As noted here on previous occasions, it is very easy to become fixated on location as the next big thing, and indeed there is much media coverage of the “battle for place” since the introduction of the Facebook places API, however location is still only one of the numerous contextual signals that make a service valuable.

This point was made very real for me on my way home from the officer earlier this week..

I have become a regular user of Borisbikes, the  ”Barclays Cycle Hire Scheme” to give it its official title, which allow registered users to pick up a bike at a local pick up point and drop it off at a destination elsewhere. There happens to be a bike docking station just a hundred metres from the Google Office and another just outside the railway station I use 2 Km away. Perfect…

But as users of the system will know, there are not always bikes available to pick up or more subtly empty docking locations to leave leave your bicycle at your destination. Fortunately Transport of London, the people behind the Borisbikes, have made available a real time feed of docking site status via an API, allowing applications like the Android Cycle Hire Widget to be developed.

So now from the comfort of my desk or where-ever else I may be in London just by looking at my phones home screen I can see if there are any bikes available nearby and then check if I will be able to drop the bike of at my destination. Key to making this happen are of course my location and the real time feed of docking site status;  the where and when.

When I reach the railway station I dock my bike hopefully!!  and then check another app on my phone, this time for the time and platform for the next train to take be home. Again when is clearly important here, but now added to the contextual mix is a personalisation signal in that I have previously stored the station closest to my home in the app.

OK so this is not quite the personal jet-pack we may have hoped was the transport of the future, but making the relevant information available at the relevant time and place really does make a difference !

Written and submitted from the Google Offices, London (51.495N, 0.146W)

A great example of an innovative use of Google Earth Enterprise, as an extension to Local Government GIS use in the UK.

To find the application of Beehives you will just need to watch ..

Written and submitted from the Google Offices, London (51.495N, 0.146W)

Dr Ed : Don’t worry Maps, it just a new way of finding geocoded images contributed by the photographers of the web.

If you have looked at Streetview ( by dragging the pegman) recently outside of the existing areas of coverage you may have noted spots of streetview coverage, this is not the result of a very disorganised group of streetview car drivers, but is a way of exposing other geocoded imagery where it is available.

Although the Google Streetview cars are once again driving the world bringing Street View images to many new countries in the meantime you can find suitably moderated and attributed user contributed images from Panoramio.

The example below is from Karon, the beach resort in Phuket, Thailand which brought back happy memories of my honeymoon, which was contributed by panoramio user bareman

The interesting point to ponder is as more and more geocoded images are published and indexed on the web, at what point if ever in the future will it be possible to replicate the complete coverage of Streetview with user contributed images ?

Both the OS and the Dept. of Communities and Local Government have announced the signing of the new Public Sector Mapping Agreement (PSMA), a sole source long term contract for providing mapping data to all of the public sector. I’m sure this has not gone down very well with other data providers, but that’s another topic I’m sure we will here all about in due course !

My question today is will this new agreement and the supposed more liberal licensing framework allow public sector organisations to publish their data online without restrictions imposed by the OS.

Specifically will the OS now allow local councils to publish their data using Google Maps or potentially add data to OpenStreetMap ?

Well the language is very positive..

“We’re opening the door to a world of government information that will allow the good ideas of ordinary people to become innovative digital solutions that improve public services.” says Local Government Minister Grant Shapps,

Chris Holcroft of the AGI talks about “Breaking down barriers and better enabling data sharing, the PSMA should help the public sector make better and more transparent decisions and allocate its resources more efficiently, saving time and money.”

The key passage from the OS press release is this..

“The new agreement also introduces a new licensing framework that will enable more collaborative working with delivery partners and will allow public sector organisations to re-use the data for core non-commercial public sector activities. It will also enable sharing of the data, and derived data, with other third parties for specific purposes to support delivery of the member’s public sector activity, for example, contractors, schools, ‘third sector’ charities, the public, for all your core, non-commercial, public sector activity.”

