Category: web 2.0

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Google Earth Google Maps web 2.0

Digital Geography in a Web 2.0 World

I went along today to an excellent showcase of the academic worlds take on Web 2.0 approaches and neogeography. Organised by the team at CASA at UCL the event attracted a large crowd for a one day event to London’s Barbican Centre. Although I was only able to attend the afternoon the presentations I attended were all excellent and I got similar feedback speaking to others who had attended the whole day.

Visually the day was very well produced, it’s amazing how far we have come in just the last few years in our ability to visualise geospatial data, and interact with it both in the lab and in the field.

A key point for me and something that I feel hugely proud of, was the number of times Googles tools were not only mentioned but also demonstrated used in the way we hoped they would be, as a way of people communicating their own work to a wider audience.

Google Earth, Maps, Sketchup etc don’t compete with the full functionality professional GIS or Architectural design packages, but they do allow anyone to create new information easily and importantly for this audience, easily communicate results of analysis to a global audience.

I was also pleased to see that the importance of developing a community of users who contribute information and ideas was also highlighted as an important success factor, indeed there was much evidence of collaboration between different universities departments, something that was rare in my day as an academic.

Andy Hudson-Smith has produced an excellent full colour booklet in parallel with the event which I recommend taking a look at, I’m sure he will is due course make it available via his blog.

Overall I was very impressed by the work presented, not quite a Scoble cry inducing event, but very motivating!

BTW If anybody find a pair of Nike trainers in Second Life, Andy is looking for them !

Written and Submitted from the Holiday Inn, Nottingham using my 3 3G usb modem.

Categories
Google Maps web 2.0

London Web 2.0 map

Interesting “My Map” by techcrunch uk, locating Web 2.0 startup in London, seems like Shoreditch is still the place to be..


View Larger Map

Written and Submitted from the Google Office, London.

Categories
Data Policy Ordnance Survey web 2.0

Zillow move should allow other small scale experiments

Last weeks announcement on the Zillow blog that is was releasing its neighbourhood boundary data to the community in Shapefile format is the story of the year so far… (ok so we are only a few weeks in… but this is important)

Zillow.com

Zillow is the US Real Estate web site that uses much web 2.0 goodness to actually carry out simple analysis of the housing market, a largely geographical phenomena of course, and allows the user to produce simple hotspot maps of the relative activities in house prices in different neighbourhoods, amongst other things.

This is where the Open Source boundary data comes in… the best people to help define and keep the neighbour boundary data “up to date” are the people themselves, and as the OpenStreetMap guys have found there is a growing community of people willing to do so.

I would be really interested to see how peoples perception of their neighbourhood compares with the “official” data, there is of course much folk-law as to the practices of Estates Agents in London calling Battersea an a rough area when I grew up “South Chelsea”, of course it is gentrified now…

We are only just developing the tools which allow users to express their own sense of place, this is an exciting first step in many ways, and will no doubt point the way to more collaborative mapping applications.

Again ,of course, this raises the question as to other data sets which could be maintained by the community in such a manner, the completeness of OpenStreetMap in the UK (shields up) could be improved overnight if data could be open sourced in this way as it has in the Netherlands for example.

The OS spends relatively little keeping its small scale business geographics data products such as strategi maintained, and it returns similarly modest revenues… worth a small-scale experiment perhaps ?

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

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Thoughts web 2.0

Auntie does mash-ups too now!

BBC Radio 4BBC Radio 4 is often seen as a pillar of the establishment in the UK, although I don’t think it has even justified the label, is was on Radio 4 after-all that Andrew Gilligan made he famous acquisition that the Government were spinning information to make the case for the Second Gulf War.

One of their shows iPM has gone all web2.0 and relies heavily on user contributed material submitted via email and blogs, and are now in the process of building a Mash-up of their listeners.

A nice simple idea and a great way to illustrate the value of mapping api sites to a different audience, seems a long time since the UK Mash-up day and OS Openspace which if you remember a year ago was seen as rather too radical !!

Written and Submitted from the Crowne Plaza Hotel, Manama, Bahrain, using its wired broadband network.

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Thoughts web 2.0

The Bubble video

Along with all the other blogs.. here is the Bubble video by SF band the Richter Scales.

Funny but not enough to make Diet Coke come out of my nose… Guess you need to be in the video or at least in the video to really appreciate it.

Written and Submitted from the Google Office, London.

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Thoughts web 2.0

Web 2.0 and the public sector

I often get asked to talk about the impacts of technology and user expectation change, the Web 2.0 effect, to conferences aimed at public sector audiences. The points I make are also illustrated in the excellent article by Eric Woods of Ovum at silicon.com.

For my old colleagues in various Government Departments around the world this is well worth the read.

Web 2.0 is not like CB-Radio, yes there is a massive amount of hype around the term which is not helpful, however the fact remains that technology change has democratised many of processes of production and communication which has lead to a whole different level of user expectations and demand for greater engagement from citizens.

This cannot be ignored !

Written and Submitted from the Google Office, London.

