So another GeoCommunity has been and gone, the format has evolved, the new venue at Nottingham is a big improvement and I have to admit to a slight sense of paternal pride that successive conference teams bring fresh energy and ideas. This was my second year as a plain participant, well a presenter participant rather than an organiser or conference chair – no responsibilities, no worries, just the opportunity to sit back and enjoy which I certainly did.
Thanks to http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelingman/
Despite the cuts in the public sector and the pressures on the commercial participants, attendance held up very well and the mood of the delegates seemed to be pretty positive. About 450 delegates were here to talk geo, meet old friends and make new ones (hiya @markiliffe) learn stuff and enjoy parties, soapboxes, quizzes and of course the twitter backchannel.
Day one opened with a changed pair of plenary speakers as both of the advertised candidates had to drop out at short notice and what a great pair of standins we got, no second besters here! Cheryl Miller (on behalf of Sir Ian Magee, Chair of the GI Group) gave a confident and spirited presentation on the role of the GI panel in representing government as the customer of the PSMA in its relationship with Ordnance Survey. There was an almost audible gasp when the phrase “hold Ordnance Survey to account” appeared on a slide and the backchannel went into feverish overload with mental images of two geodames slugging it out.
Next up was Jamie Justham of Dotted Eyes who was talking about the creation of the new parliamentary constituency by the Boundary Commission. I was surprised that the team had chosen this for a plenary, I thought it was going to be a dry and rather geeky topic. Wrong, wrong, wrong! Jamie Justham’s almost schoolboy like enthusiasm for his subject combined with his almost encyclopaedic knowledge made this presentation absolutely rivetting. If Jamie ever gives up geo he could replace Peter Snow and the Swingometer. Dotted Eyes have released a dataset of the proposed boundaries as OpenData for anyone who wants to investigate and contribute to the consultation, well done guys.
The final keynote from Amanda Turner of ESRI UK (one of the Platinum Sponsors) was an interesting review of the challenges facing our community from a newcomer’s perspective. When she questioned the complex and varied language that we use to describe what we do (GIS, Geography, Location, Spatial, GI) I think many agreed with her.
A quick mention of the food at the East Midlands Conference Centre which was exceptionally good and a massive improvement on the old venue. Culinary delights at a geoconference – unheard of.
Collect all 6 stickers and win a prize
For a day and a half I had been stickering everything that moved in a guerilla marketing campaign for the launch of the OSM-GB project that I have been working on with CGS at Nottingham and 1Spatial. This was to ensure that I had a full room for my session on “How authoritative can the crowd be?” which mused on what constitutes authority in geodata and what might be done to increase trust and confidence in OSM to encourage public sector to use OSM, become contributors helping to increase coverage and attribution and identify use cases for an alternative (not a replacement) to other base maps. You can read my paper on the OSM-GB blog and the slide deck is here.
The response was very encouraging and you will be hearing more from me about this as we get our researcher in place and start.
I also did a soapbox that gave a quick preview of the project, slides are here if you want them. Day one finished with a superb presentation by Mark Iliffe, a PhD student at UoN who looks to have a great future. Mark talked about mapping in the slums of Africa, it was a massive reality check for many of the audience, he was immensely quotable and my favourite was describing toilet trenches as “Open Defecation Areas with tag=’land use’ value=’shit’”. Not surprisingly he got one of the biggest rounds of applause at the end of it and subsequently won the delegates vote and award for the best paper at the conference.
The Soapbox has become an established feature at the end of day 1 of GeoCommunity. It is a combination of georant and geostandup comedy in 5 minute blurts to an autotimed slide deck. Not easy at the best of times but when the beer is flowing (courtesy of Star Apic) and the audience are barracking and throwing virtual rotten tomatoes via twitter this is a tough place to be. Not satisfied with standing up for OSM-GB I managed to be persuaded by Ken Field (who is now based at ESRI in California) to do a second transatlantic soapbox where he prepared the soapbox and I did the chat bit (unseen!). Stupid? Yes, but persuading Gary Gale to join me in a chaotic double act was the only smart thing I can claim about this fiasco. You can judge for yourself with a warning about the occasional profanity for those of a sensitive disposition.