So maybe now the debate will move on from what is derived data to what is a “core activity”?

Still this all seems rather positive does it not, the proof of course will come in April next year when the PSMA comes into effect, and yes I’m sorry I know this is all rather confusing for my Australian readers as your PSMA is a whole different thing!

UPDATE : Paul from the OS Press Office has kindly responded on the OS blog, which I have now commented on, I have reproduced my comments below, but I suggest you follow the debate at the OS blog.

“Paul,

Written and submitted from the Boulder Marriott (40.016N, 105.260W)

Last week London finally got its bike hire scheme something that just cries out for a location aware real time application to help users.

So just in time Little Fluffy Toys have released their widget for Android phones that no only tells you where the closest hire point is, but also updates the number of bikes available in real time.

This is neat is so many ways, making use of location – tick, using a government data feed  - tick, crowdsourcing of location status – tick.

Can’t wait to try this out when I get home !

Written and submitted from the Boulder Marriott (40.016N, 105.260W)

That said flash has never been very popular from a web mapping point of view, every since the original Google Maps back in 2005 web mapping has developed by exploiting the cutting edge features of html and javascript.

However from a rich user experience point of view there is much that flash still has to offer..

Last week I spent some time with the people behind findmaps.co.uk, a B2B operation in London who have developed a rich mapping/GIS  SaaS  (“software as a service”) application using flash. The service is a very slick interface to OS mapping in the UK, and offers basic GIS functionality without any of the GIS baggage found in other web based GIS tools.

So Findmaps sits somewhere between arcgisonline and Google/Bing maps, and clearly meets a real market requirement. In particular a key point of pain that is largely successfully hidden from professional users is the almost comically complex OS licensing that has been reduced to a running shopping basket total which is updated each time you view a map.

Yes you read that right for large scale OS data you do pay each time you view the map on screen !

In many ways findmaps may represent what GIS ultimately becomes, the complex GIS we know today will become even more focused on the needs of those relatively few organisations that create data, the professional users in real estate, Land and environmental management who currently use desktop GIS will migrate to SaaS applications like this and everyone else will use web mapping tools.

Not sure the slides will make much sense on their own, but please get in touch if you have any comments.

Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)

UK: Coastline

House of Lords

Written answers and statements, 23 June 2010

Lord Laird (Crossbench)

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is the length of the United Kingdom coastline in miles at (a) low, and (b) high, tide; and what are the lengths of the coastlines of (a) England, (b) Northern Ireland, (c) Scotland, and (d) Wales.

Baroness Hanham (Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, Communities and Local Government; Conservative)

Information provided by Ordnance Survey for Great Britain and by Land and Property Services, an agency of the Department of Finance and Personnel for Northern Ireland, indicates that the lengths of the coastlines at mean high water (MHW) and mean low water (MLW), (mean high water springs [ordinary spring tides] and mean low water springs in Scotland) are:

These coastal lengths include all offshore islands, and land areas which are above MLW.

The precise length of coastlines will vary from time to time due to natural and gradual changes arising from coastal erosion and silt deposition.

Written and submitted from Warsaw Airport (52.177N, 20.974E)

I finally got the chance to watch the Apple WWDC keynote last night in my living room on the Apple TV, now that statement qualifies me as an Apple fanboy in itself.  I have seen many stevenotes over the year, even one in person at a Macworld in New York a few years ago, but his performance at this years WWDC was quite brilliant.

So for anyone who makes presentations what tips can we learn from the master.

1 ) Steve always begins his presentation by setting the context, framing the market for the new product announcement. This he does by quoting some very carefully chosen and very selective statistics..so for example iPhone has 28% US smartphone share, compared to windows at 19% ? and Android at 9%, the next slide however drops Windows and compares mobile browser usage with iPhone having  a massive 58.2% compared to Androids 22.7% – I wonder what happened to all those windows smartphone users ?

