Sounds off

I am a sceptic about sound maps in general because I can’t normally see any significance in the spatial distribution of sound clips or why you would want to search for sound clips by location. I think there may be a real challenge in linking sound and maps in a meaningful way.

Thanks to Mag3737

Among the silliest in my opinion is the UK SoundMap from the British Library. I doubt that much of value will come from allowing anyone to upload any sound clip they wish and associate it with a point on a map.

In contrast Memory Loops clearly has focus and undoubtedly the sound clips are a valuable historical archive.

“With Memory Loops, Munich is creating a virtual memorial for the victims of National Socialism. Michaela Melian’s audio work of art comprises 300 German and 175 English audio tracks which can be found on a map drawn up by the artist …”

The hand drawn map creates an interesting background for the sound clips which are well worth browsing through. I guess if you live in Munich today the locations might add a little relevance but I think these clips would be a chilling record of European history without any map.

Derived Data – simple takes a little longer

The 1st of October, hereafter to be known as Double D Day, will be marked in the annals of the Free Our Data campaign and the those supporting Open Data and the reuse of public sector information and within local and central government and within the world of geogeekery and perhaps even at Google Towers. We now have a Derived Data policy that we can read, understand and most importantly that enables lots of data created by OS licensees to be shared, re-used and published. This may well prove to be a more significant day than Gordon’s Day (the announcement last November that some Ordnance Survey data was going to be made freely available).

Derived Data thanks to 1sock

This is good stuff and the OS should be complemented for presenting the policy in a fairly simple to understand manner. Basically if

• you create the data independently of OS mapping (by GPS for example) the data is yours to do with as you wish
• you infer it from OS base mapping but do not capture it from any existing features or attributes it is “free to use”
• data created must be new and not be a proxy for existing features within an OS map.

There are some examples given to illustrate different scenarios.

So once you have created your free to use data OS say

‘… we grant you a non-exclusive, royalty free, perpetual licence to use and sub-license Intellectual Property Rights in Free to Use Data.’

Royalty free means it’s free for you to use without charge.

Perpetual licence means that you can continue to use the data you have created for ever. You don’t require an ongoing licence for the Ordnance Survey dataset from which you inferred the data (unless you intend to use it to display your data).

Sub-license means that you can make the data you have created available to others. You can do so on a commercial basis too if you wish.

‘The licence granted does not entitle you or your sub-licensees to re-create, reproduce or represent any Feature Attribution or any Feature in any Topographic Dataset (or any substitution of such Feature Attribution or Feature).’

That pretty much covers what most people will want to do.

Now of course there will be some scenarios that will still not be met by these new licenses and there will inevitably some grey areas in interpreting the guidelines but we are a long way from the situation we used to be where you could ask different people and get different opinions at least one of which would be no. This is definitely progress and the simplicity of the underlying principles should help to get widespread understanding and usage.

And that is a nice way to finish the week.

Anonymous places, the case for PND’s

Last week I was trying to get from Stratford on Avon to meet up with my wife in Glaston, Rutland after GeoCommunity. No PND and no printer available to print out a map and directions but I wasn’t worried I had my trusty iPhone. Not quite so simple.

Thanks to Lawrence Whittemore

Lets start with the limitations of an iPhone and particularly an old 3G as an in car navigation device – battery life, lack of mounting, low volume on speaker, tendency to switch off display and autolock after a few minutes of inactivity.

Then there are the limitations of the navigation software. Skobbler sort of offers turn by turn navigation and spoken directions but the volume isn’t sufficient to overcome road noise and the OSM data is not comprehensive enough at the moment to guarantee to get me where I want to go, the last time I used Skobbler it tried to route me into the middle of a field! Left me less than eager to try it again. Skobbler will be a fantastic app in a while but the combination with the iPhone just isn’t dependable enough for me at the moment. But of course there is trusty old Google Maps on the iPhone, at least the maps are comprehensive and the routing is usually OK. But you can’t get an overview of the whole route or just the turn by turn directions and if you add to that the tiny fonts and screen space plus my need to put on reading glasses every time I want to read an instruction you can imagine how many times I had to pull over on the way. Good thing there are loads of parking lay byes on the route. Now add in the UK’s stellar quality 3G network which means that for much of the time that you are travelling through rural England, even on A roads, you are struggling to get GPRS let alone full 3G and that means no slippy maps underneath your blue GPS dot and a thoroughly unusable navigation device.