Thanks to Ken for the slide deck and a great idea and a big thanks to Gary for standing up with me on this. The undoubted champion of this year’s soapbox following in the footsteps of previous winners Ian Painter and Thierry Gregorius was Mike Saunt of Astun Technology debunking some of the myths of Open Source Geo with a great surprise about 90 seconds into the video.
I particularly like the concept of the “software tax” I bet that Ian painter and others will be back soon to respond to Mike’s thoughts. I think he is spot on.
The least said about the evening’s festivities is probably the better, more food, a free bar, scalextric, a surfboard thing to fall off, loads of new people to meet and quite a bit of whisky.
24 hours later I am starting to feel the strain, so this will be Part 1 and some thoughts on the second day’s speakers and the overall event will follow in a couple of days (some proper work to be done tomorrow)
“(a) the agencies and data to be included in the Public Data Corporation, (b) how the data will be made available, (c) what the licensing terms will be for the data and (d) who will oversee and regulate the corporation”
If they can announce all of that in the autumn, I will be surprised to say the least.
Posted: July 12th, 2011 | Author:steven | Filed under:Uncategorized | Comments Off
Way to go Egypt! Thanks to cactusbones http://www.flickr.com/photos/cactusbones/
So what’s that title about? A summer season post, stretching metaphors and rambling a bit.
It occurs to me that there have been some quantum shifts in the international and national political spheres this year. The common theme is that there came a point when popular orthodoxy and acceptance of the status quo was overturned by a relatively small event with unforeseen consequences.
In the week when the Murdoch dynasty relinquished at least a bit of its stranglehold on British media and politics, one can but wonder whether there is a parallel in the geo world.
So what would be the News of the World moment that might tip the scales in the geo world? Are the dominant players in our industry whether in software or data comparable to the characters of my title and about to be toppled by a combination of the crowd, open data and open source? Or has it already happened?
Posted: May 9th, 2011 | Author:steven | Filed under:Uncategorized | Comments Off
Thanks to bonkiss http://www.flickr.com/photos/bonkiss/
There has been quite a lot of fuss over the last week about the discovery that Apple apparently store a wadge of location data on your iPhone (actually it isn’t your locations but the wifi spots you have been close to and Apple never meant to store it all anyway, or so they say). I think the discovery turned out to be a bit of a non issue but it did highlight how people are growing more sensitive to the issues of privacy and that they consider their location history to be potentially something they don’t want to share.
Compared to the sharing of location data on a mobile device the amount of information that we give up when we browse the web is colossal. I have been plagued recently by popunders from the likes of Groupon, horrible spawning windows that you don’t even see but which clog up the works and which escape my popup blocker. Someone recommended a Firefox plugin called NoScript which prevents scripts executing without your explicit approval, the results are quite amazing. On almost every page that I visit there are multiple scripts running in the background, I don’t know what they are doing or whether they are in any way invasive but it seems in most cases declining to enable them does not appear to in any way limit the page I am viewing. I guess a lot of them are adserving services and other trackers, they probably don’t do much harm and may well be some of the juice that keeps a free internet working.
The question for me is whether these services need to make themselves more explicit to the people they are tracking or whatever they are doing. If you want to find out what is going on behind the dark door of that web site and you use Firefox give NoScript a try, you can always switch it off if you are comfortable with all those background scripts. I will be keeping it running for a while.
BTW: There are 2 scripts running on this page, Google Analytics (provides usage stats) and the Kontactr which allows you to mail me without the need for me to disclose my email address to the whole world.
When I was asked to give a lecture in the GI Frontiers series at Nottingham University I thought it would be easy to pull something together quite quickly, so I asked what would you like me to cover and Jeremy said “how about a history of web mapping?” No probs I thought. Well it turned out that this was a bigger task than I had anticipated but it was massively rewarding and I learnt a lot.
The lecture turned out to be a work in progress because I gathered so much material from interviews and other research that I ran out of time to fully analyse it. There are also several areas that I know need further research to fill in detail and I didn’t get to look at the evolution of mobile. I am going to pause and digest the stuff that I have found before deciding how to move forward with this history (offers of sponsorship, publishing etc would be welcome).