2) Steve is the master salesman his description of the iPhone 4 is a work of genius, “a quarter thinner for something you did not think could get any thinner”, the retina display so high resolution your eyes cannot see the pixels anymore – quite brilliant.

3) When things go wrong Steve keeps his cool because he knows his stuff, this keynote will be remembered as the one when the wifi broke. There has been much debate as to why, but the end result was that Steve’s demos did no work very well. Rather than panic Steve unlike many CEO’s was able to diagnose the issue on stage and explain it, and then later on make a joke of it asking people to switch off their own wifi devices so he could continue with the demo.

4) Make people believe something is new by selling it better, so Facetime offers the ability to carry out a 1 to 1 video conference using two iPhones 4′s on wifi, "we have been waiting a long time to make this happen", eh no.. I remember calling my wife over the vodafone 3G network using a pair of different Sony Ericsson phones five years ago. Video calling did not really take off, the technology and the public was not really ready for it.

To make the public ready it needs to be sold not on the basis of technology, which the early vodafone live very much was, but the emotional strength of human communication. Compare the vodafone PR shot here with a still from the Facetime video ..

A lonely businessman away from his baby, stuck in a hotel room –  now that’s a market..

There are two really significant technology advancements that are of note and that may not have got as much attention as facetime or the retina display..

Firstly the iPhone 4 is the first quad band iPhone supporting the 900Mhz HSDPA band used extensively in the UK but not previously supported on iPhones. Wonder why your iPhone 3G coverage was often worse than other smartphones ?

Secondly supplementing the digital compass the 3-axis gyro will allow devlopes o crate much better augmented reality applications, potentially solving many of the pose problems suffered by the current generation of smartphones. In the future who knows maybe some clever software will turn the iPhone into a simple Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) which could allow indoor navigation applications ?

So once again the great snakeoil salesman has got me and I will be taking delivery of an iPhone 4 of thursday as my home phone to sit alongside by Nexus One work phone.

Now which network….

Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)

Produced by MySociety ace Matthew Somerville a really neat demo and another example of the value of releasing government datasets, and in this case an example of an occasion where an API is more useful than the raw data.

Written and submitted from the Google Offices, London (51.495N, 0.146W)

With the release at Google I/O this year of the V3 Maps API and styled maps functionality these tools are becoming more accessible, and one of the early results is a beautiful map produced by Stefan Wehrmeyer in Berlin. His Mapnificent London map uses the styled map API to show London by night, and then with full credit to the famous mapumental map, dynamically displays journey times if you used the extensive London night bus network.

The dynamic aspect makes this map really interesting by simply dragging a time slider bar you are presented with a great deal of information is a clear and simple way, something which would be difficult to achieve with traditional static cartographic techniques.

Hopefully the first of many new dynamic maps..

Written and submitted from the Google Offices, London (51.495N, 0.146W)

Seems, like I have been running around almost constantly for the last month, but tomorrow I have made a little time for myself to brew a pot of coffee sit down and watch all of the Geo Developer presentations on youTube from last months Google I/O conference in San Francisco.

If like me you missed the event this is a great opportunity to catch up with things like the Latitude and Places API, developing mobile apps using the v3 Maps API and of course my favourite the new Styled Maps feature.

Kick back and join me before the football starts !

Well for me it was a strange experience, sitting in the audience at an Ordnance Survey partner event (although Google is not a partner) just a few months after it seems the world fell apart around the directors of the OS – talk about a LOST style flash sideways.

It became clear soon into Vanessa Lawrence’s presentation that the organisation is still recovering from these traumatic events, and that there is not a vision yet for the future of an OS that both produces commercial and free data sets.

OS Lost at Sea ?

There were 3 key aspects to the keynote;

• The release of the free data was as many  suspected  forced upon the OS, and there is still some internal resistance to the whole idea at the top of the organisation.
• The building of the new OS Head Office is going according to plan, although it always seems to rain when Vanessa is onsite !
• The Queen will be opening the new building (Did I say the building was on time)

Key issues for the partner community in terms of complex pricing and licensing models remain, work on solving those has been delayed it appears as a result of all the “free data” nonsense, although a new more simple model is promised in the future.