Next time I am taking the old PND, it doesn’t rely on a 3G signal, it has relatively comprehensive maps even if I haven’t paid for the data upgrade, it has a decent sound volume and a windscreen mount/power supply, if I miss a turn it just recalculates the route and gets me back on track and I can see the nice big direction symbols without having to get out my reading glasses. There is a lot to be said for a dedicated device that does just one thing and does it reasonably well.

And the anonymous places? We are talking metaphysics here, in the spirit of “if a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there,  does it make a sound?” or as someone asked at #W3G “if Google doesn’t index a website does it exist?” If a village is in a 3G dead zone so no iPhoners can find it does it really exist? I’m not sure, but at least Glaston was in the road atlas (remember those things?)

Cocktails on the Titanic – the final chapter from #GeoCom

I presented Cocktails on the Titanic to a pretty full room at GeoCommunity on Wednesday. I have been developing my thoughts for this presentation over the last 6-9 months. It started with the AGI Foresight study and my section of the editorial on social and economic trends, it evolved with “Without a business model you are FCUK’d” at wherecamp.eu and then presentations to the ESRI UK user conference, The GeoData 2010 event, State of the Map in Girona and a lunch time lecture at CGS in Nottingham. You could say that I have been hawking this stuff around for a bit now, I would respond that my thinking has developed and refined as I have engaged in conversations with different audiences.

Thanks to Cliff1066

Now that I have just about closed out my thinking on this, I consider the key elements to be that

• Free API’s are going to dominate simple web presentation because they incorporate good quality free data, are highly performant and scalable and offer slick intuitive interfaces. The traditional GI industry can and is responding by moving to the cloud but they will face some fierce competition from an advertising funded business model with massive resources.
• Open Source software is increasingly recognised as a cost effective alternative to proprietary software, particularly for web mapping applications where the functionality is quite well established and becoming commoditised through open standards interfaces. Open Source is not free but it is potentially a very cost effective alternative to traditional license models, particularly if hosted in the cloud.

Thanks to Snowflake Software

In his barnstorming defence of his Soapbox champion’s trophy entitled “Free, my arse” (note the importance of the comma) Ian Painter had a light hearted lampoon of me ranting “You are all doomed” in a Scottish accent (not sure about the accent). It was good fun and he was making the perfectly valid point that access to source code is usually irrelevant to customers (I agree) and that implementation costs can be much higher than for well designed proprietary software (I doubt this but would like to see some evidence to that effect, the Accenture report that I found did not support this statement) and that support costs could be higher than those for proprietary software (possibly but I doubt that TCO over 5 years would be anything like the cost of licenses and support and maintenance for a proprietary solution). So am I suggesting that Open Source is the answer to every problem, absolutely not!

Open Source appears to me to be a very attractive option for server based applications. Linux, Apache and Java power a mass of web applications from many of the giants of the internet including a large part of Google’s applications. Many enterprise vendors including IBM, Oracle and most of the GI vendors use some of these Open Source products or components. They aren’t doing this without carefully evaluating their costs of ownership. So as web mapping becomes more mainstream and the pace of functional enhancement slows, Open Source becomes a very viable alternative and new services businesses will spring up to implement efficiently and offer competitively priced support.

Where Open Source is unlikely to compete so strongly is on the desktop (most of the user interfaces that I have seen are just too clunky to gain widespread adoption even if they are free, of course that could change as some government bodies are considering dropping Microsoft and deploying Open office on a Linux desktop) and in the specialist niches where it is unlikely that a large enough community of developers will form around a project.

The implementation of the UK INSPIRE implementation on Open Source, distributions of complete geostacks loaded with Open Data by academics and other initiatives suggest that Open Source geoweb is gaining ground fast. The next year should be very interesting and no doubt the traditional vendors will have some strong and competitive responses all of which should be for the benefit of UK Geo.

