Tag: blog

Did a short package with Dutch TV yesterday in Amsterdam talking about the differences between the maps of the great Dutch cartographers of the 17th Century and modern Google Maps.

In some ways there are surprising similarities, both in effect are all about discovery, earlier discoveries of new lands to exploit have been replaced by personal discoveries of places important to the individual a result of yes the democratisation of mapping.   

The 17th century maps of Blaeu et al are currently on display in Amsterdam at an exhibition at the National Maritime Museum, Het Scheepvaartmuseum, which is worth a visit if you get the chance.

http://www.hetscheepvaartmuseum.nl/exhibitions/exhibits%7C40

As a amateur video geek I was impressed to see that even network TV now make use of digital SLRs for video production, not quite the shift mapping is going through from paper to mobile phones but still a significant step from the last generation of big professional video cameras.

Digital video technology has fundamentally changed TV production, I'm sure nobody on the production team of "Een Vandaag " know how to use cine film… I wonder when we will say the same thing about paper maps ?

#blog  

I was able to make a flying visit to the State of the Map US conference yesterday in Washington DC. As usual it had the higher than average GIS conference energy levels, but it felt really different to previous events to me..

Firstly the conference was a step up in terms of the professionalism of organisation, congratulations to the local organising team even if they owe me a T-Shirt !

The real difference I guess compared to SOTM events in Europe was more focus on the opportunities that the map as a dataset provides to other organisations and companies to build additional products and services many of which are commercial.  The large investments made by Map Box and those announced by Digital Globe in developing the ecosystem around OSM are evidence of this..

Perhaps as a result  of this perspective the big topic of the weekend was the ongoing debate around the ODbL licence and it's impact on the use of OSM within third party products.

Is it more than a cliche then to say that the US is more entrepreneurial than Europe ?   

#blog  

We spend about 70% of our lives indoors, a real data capture challenge, as your need a very scalable solution –

ProjectTango may be part of the solution.. 

Early days of course, but there is real potential with this approach, perhaps more than efforts focused on data standards which overlook how the data will be captured..

The project team have 200 prototype dev kits to distribute to Open Source developers working in projects including of course  indoor navigation and mapping.

Visit http://www.google.com/atap/projecttango/ for details

#blog  

Love Maps Engine, a simple Flood risk map based on liberated Environment Agency data, a bit of QGIS hacking and spare half hour.

https://mapsengine.google.com/06793588975440581048-09757940799309423091-4/mapview/?authuser=0

I should do this more often, brings back happy GIS memories
#blog  

A much needed call to action from Alex Singleton, but I don't underestimate how hard this will be to achieve. There remains I'm afraid a cultural view within many Geography Departments against GIS let alone programming and the current generation of students entering higher education have no background in coding from school.   

It's a big challenge, but one I completely support,  programming is becoming established in schools at last, hopefully future geographers will see the development of new tools as the truly creative process it is.

Discoveries in many scientific disciplines are the result of the development of new tools, as Geographers we should not forget this and think about how we can build our new telescopes, the universe of geographic big data needs exploring.

#blog  

A nice article that lifts the lid on all the complexity we try to hid with tools like Google Earth.. and explains why the prime meridian at Greenwich is not the same on your iPhone !#blog

It’s great to finally see this story told so well. It’s a truly uplifting demonstration of just what can happen when access to information changes peoples lives..

So for those days when you ask yourself if what you do in geo matters, just watch this video..

Another example of street view taking you to a place you are not likely to visit, CERN is the largest particle physics laboratory in the world and if you look carefully you might find a Higgs Boson !   #blog