The big issue of derived data also remains, although to his credit in the Q&A session, Peter ter Haar aimed to clarify things by reading out from his iPad a draft version of what OS view is derived data. This it is promised will also be released soon, but to paraphrase;

Derived data concerns the direct copying and manipulation of features which exist within an OS data product. If new data which does not appear within the OS data is captured with reference to OS data, then this data is inferred, not derived, so it’s OK !

Of course the free OS data has no “derived data” limitations..

I asked for the OS to communicate this on their website as some form of White paper, again we await this with interest.

Of interest clearly to OS partners in addition to pricing and licensing and the future role of OS Ltd, which was only briefly mentioned are products..

Here the OS seems to be making real progress the new VectorMap series is at last demonstrating the capability of the OS to produce products that are fit for purpose for electronic rather than paper mapping, John Carpenter delivered an excellent presentation on these new data products and the philosophy behind them, this truly was a breath of fresh air.

Clearly it has been a difficult year for the OS, the landscape has changed massively and continues to do so, Vanessa hinted that the new government spending cuts have already started to have a impact, perhaps as Thierry is suggesting a reduction in the subsidy promised to deliver free mapping?

More than ever the OS needs a new vision fit for such a radically changing environment, embracing the freemium model which has been imposed on them and establishing their role within a very different UK and global geospatial industry.

The new building deserves a new vision ?

Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)

Last week I attended the Google Zeitgeist event, a kind of mini-TED the highlights of which are in the video. I’m the one with 8 screens of Google Earth goodness,  and after a ride I’m saving up for the Tesla !

Eds law of mashups..

“The map is important, but not as important as the data you are publishing on top of it”

Yes the expensively created, well drafted work of art you have struggled to produce following years of effort, is actually just providing a background or context to the location of pizza restaurants or free car parking places.

You might not like that, but is true !

A number of web mapping companies have over the last few years experimented with a few different colour pallet tile sets, but last week rather buried by the other Google I/O announcements, the latest enhancements to the v3 Google Maps API was announced in the form of  ”Styled Maps“.

Rather than just present a few fixed tile sets, styled maps allow you to dynamically create a map based on a custom colour palette so there is a huge range of possible map styles available to you.

Styled maps may be used to;

• Make the background map less intrusive..
  
• Conform to a website design, A orange map for easyjet ?
• Make some features “invisible”, – remove minor roads for example !

So this is not a full computer cartography tool yet, but these enhancements we meet the needs of many map developers to make their maps unique.

Those in the know will realise this represents a whole new way of rendering maps online, the definition of a “map style” is stored as JSON matching map feature types to styles defined by  hue, lightness, saturation, gamma, inverse_lightness and visibility.

To make life a little easier there is a rather neat web tool to define your styles.

Remember one day, no two Google maps will be the same…

Written and submitted from the Google Offices, London (51.495N, 0.146W)

A week ago today I stood nearly ten miles away from the launch of Space Shuttle Atlantis, on its way to the International Space Station. Despite the distance I “felt” the launch in a number of ways. Unless you have experienced a launch it’s hard to describe the phyiscal impact of such power, shaking the ground, vibrating every molucule around you, imagine a continus clap of thunder lasting for more than a minute is the closest way I can attempt to describe it.

But the launch also effected be emotionally, I felt the same way watching the last three Concordes landing back at Heathrow together when they were retired from service.

As a child growing up in the seventies I expected my adult life to involve jumping on and off supersonic aircraft, perhaps flying to a spaceport somewhere to fly into orbit, instead I got the 8:20 South West Trains Service to Waterloo.

Perhaps it was always science fiction, but as a boy growing up watching Thunderbirds and Tomorrows World, if you had told me that society would develop and then lose supersonic transport and that by 2011 NASA would no longer be able to put Americans into low earth orbit I would not have believed you.

