puts it, Data is the Intel Inside.

Exploit the “people inside” the application

Although Google, eBay, and Flickr etc. are technically interesting applications and represent new approaches to on-line business what is really interesting is that much of their value comes from the content of their users. In fact Google has no content on its own, it’s value comes from exploiting the linkages other people make between websites. From a GI perspective it is easy to recognise the value that users of Geographical Information can put “back into the machine”, both in terms of providing quality assurance and most excitingly as a source for the “sense of place” data the traditional GI industry is so poor at.

Innovation from the edge

Lastly don’t look to the traditional GIS industry for innovation, or mainstream IT for that matter… watch the geeks !!

Written and submitted from the BMI Lounge at Heathrow Airport, using the BT Openzone wifi network, on the way to Survey Ireland 2006.