You can run through the slide deck which is annotated with my speaker notes here
You can also view my mindmap which has a load of my interview notes, links to interesting resources and stuff. If you want to suggest stuff that I have missed or add some stuff leave a comment below and I will add.
Thanks go to Ed Parsons, Antony Pegg, Audrey Mandela, Sean Phelan, Tyler Mitchell, Charles Kennelly, Dave McIllhagga, Muki Haklay and Tom Myers for their time and insight.
Reinventing the wheel. Thanks to conskeptical http://www.flickr.com/photos/conskeptical/
Maybe it’s an age thing or a touch of deja vue but a blog post from my friend Andrew Turner (hope he is still a friend after this post) at Fortius One prompted a wry smile. The post announced the launch of “Acetate for better thematic mapping”
Acetate allows you (someone who is creating a thematic map on GeoCommons) to separate place names, road labels and roads into layers rather than one raster basemap. You can then set the order of the layers including your thematic layer for better clarity and communication. This example shows how it works (it doesn’t squeeze into these small columns very well but you should get the idea by opening and closing the Layer Control or look at a full size version here)
Hmmm, a “Layer Control” remember those things ESRI and MapInfo users from the last century? I think my old company GDC even had one of those in a browser based application with thematic maps and all of that paleo guff in 2001. It seems that some of that old stuff might be coming back into fashion (which can’t be bad for GeoDaddy’s and Field Marshalls like me).
That said, Acetate addresses a real problem with today’s flood of data and the ease of creating interactive maps, as Andrew says
Cartography has a long history in guiding proper design of maps so that data is interwoven with place – something that we’ve lost with our digital maps and numerous layers on top of generic and ubiquitous basemaps. Acetate is meant to address this by providing you with the tools to combine your data with muted but useful basemap information.
It is great to see cartography being discussed by a cutting edge mapping business like Fortius and even better that they are making some of their Acetate code available as Open Source. Deserves a big respect
And if this gets you thinking about cartography and visualising data then you might be interested in an event that I am running on behalf of the AGI in early April called Every Map Tells A Story (with apologies to Rod Stewart for those of you who get the reference). More details will be available soon but places are quite limited so watch here or on the AGI site for more details soon.
Today Francis Maude announced that the government will be forming the much trailored Public Data Corporation or PDC.
Free and Open data could be on its way thank to PDC. Image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/daveboudreau/
At this point there is not much publicly available info apart from this statement of intent.
“By bringing valuable Government data together, governed by a consistent set of principles around data collection, maintenance, production and charging, the Government can share best practice, drive efficiencies and create innovative public services for citizens and businesses. The Public Data Corporation will also provide real value for the taxpayer”
There is loads of other good stuff in the announcement about innovation and openness.
“.. it will open up opportunities for innovative developers, businesses and members of the public to generate social and economic growth through the use of data”
Not sure how opening up data etc gels with the idea of attracting external investment but no doubt all will become clear as plans develop. Apparently government has not yet decided which data empires within public ownership will be transferred into the PDC, a review is underway. I imagine their will be quite a lot of debate and negotiation behind the scenes and we on the outside will have loads of fun speculating about who is in and out and on what terms. It will be like months of January transfer window speculation (a football analogy for anyone who is puzzled).
I am increasingly of the view that the best way to exploit government data would be to put it into a big bucket marked “free” and leave it to the innovators (economic and social) to work out what to do with it. But I suppose if you are the Shareholder Executive or the Chancellor and you have placed values on these businesses in the national balance sheet you might be less than happy to just turn them into a revenueless cost centre. So it is probably unlikely that all of that data will become free within PDC.
If we have to be measured in our asks of the PDC, my personal ask would be to free up PAF. I am sure the “centre of excellence” could come up with some more efficient ways of maintaining the dataset and it probably ranks near the top of geo folks remaining requests now that we have OS OpenData. This is a bit Oliverlike “Please Sir, can I have some more?”