My hypothesis to this rather sad state of affairs for a geek, is that we allowed ourselves to over engineer solutions producing an era of machines that are so complex that economically they are unsustainable.

For example to launch Atlantis required tens of thousands of people to work at facilities all across the United States for four months to service the shuttle following it’s previous mission. This means that each shuttle missions in pure operational expenses costs hundreds of millions of dollars. Concorde was also a “hanger queen” requiring far more maintainance than conventional airliners.

Both Concorde and the Shuttle will not be directly replaced, instead in many ways less capable and simpler systems have and will take their place.

In the field of geospatial technology will we see the same trend ? Complex highly engineered solutions replaced by less capable and simpler systems, there is some evidence to suggest that trend, on the other hand Arc/Info in it’s various forms is only a year younger than the space shuttle programme and looks like it will outlive it with ease…

Is Google to ESRI as Scaled Composites and SpaceX are to NASA? I’m not sure but the old guys can always learn new tricks, while for the new guys there is wisdom to appreciate.

Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)

One of the points I made was that we are on familiar ground, it seems every year since about 2001 has been the “year of location”, so I posed the question – this year “are we there yet?”.

Well clearly a lot has changed in the last ten years, devices are now very powerful, despite what they may think the mobile networks operators are no longer major players (bottlenecks) in the value chain, and with hybrid location technology from the likes of Google and Skyhook location determination is straightforward and ubiquitous .

More than anything else this last point and the fact that location is exposed through simple operating system level functions or via modern browsers means that it is trivial to add location to any application almost for free. This has fuelled the massive interest in bringing location into social applications, from Facebook to Twitter, foursquare to yelp, people are at last central to location based services.

I tried to make the point that actually places only really exist as a reflection of society..

Place = Location (points of interest) + People

As Gary Gale pointed out in another one of his seminal presentations there is still a “lot of stuff” we need to better understand about managing places.

Surprisingly there was little focus on the years “hot topic” of Augmented Reality, other than an inspirational presentation from Claire of Local AR stars Layar.

Overall a very enjoyable conference, in many ways not so different to ten years ago but now with a few clear areas of areas of agreement.

• Location is now mainstream – no really.
• “social” is as an important contextual signal as location.
• There is little money to be made with pure location outside a few niche vertical apps, it’s real value comes from it’s ability to better customise content specific to individual users.

Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)

Without doubt,within Europe, Germany seems to have the greatest concerns with regards to privacy and so far much of the debate has focused on “what you potentially lose” by making information about you or your street public. Jeff counters this with the opposite opposite argument “what you gain” from making knowledge public.

This will remain one of most important web memes of the next few years as it goes to the heart of what has made the web so influential to our lives so far, but also how that may change in the future.

This is nothing less than a battle for the soul of the web.

The open web based on the concept of open access to information, ideas and knowledge is not guaranteed by any means, and we may need to do more than just watch the traditional holders of power in society start to shut down the elements of the internet they feel threatened by.

The appalling Digital Economy Bill passed in the UK is just the one element of this, the move to accesses information through applications and portals only threatens a return to the world of walled gardens we thought we had moved beyond with the closure of AOL and CompuServe, is another.

The danger of regressing to a world where access to  information is again controlled by a powerful few is increasingly real !

Not all OS Maps now free – brilliant.

To better understand how to use similar Google tools and to make sure your website is well placed in organic search results, check out fellow Googler Matt Cutts blog.

Courtesy of last weeks drop of Ordanace Survey Open Data, the Westminster electoral boundaries in Google Earth.

It’s amazing to think that such a key dataset was not easily accessible until so recently. Without doubt this is just the type of data set that the “free our data” movement was calling to be made freely available.

The type of innovation that comes from the increased accessibility of information is well demonstrated by the code point web service developed by Stuart Harrison over the weekend at http://www.uk-postcodes.com/ and documented on the uk-government-data-developers mailing list.

What a difference a week makes !!