There is no doubt that the postcode is off massive value for building local websites and all things Geo in the UK, as it is key to geocoding many other datasets.

In parallel to the more public debate about OS mapping data, you could argue that making the postcode freely available would have a much greater impact as it’s potential use is more widespread than mapping.

The problem is the Post Office recognise its value and change extortionate fess for people to use it, especially online.

Lets hope this site does not go the way of it’s namesake, the real Ernest Marples escaped to Monaco pursued by the Inland Revenue and Scotland Yard !

I’m speaking next week at the Location and Timing Forum who are holding a special meeting on the informed traveller, in other words providing contextual services to travellers.

Next week the meeting is at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, so I won’t really be needing much in the way of contextual services to get me there ..

But in all seriousness I have become to rely at least on the mobile mapping services on both my Android and iPhone to get me to meetings, where once I might have printed off a map from a web mapping service, or in the more distant past used a street atlas, I now just use my phone.

This is of course the most obvious and simple application, the real innovation will come when in addition to location the other context clues about the individual traveller such as time and history are also used in applications.

Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.

Stata Center MIT

Very much business as usual for this important standards making body, but on the first day of the meeting there was a one day summit on the specific issue of Digital Rights Management as it relates to Geospatial data and services.

Before you all run for the exit, shouting “look at the music industry..” the management of rights to information is a topic far greater in scope than copy protection, and is of particular relevance today for  the Geospatial industry.

Adena who was at the meeting has provided a good summary in Directions Magazine, my overall impression is that at last the focus is moving on to the problems which need solving, and that solving them is not really an issue of technology.

As far as I am concerned there is a clear work-flow component to rights management around geospatial data, which it is useful to work through.

Firstly you must want to share your geospatial information, an obvious point but the motivation to share and how strong that motivation is drives all the remaining choices around management of rights of others to access and use your data.

It you really want the widest distribution of your information possible with no “strings attached” there you put your information into the public domain as is the case with federally funded datasets in the USA. Putting geospatial data into the public domain means you have no control whatsoever as to how the data might be used, by whom and under what commercial arrangement.

Outside of the US government very little geospatial data is put into the public domain, instead some form of license is usually established, which provides the user of the data with a set of rights to use the data with some restrictions.

The creation of licenses for information on the web has been hugely simplified by the great people at Creative Commons, who have developed their CC licenses which are simple and offer the type of control over how information is used that meets most peoples needs online.

However the series of CC licenses does not really meet the requirements of expressing rights to a database, which by its nature is not a creative work but a collection of facts. This is one of the reasons the OpenStreetMap Foundation seems to be moving away from the current CC license.

The development of Generic licenses for geospatial data or any database for that matter is relatively immature, as I understand it OpenStreetMap is moving towards adopting the new ODbL license. At different approach is taken by Creative Science an organisation aiming to follow the example of the CC movement but for databases who have come up with the cc0 (CC Zero) license, a license for database which is a formal express of public domain like rights.

Commercial organisations have developed their own licenses that meet their own specific needs such as the Google Map Maker Data license.

This remains a complex and little understood area in the community, with organisations wanting to restrict rights to demand attributions, force third parties to license derived information in the same way, restrict use to non commercial uses etc, and trying to do so without much consistency.

The focus of the DRM activities at the OGC have largely skipped these issues instead concentrating on technical means to encode and transfer licenses using technologies like GeoXACML .

This is all very good, and will at some point in the future be needed, however the point I made at the summit this week is that we are perhaps putting the cart before the horses here, until we can get simpler and more robust licenses to protect geospatial data, there is little point in developing the services that may sit around them.

We may also have to accept that for these licenses to be successful they need to be simple, and may not offer as much fine grained control over rights to databases as some database owners might like.

Kudos to Graham my old friend at the OS for organising the meeting which attracted many from outside the OGC community and provided a great platform to debate the issue.

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

Terminal 5 (click for full size)

Many of the sessions investigated in depth, progress to date across the many local, regional and global efforts to develop SDI’s, other focused on the building blocks of data standards and interoperability, metadata, portal design and legal/policy decisions.

I sensed, as I’m sure many others did, the missing perspective of the actual intended users of these SDI’s; who represented the users and consumers of these complex systems? who was providing the use cases, as to what sort of information was actually needed?  and how would people like to access SDI’s and what might they want to do with the information.

The citizen as a potential user of SDI’s was almost completely ignored.

In my presentation I made the point that there is also a lack of emphasis on the development of the very necessary network and storage infrastructure needed to allow distributed users to find, access and use spatial data across the web, and made the offer than Google and I’m sure the other geoweb companies would be happy to host data on behalf of public sector bodies.

SDI people like the SD but ignore the I !

This was developed into a useful metaphor by someone in the audience, when I likened this type of infrastructure to domestic plumbing, vital but often invisible until it breaks.

It seems that at the moment much of the industries emphasis is on producing the best quality water that is possible ,while at the same time developing and agreeing on a method to illustrate how pure and clear the water is. To be fair we may also now be discussing the size and shape of bottles we might use to store our water and the colour and design of the labels we will put on the bottles.