You can view the slides for this last presentation here

The mindmap for the presentation is here and is open for edits

That may be the final chapter for me on this topic as it is time to get on with doing some stuff in the cloud with geo.me and on Open Source with CGS in Nottingham. The epilogue will need writing by someone, maybe this time next year? Ian P, I am sure you will remind me about this post at next year’s GeoCommunity.

Tweeting responsibly at #W3G and #GeoCom – a public service announcement

Some people don’t get twitter, fair enough. Some people don’t like the back channel at conferences, maybe they think it is distracting delegates from listening to the presentations, fair enough. Some people tweet way too much, that’s me.

Thanks to carrotcreative

At a conference the tweetstream is a conversation, often irreverent, frequently sharp and observant, sometimes puncturing pomposity (not that I am suggesting any existed at W3G or GeoCom) and nearly always humourous. If you are wondering what the geotwiteratti were chatting about you don’t need to join twitter you can just read these tweetdocs from W3G and GeoCommunity

Simon Doyle, the chair of GeoCommunity asked us to tweet responsibly, I think we did.

Interesting, useful or pointless? Let me know what you think.

Just because you can put something on a map …

Gary Gale invited me to talk to one of the 3 W’s of geo at W3G. I chose the “what”

That's me thanks to Paul Clarke

You can probably guess where this went. After a preamble about relevance, spatial patterns, distortion and open data I launched into my personal trawl through the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. My final message was “Think before you map”, I got a few laughs and a couple of people who I had not met before actually came up to me afterwards and said nice things in agreement with my opinions.

Word spread through the twittersphere to Andy Hudson-Smith that I had launched into SurveyMapper, which I had and I thought woops I may have pissed him off again – when we had a lengthy conversation much later in the evening fuelled by some geoLagavulin it actually turned out that we were pretty much in agreement.

Apparently there was some surprise that I won the unconference prize for the most over-running presentation.

Now it is on to GeoCommunity another presentation, a panel discussion and a georant. Going to be a busy day

The slides are here

And the mindmap that explains what I was talking about is here

Goodbye #W3G, hallo #GeoCom

So the W3G conference is over, finished, gone.

What an amazing day, it started with Henk Hoff and I leaving north London way before 7 to head up to Stratford geobabbling OpenStreetMap, navigation, maps, and stuff all the way there.

When we arrived AGI’s very own unconference was already warming up and the room was full of people and to my delight this was not the same old same old who frequent the geoconference circuit. Of course there were several old friends but there were also a load of new faces who, I presume, had been attracted to the event by Gary Gale’s humorous and relentless publicity and slow drip marketing.

W3G t-shirt by Gary Gale

Why W3G? The W’s of geo the Who, What and When.

This was a fantastic event with some great pre-prepared presentations (I am not referring to my own of which more in another post), some excellent impromptu ones and most importantly a massive amount of time for chatting and meeting new people concluding of course with some geobeers. Big respect must go to Gary Gale who in my not humble opinion is an awesomely good geogeezer (gizza a job gazzza) and big thanks to the AGI for funding this and providing logistical support, oh and respect also to Rollo Home who was Gary’s coconspirator and organiser.

I am too knackered to run through the wide ranging and thought provoking content but I can say that in true unconference style the award for the most outrageous title has to go to Richard Rombouts for “Tulips, porn, cheese and standards”

Tulips, porn, cheese & standards by Paul Clarke

The final panel session ended with a question from the audience “what do you think are the dead end technologies of geo?” The panelists paused for a second, well maybe half a second, before offering their carefully considered responses – Foursqare, SDI’s, OGC standards and geoconferences. I agree with at least two of those (your guesses on a postcard please)

The geobeers were winding down by 6.30 and after a quick change of t-shirt it is time for the GeoCommunity icebreaker, a ridiculously difficult geoquiz by the AGI CFO Alan Wilkes and of course dinner and time to catch up with more old friends and GeoCommunity regulars. Much talk of “austerity” “new strategies” and “opportunities”. Of course we ended up back in the bar and thanks to a very tall Dutchman my efforts at getting a reasonably early night were thwarted. All in that was about 20 hours of non stop geo!