Categories
Data Policy Ordnance Survey web 2.0

Ordnance Survey embraces UGC.. it’s a start

No hell has not frozen over, Ordnance Survey finally launched their explore portal this week, a site designed for walkers, hikers, cyclists and anyone interested in the outdoors to share their walks and favourite places.

explore portal

Although this is nothing new, platial after all offered similar functionality a few years ago, this has been a long time coming, I was involved in some of the design work over a year ago! this is still an important step forward for the OS.

From a technology point of view the service was/is underpinned by the backend system developed to support the long delayed OpenSpace project, so hopefully there will be news about that soon.

Although I would take issue with some of the T&C’s, this really is progress in the right direction from Southampton.

Update: My first walk is here.

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

Categories
Thoughts web 2.0

Academic 2.0

This evening I went along to my old haunt Kingston University to attend a lecture giving by a past colleague, Jonathan Briggs to mark him becoming Professor of eCommerce at the University.

The Talk entitled “eCommerce 2.0: How AJAX, blogging, mashups, search engines and social networks are changing business” pretty much did as is says on the tin and covered both technological change and societal impacts of the new “web 2.0” processes and how they are changing business.

All very good, but what impressed me most was Jonathan’s approach to his career so far, although an academic with teaching responsibilities, he has set up a successful internet business the other media , which some blue chip clients and has helped create new educational establishments for teaching new media in Sweden and Kosovo. He runs an excellent blog, which is one of the ways he communicates with his students.

So what we have is a real practitioner of their subject, who can provide their students with real business experience gained by actually building sites, competing to work for clients and running a successful business – for potential employers this is just what they want to hear.

Congratulations to Kingston University for giving Jonathan the freedom to do this, your students I’m sure benefit far more from this, than they would, if he published x peer reviewed journal articles each year.

Web 2.0 has massive potential to change the way higher education works, I wonder how ready Higher Education 1.0 it for it ?

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

Categories
Data Policy GIS Ordnance Survey web 2.0

The Power of Information Report – connecting .gov.uk to the mashup generation

Ed Mayo and Tom Steinberg have completed, their important review of the potential value of Government generated information, when combined with citizen contributed information and tools.

Power of InformationThe Power of Information review commissioned by the cabinet office, is a very important report in my opinion – noting the value of Public Sector information, but also recognising that it is when this information is in the hands of the citizen, it becomes most valuable.

The report should be seen as a way for government to catch up with and serve the needs of the “mash-up” generation who will increasingly become a demanding group of citizens who understand the power of information.

It will be interesting to see the Governments response to the report, as is often the case we must remember that Government does not speak with a single voice, but the fact that the Cabinet office commissioned this independent report in the the first place is very positive.

If you are a UK reader I recommend downloading and reading this report, there is one recommendation that is close to my heart :-), and another that is just vital –

Recommendation 9. By Budget 2008, government should commission and publish an
independent review of the costs and benefits of the current trading fund charging model for the re-use of public sector information, including the role of the five largest trading funds, the balance of direct versus downstream economic revenue, and the impact on the quality of public sector information.

For too long the debate about cost recovery has been carried out in a vacuum without an authoritative economic justification of the statue quo – this recommendation would either prove the case for the OS so it would no longer have to defend itself, or prove the case of the free data lobby – and we could then get on with the important business of using geography to make the world a better place to live in.

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

Categories
Google Earth Google Maps INSPIRE web 2.0

Google search extended to KML – Wake up everybody

It’s been a couple of weeks now since Google announced that its main search engine is now able to search and parse KML files, the native file format for Google Earth. This was widely reported in the blogosphere but with little comment, I’m not sure most mainstream GIS users are even aware of the news..

They should be !!

It might not seem a big deal, after-all KML is a “Google” format, and you would expect it to be searchable in the same way that a pdf document is for example. But.. and its a big but, the Google search engine is parsing and understanding the geographical data within the KML and returning relevant results geographically in additional to all the every clever page rank stuff.

KML Google search

So if I chose to publish the KML file of my evening walk around Teddington on my web-site.., The Google spiders would find it and parse the content noting from the description tags that it is about teddington, but would also get the extents of the GPS track from the linestring co-ordinates.

Now anybody searching for content on Teddington would find the file and its content either from the term teddington, or if using Google Earth from it’s actual location encoded as geographic co-ordinates.

Ok now move beyond a simple walking track to a KML with a linked shapefile, or network link to an enterprise spatial database of agricultural information. The mechanism described would search and find this content just as well !

As Michael Jones points out in the excellent Directions interview, Google Earth and I guess potentially tools that understand KML like ArcGIS Explorer become browsers of Geographic content in the same way Firefox or Safari are browsers of document based content.

What does these mean for the GI industry – I think this is really important !!

To develop infrastructures of Geographic information (SDI’s) we are doing the “right thing” working hard on metadata standards, and discovery portals but it is taking a long time and may need a revolution in semantic techniques to actually work using even quite broad controlled vocabularies of terms.

But hang on… the rest of the web did not wait to develop metadata standards for page content, instead it could be argued they took the “dirty” route and chucked massive computing power and very clever search algorithms to solve the problem with great success – To Google is now mainstream language.

With INSPIRE now real, it’s interesting to think, is the solution to a practical and cheap to implement SDI, publishing KML files and a simple search box ?

Wake up everybody !!!

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