Here and There - a horizonless projection in Manhattan - the work of Schulze & Webb, a creative design agency based in London.

Over the last nine months the POI task force have blogged and discussed pertinent issues openly, ran a competition (Show Us a Betterway) to engage with the public and subsequently canvassed opinion from entrants, and they’ve also spoken with several organisations in related industries. A marked contrast to the ‘we know better’ approach taken by the GI Panel and their Place Matters report, and the work of the Shareholder Executive in their role assessing the suitability of Trading Funds.

Hopefully - it would make sense - the findings of the POI taskforce feed into the review of trading funds and OS business model by the Shareholder Executive? I guess we’ll have to wait for the budget to see if it’s a case of ‘joined up government’, or left-arm right-arm. The POI task force report, in its current form, gives the Shareholder Executive a clear alternative to an ‘off the shelf’ Ordnance Survey privatisation.

Given the potential impact this interest from the cabinet office could have on the UK GI Industry, I’m surprised at the lack of discussion among stakeholders? The AGI have just posted a response to the UK Location Strategy…it would be interesting to learn of their input into the work of the cabinet office and Shareholder Executive, or their take on the draft report from the Power Of Information task force?

A demo has been developed by Soul Solutions here.

For some background on the history of DeepZoom, the underpinning technology, TED have a video:

John McKerrell has been posting recently on his experience developing an iPhone application for the ‘Free The Postcode‘ project - the project aims to build a free collection of UK postcodes (why?).

Interestingly, I found John’s application surfing the application store on my iTouch; it’s a smart move by Apple to put such consideration into providing a market place and distribution channel for application developers. John has shared the download stat’s for his FreeThePostcode app…a staggering 3000 downloads in just a couple of months - for an application that targets a niche audience - all very impressive.

Matthew Somerville has also built a similar iPhone application for FixMyStreet.

A novel approach has been taken to resolve this and similar problems using Flickr’s 90 million geotagged photographs: The Shape of Alpha.

A handy demonstration of the API has been developed by Tom Talyor. A good example of the power of crowd sourced datasets.

Parliament? An MP? The Cabinet Office? The Shareholder Executive? No, read it here first…

The Sunday Times : Treasury in state-owned assets sell-off

Earlier in the summer Ed Parsons noted the recruitment of a GIS analyst for the Obama campaign…

On the campaign trial John McCain struggled with the Iraq-Pakistan border…

A slip of tongue, or a clue to future foreign policy? Kevin Burke has noted similar geography hiccups from Barack Obama.

Of course long before November 4th, geography and GIS are at work carving the outcome of the election, the folks over at WhyTuesday have posted a clip to YouTube raising awareness of ReDistricting and the dark art of Gerrymandering…

I often work on the assumption that location adds value to an application, so it was intriguing to discover that a greater percentage of location aware applications are given away for free (40%), in comparison to the larger pool of iPhone applications, of which only a quarter are given away, and the remainder are sold.

Her book ‘Envelopes: A Puzzling Journey Through the Royal Mail‘ is on sale shortly.

Google have acquired a new JavaScript engine (V8) written from the ground up to work more efficiently with websites that have large amounts of JavaScript rather than the little snippets of JavaScript which was typical of websites developed when JavaScript was first integrated into Netscape Navigator in the mid 1990s.

Typically JavaScript engines use a dictionary-like data structure as storage for object properties - each property access requires a dynamic lookup to resolve the property’s location in memory. V8 works differently…the first time V8 encounters an object it interprets how the object would be represented as a class, creating a hidden class, which means the next time the object is encountered, its properties can be accessed from memory without the time consuming dynamic look up.

Google give a far more comprehensive introduction to this approach in their documentation of V8, conveniently they use the example of an object common to all GIS developers…a Point.

So What?

The novel approach taken by the V8 JavaScript engine, presents a new opportunity for GIS web developers to work with Points, Lines and Polygons on the web client instead of the web server as is typical of a web based GIS. Using JavaScript in the web browser removes the need for lengthy round trips to the Server, which will make for faster web mapping applications.

Here and now, this will allow web mapping API developers to work with more markers, the typical 100 marker limit of Google Maps applications (and similar web mapping API’s) - is no more; Mike Williams and his team have reported working with as many as 2000 markers when using Google Maps within Chrome.

Chrome isn’t the only web browser to recognize the importance of working with JavaScript heavy web sites, for example, much work is being done on a new JavaScript engine for Firefox. Perhaps in the future, as this approach gains support, spatial analysis functionality can move from the server to the client, which would make for a more engaging web mapping experience?

If anyone is looking for a dissertation project, or has time of their hands, it would be interesting to see the outcome of taking some topological operators (e.g. Java Topology Suite), Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and GWT for Google Maps, all served up with Google Chrome?