As to how we might distribute the water efficiently, there is still little discussion beyond the vague idea that it will obviously need some pipes, valves and taps of a standardised size..

This is all good stuff, but if you ask my plumber Jez, to put in a plumbing system into your house, he will ask you some very pertinent questions first..

He will ask, how many bathrooms will the house have and where are their situated, do you need radiators or under floor heating, are you sure you want a power shower on the top floor of your house,  do you need to run a garden hose.

These are, if  your are following the metaphor, the applications that will use the SDI..

What Jez would not do is just go ahead and lay 150m of  Hep2o 22mm water pipes around your house, install a Taco circulating pump, and connect all to a tanker full of Evian water outside your house, and then leave you without fitting any fixtures!

OK so this metaphor is a little facetious, but it can be extended, how about connecting my and my neighbours houses plumbing together to create a regional SDI… the point is that an infrastructure developed in isolation to it use runs the major risk of not meeting the users needs.

My second point and this is an important one also, is that we are beginning to see many applications outside of the SDI community really adopt the “cloud computing” model, where in addition to local repositories of data used to build and maintain data, data itself is published to the cloud and makes use of the robust and scaleable infrastructure that commercial operators like Amazon and Google and even ESRI are making available.

This type of architecture is perfect for deploying SDI’s as it has the potential to scale with need, Information is my design easy to find and share, and of course it’s cheap !

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

Footnote : Still unsure of what an SDI is, read the SDI cookbook

On your trike

I have voted for Stonehenge myself, and of course I am not going to try and influence your decision, but just think of our poor cyclist (not me !!) who may have to cycle round Loch Ness or the Pembrokeshire Coast.

Written and submitted from NH Atlanta Hotel, using the swisscom 802.11 network.

I had the pleasure last week of attending the International Conference of SPOT Image the Toulouse based company that launched SPOT 1 back then and who are now operating a constellation of SPOT satellites that provide imagery to many familiar names including Google.

I had been asked to make a couple of presentations and take part in a round table debate, but had the pleasure to sit back and watch as Jeff from the SPOT Image web team demoed their new online services using Google Earth.

Over the next five years SPOT Image will launch another 4 remote sensing satellites, and amazingly ambitious goal, Pleiades I and II will be 0.5m highly agile satellites similar in capability to GeoEye and WorldView and SPOT 6 & 7 will be mission continuity satellites for the current SPOT constellation.

That is a great demonstration that in Europe there is a very active Earth Observation industry that is leading the world.

Written and submitted from NH Atlanta Hotel, using the swisscom 802.11 network.

The iPhone now joins the two Android powered HTC phones in having a high quality networked assisted GPS, a digital compass and of course ubiquitous network access, the necessary building blocks for a phone to access information based on its location.

Accuterra Mobile

We can expect to see more applications that use these capabilities to present information is truly innovative ways like wikitude and sky map, and of course applications which put the phones location core to their functionality, the ZipCar app demoed at WWDC is a great example of this, and you can imagine a range of security or e-commerce application which may be enabled by location in this way.

Imagine your credit card transaction verified in part by the fact you are in the same location as the vendor..

At the same time more traditional mapping users are served by applications like
AccuTerra Mobile which although one of many trail tracking applications aimed a walkers, is generating a buzz because of its high quality topographic mapping data.

This is an obvious market that in the UK we could expect to see an Ordnance Survey partner develop a similar application, indeed it will be a test of the new innovation friendly strategy of the OS to see if a similar application is developed in the UK.

After many false dawns Location based applications are really now with us, and so very accessible, with the new Mapkit framework in iPhone OS 3.0 and similar functionality on Android developing simple mapping based apps has never been more straightforward and crucially with integrated  Application Stores easy to reach potential customers.

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

Congratulations to Simon, Tony and Emma on a great event.

Written and submitted from the SPOT Image User Conference, Toulouse.

Being-Digital is a “conference without PowerPoint’s”, instead there are round-tables of industry experts discussing hot topics and short demos. The focus is much more on debate and discussion; both via traditional questions from the room and via SMS and Twitter feedback (Hashtag is #bde). 

This level of interaction is important and in not uncommon in broader web conferences especially those accross the pond, but it’s less common in the UK.

Hopefully the reinvigorated AGI GeoCommunity conference with its new Geoweb stream, will bring some of this different approach to the world of GI conferences.

Written and submitted from Teddington Swimming pool, using my home 3 UMTS modem.

It is still early days for UKMap, which although in many ways similar to OS Mastermap is a radical departure from the OS offering.

Unlike the OS which must offer national coverage, The GeoInformation Group will focus on mapping the top 500 urban areas in the UK where there is most economic activity and hence where most change takes place. This is a sound economic move reflecting the realities of the potential market.

London will be the first city complete when UKMap is released in September, which will be available in a wide range on industry standard data formats.

Key for many potential users will be more flexible licensing terms than offered by the OS, in particular a clear definition of derived data rights.

Personally I wish all the best to Seppe and Alun, my partners in crime is setting up the GIS Degree at Kingston all those years ago, competition is always a good thing for consumers and at last the OS monopoly faces a challenge.

Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.

For those of you like myself, not invited to the OS New Strategy Event, the OS have posted a video summary on YouTube. That in itself is progress of course ..

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

From the FAQ of the Obama administrations new website data.gov launched today..

“What are some resources for viewing geospatial datasets?

The geospatial datasets available on Data.gov are provided in up to three open file formats: Keyhole Markup Language (KML), Compressed Keyhole Markup Language (KMZ) and ESRI Shapefile. These datasets are all viewable in many commercial and freely available applications. More information about Geographic Information System (GIS) software can be found by doing a web search.”

It does not need to more complex than this for the citizens of the US to benefit, there are many individuals and organisations both commercial and non-commercial who can now build on this.

Written and submitted from the BA Lounge, San Francisco Airport.

Last week the OS launched their Geovation website, and have opened up somewhat their OpenSpace API – all very positive..  

But then this morning comes news that Gavin Brocks kml file which allowed OpenSpace tiles to be displayed by any application that understands kml including Google Earth has been blocked by the OS for … well I’m not sure actually read Gavins blog post on the subject for the details.

I hope this is a case of one part of the organisation not realising the world has changed, but then again maybe it’s too early to tell. As someone who tried to get the OS to take innovation more seriously during my time there, I am just very disappointed for Gavin, if not surprised.

UPDATE  19/5 : The OS has reversed its decision, see Gavin’s blog for details

Written and submitted from the Google Offices, Mountain View California.

Stresa, and a view of Lake Maggiore (click to enlarge)

This is an interesting development because it is an area where there is little case law despite the fact that the reuse of public sector information as a policy in Europe has been established for a number of years.

The key element to this decision was that is was not appropriate for the City to enforce expensive licensing on a database which was created by them to carry out their core activities.

Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.

For most of its history the RGS has sponsored expeditions increasingly scientific in nature to explore the planet, and of course there is still much to be discovered by “Field Science”, getting out and making measurements of our every changing environment.

Early this year I had the privilege of meeting Pen Hadow a modern polar explorer who is currently on an expedition to the North Pole making vitally important measurements of the ice thickness. This is very much the model of a modern day expedition, requiring all the skill, expertise and endurance of the past expeditions, while making use of modern technologies such as Google Earth, RSS feeds and YouTube to communicate their progress and findings in almost real time.

To the man in the street, Hadow and the  Catlin Arctic Survey Expedition really encapsulates what Geography is..

Catlin Arctic Survey

During the 1990’s the RGS shifted it focus towards Academic Geography, and in 1995 merged with the Institute of British Geographers, and since then it’s focus both in terms of direction and funding has been to support the academic study of geography in Universities and Research Institutes and away from large expeditions.

This shift has upset many, and a group of fellows are now campaigning for a return to “field science”, not replacing totally the support of academic geography, but providing more balance. Their case is presented at the Beagle Campaign website, the campaign rather neatly is named after Darwins expedition which itself was part funded by the RGS.

I must admit I find their case quite compelling, it was field science that many years ago turned me into a Geographer, and I continue to be inspired by the exploits of those who venture into the still many inhospitable parts of the world to make important scientific measurements, and bring make vivid descriptions of our fragile planet.

In the age of Google Earth such exploration becomes even more meaningful, as it and other Internet tools provide a way of quickly disseminating the findings of expeditions in a way that is accessible to all.

I will be voting for resolution which calls on the RGS to return to mounting its own multidisciplinary research projects for the advancement of geographical science and knowledge.

Geography has perhaps a last chance to regain its relevance in the eyes of the general public,  organising high profile expeditions which demonstrate the value of science in the field would be a great way of doing this, in a way that funding desk based research such as “Global change and post-socialist urban identities” does not !

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

It is always refreshing to look at how people other than cartographers choose to represent geospatial information, the image below taken from Terry’s presentation show the Thames Gateway, the area of urban redevelopment east of London, and takes its inspiration from Beck’s Underground map.

Thames Gateway

Beck’s map (or plan ?) is truly iconic and the map of the Thames gateway uses the Circle Line from it both to provide a geographic anchor for the map and to provide relative scale. I always find it amusing to remind people that one of the most famous maps in the world is the product of a graphic designer based on the principles of laying out electrical circuit diagrams.

Becks Tube Map

In my presentation I made the point that we are increasing moving to a time when maps are customised to an individuals needs, and will become task focused delivered on mobile devices and as a result transient. Indeed for many tasks where a map was once needed a location aware application can provide users with the information they need without a map display.

Just step back and think about this one button from the “infamous” National Rail app for the iPhone.

Next Train Home

Press it anywhere in the UK, and it will tell you the time of the next train home, and when you would expect to arrive. As a geospatial professional think about all the functionality and data that is hidden behind this simple button, and the analogue sources of information you would need to have access to to provide the answer.

As a Geographer sometimes it hard to accept, but it is still true, that it is often not about the map !!

Written and submitted from the Google Office, London.

The Acropolis of Athens

A Panorama of the Acropolis, taken on a rushed morning trip during the recent OGC TC Meeting in Athens.

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