I’d echo Mr Gale and call that a geotastic day.

Paul Clarke’s lovely photos of the day can be found here http://www.flickr.com/photos/paul_clarke/sets/72157624926808787/

3 weeks to GeoCommunity – get your #GeoCom tickets now

It is just 3 weeks to GeoCommunity.It looks like it is going to be a festival of geogoodness under the leadership of a new team headed by Simon Doyle (who is an ex GDC’er so he must be a goodish type of guy).

On the Tuesday Gary Gale has organised a free unconferencey thing called #W3GConf, word has it there are only a couple of tickets left.

The main conference program is fool (such a good typo at this time of night that I had to leave it in) of interesting stuff (particularly if you are wrestling with inspiring obligations) and no doubt the folk from OS will be sharing lots of insight into the changing world of geodata and Open stuff. I bet we don’t get through the three days without hearing Derived Data and we might even get some hints of good news in that regard.The agenda is broad enough that you should be able to avoid any of my 3 talks/rants/babbles if you want to (actually there are 3 speakers talking at the same time as my presentation on Wednesday that I would rather be listening to). The keynotes include Nigel Shadbolt who is a demigod of the Open Data movement after he and Sir TBL freed up all that OSOpenData. To be honest the big problem with the program will be choosing what to miss.

Oh and if that isn’t enough to tempt you late undecided folk the Soapbox is back. No one who saw the astonishing performance from Ian Painter or the stunning costume of Peter Batty could possibly miss this year’s extravaganza. Word has it that some of these guys have gone into training, me I think I am going to do a no slider possibly made up the night beforehand – that could be worth a laugh too.

So what are you waiting for?

There are still a few tickets left, you can book here.

And if you need an extra inducement, buy a ticket now, post your ticket number on the comments here and you can claim a free geobeer courtesy of KnowWhere Consulting (terms and conditions apply)

GeoBeer photo thanks to Gary Gale

Cheers

GIScussions is No.35 in auspicious company

The people at Online Engineering Degree have published a list of their 50 Best Blogs for Geography Geeks and GIScussions gets in there at 35th. Not bad when you look at some of the others included. They said

“Steven Feldman loves himself some geography, keeping an excellent blog that concentrates on how GIS technologies have forever changed the way people perceive the world around them.”

Some wag suggested they should have clipped that to the first four words. No comment from me except there are some much better blogs than mine that they have missed off, must be my shameless self promotion.

Research help wanted for #W3GConf – crowd sourcing a presentation

About 3 weeks to go to GeoCommunity and W3GConf.

I am starting to think about my pressy at W3GConf which is entitled “Just because you can put something on a map …” Here are the bullet points that formed my abstract:

A flood of open data combined with ever easier to use tools for mapping that data has the potential to unlock insights or create interactive pincushions.

Opening up data does not guarantee useful or even truthful visualisations. You can mislead or even lie with maps unless you have an understanding of the context of the data you are mapping.

Is there is a role for someone who “understands” the data, its context and has some basic skills in geostatistics, presentation and analysis (all that boring paleo stuff)?

Will the wisdom of the crowd prevent miscommunication or fuel popular misconceptions?

Does it matter?

Hopefully you get the drift without me spoiling it for anyone who was planning to attend.

CC Britta Bohlinger

I thought I would try and crowd source some of the content for this pressy (i.e. get you to help me out). We have all seen web things with pointless, stupid, meaningless or just plain misleading usage of maps – let me know which are your favourites and pet hates. If you could contrast your worst examples with something that you think really “works” and adds value, conveys insight that would be even better (then I would have little or no work to do but pulling together some slides and some witty observations)

All contributions will be gratefully acknowledged within the pressy unless you request your bit to be anonymous (which might be a good idea if the site is run by your employer or a client). Either post on the comments or send through the “Contact Me”.

Still need more suggestions for the GeoBuzzword Bingo as well