I wonder whether Francis Maude was thinking about Royal Mail and PAF when he said
“At present many state agencies face a conflict between maximising revenues from the sale of data and making the data freely available to be exploited for social and economic gain. Creating the PDC will enable the conflicts at the least to be managed consistently with a view to opening up access, and at best to be eliminated.”
We have been waiting a long time to see a resolution of the Address Wars between OS, NLPG/IA and RM (Royal Mail) and rumours had been all over the place as to what the outcome would be.
Thanks to unloveablesteve
It seems almost unarguable that there should be a single definitive address gazetteer for use in the public and private sectors and much of the debate in the Free Our Data campaign has been about the chaotic internal market within the public sector for address data with OS, LG and RM all claiming intellectual property in an address. In the FAQ issued with the various press releases reference is made to the CLG consultation:
The Ordnance Survey consultation run by the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) in December 2009 highlighted the recommendations of the Power of Information Taskforce and the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee to create a freely-available single definitive address and postcode database for the UK (my italics). It sought views on the proposal for a single national address register and 43% of respondents provided comments, the large majority supporting the proposal.
The creation of GeoPlace, in response to this strong market demand, will:
replace the need for two public bodies to produce two similar products, leading to direct public cost savings arising from the de-duplication of work;
create a product that meets the needs of Government – central and local;
lead to the more efficient transfer of address data within Government. This will, in turn, lead to improved decision-making and delivery of public services;
and provide the private sector with a single source of national spatial address information.
As Bob Barr suggests in his letter to the Shareholder Executive GeoPlace will not create the freely available address database that the CLG consultation envisaged (at least not for the private and third sectors or for developers using government open data) and the silence of RM suggests that their exploitation of the PAF may continue.
It is puzzling that Local Government and OS still want to create a commercial market for private sector usage of address data, it just doesn’t chime with the principals and aspirations of all that has been achieved with open data in the last year. It is also surprising that this government is willing to create another state monopoly. That said, there must be costs of maintaining the NAG and government probably needs to defray them somehow. Bob Barr has long advocated a small charge for every change to the address database, perhaps that is an alternative to charging business and the third sector for address data.
A while back an “enterprise license” for AddressPoint was close to £100k, I am not sure what price levels are being proposed for the NAG. It will be interesting to see what OFT says about this newly formed monopoly. What controls, if any, will be imposed on pricing?
When we play Monopoly at home there are often some interesting tactical alliances amongst the family, usually someone ends up complaining that it isn’t fair. I wonder whether this will be an addressing version of our family Monopoly games?
I have been at the 1Spatial user conference at Homerton College in Cambridge today. Several people commented on the difficulty that they had in finding the conference centre on Google Maps which matched my own experience. Search on Google for Homerton College and you will get directed to the centre of the Addenbrookes Hospital complex famous for heart transplants but not to my knowledge a conference venue.
Google Maps search for Homerton College
The “A” marker is what the search returns while the green arrow is the location returned by Google for a search on the postcode CB2 8PH which is what the conference web site quotes and which turns out to be correct. But that is a bit confusing as there is no Homerton College at the location of the green arrow (if you look very carefully you might see a slight shading that could represent a building but definitely no attribution and certainly not the detail of Addenbrooke’s. Part of the problem is that somehow Google have the wrong postcode recorded for the college. No wonder people searching on Google were a bit confused, at least one was last heard of still driving around the hospital.
I am not in any way criticising Google, the fault, if any, is with their data supplier Tele Atlas.Homerton is not exactly a new build, it has been on the current site since 1894 so one would have thought that the same vehicles that drove round the Addenbrooke’s site could have nipped a few hundred yards up the road and recorded Homerton or at least put some carto text on the map if they were unable to capture all of the detail.
You can guess where this goes next. I looked up Homerton College on OpenStreetMap and wonder of wonders
Beautiful isn’t it? I thought so and when I showed it to one of the people complaining about Google/TA they were impressed but asked “why would anyone do that for nothing?” Well that’s another story but thanks to ito World you can see who mapped Homerton College and when here.
Now Homerton College Cambridge is not the whole of the UK let alone the world. Perhaps the demographics of a university town mean that it will have a strong team of active mappers. But it does prompt some questions about completeness, detail etc.
