Archive for June, 2007

The Future of Location Based Services

Monday, June 25th, 2007

Location Based Services (LBS) and Local Search (show me pizza places near here) have been going to be the next big thing for some time now. Some attribute the failure of LBS to the ‘walled gardens’ that mobile phone networks operate within, a factor magnified within the UK by the comparitively high cost of data calls compared to the US.

Local Search has been a lot more successful (if you define success as numbers of users), in that I can search for the nearest cashpoint to my current location and usually find what I am looking for. Critics of Local Search suggest that it will ‘never take off’ because people know what is in their area and don’t need the Internet to tell them.

There is some sense in both of these standpoints. The high cost of data calls, does diminish the value of mobile LBS for the consumer. I do where the nearest cashpoint to my house is. A problem with LBS is complexity: it seems to be difficuilt to to provide a service that tells me what I want to know about where I am. This complexity goes hand-in-hand with the walled gardens of the mobile operators – its in the best interests of a service provider to make their customers think the job they are doing is incredibly difficuilt – it adds value to their service.

The LBS question – what is there that I want, near where I am – isn’t a particularly complex one. We talked about some of this stuff at Where Camp a few weeks ago, and a load of smart people thought of some complex solutions to the problem. The solution isn’t a complex one. I know loads about cash points here, and I am happy to tell someone who wants to know about cashpoints here everything I know, on the same terms that I am happy to give my knowledge to Wikipedia – that is I want to have certain privacy guarantees and I want to be opt in and out of the participation process.

So, we lots of geographically dispersed people who may be willing to share their local/specialist knowledge with each other. Why not have a Twitter group for ‘here’, which you make friends with if you know about here? If I want to know about here, I send a Twitter to here, saying – ‘where is there a good bar near here?’. Here isn’t a real person, its a bot (a computer program) that listens to incoming Twitters via the Twitter API. When it hears my Twitter, it sends it back out to each of its friends – people who know about here. Pretty simple.

With this in mind, I was excited to hear about Multimap’s new Twitter Bot. You can now query Multimap’s location data by sending a Twitter to their bot who talks to their own API and replies, for example:


d multimap nearest postoffice to reigate

reply:

direct from multimap: 1. Reigate, Bell Street, Reigate and Banstead, RH27BB

This is the most innovative thing to happen to LBS for quite some time. Its simple, cheap, effective and it works.

Posted in Geodata, LBS | 6 Comments »

Isle of Man is OpenStreetMap’s Image of the Week

Sunday, June 24th, 2007

Its great to see the the Isle of Man featuring as OpenStreetMap’s image of the week:

The map you see is the combined result of people tracing from aerial imagery, people collecting gps tracks, and people tracing from the map that the Isle of Man Department for Local Government and the Environment gave to OpenStreetMap.

With the help of Artem and John Burgess’ osm2pgsql conversion utility, I’ve produced some shapefiles of OSM data for the Isle of Man. Grab them from here.

Posted in Cartography, Geodata, Isle of Man, Openstreetmap | 1 Comment »

Don’t Repeat My Mistake – assert_flash

Saturday, June 16th, 2007

Purely to stop you making this error. Nothing useful comes up when searching for:


NoMethodError: undefined method `assert_flash'

The assert_flash method is now deprecated. If you are trying to run functional tests in Rails, what you are probably looking for is:


assert_flash_exists
assert_flash_not_empty
assert_flash_has 'hello'
assert_flash_has_no 'stds'
assert_flash_empty
assert_flash_has_no 'hello'
assert_flash_has_no 'qwerty'
assert_flash_equal 'my name is inigo montoya...', 'hello'

Posted in Ruby, rails | No Comments »

Where2.0 Post Mortem – GeoCommons, Streetview, Virtual Earth, Yahoo!

Tuesday, June 5th, 2007

I got back to London from San Francisco yesterday morning after a week of geo-intensity; Where2.0, meeting a load of geo people, an earthquake and WhereCamp. This was the first time I’d been to Where2.0 – in previous years I listened to talks on the excellent IT Conversations as well as various illicit podcastings. So I was pretty excited to be taking part. There was a stark contrast between the really interesting stuff and the kind of interesting stuff being talked about. Companies like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, who have contributed massively to recent developments in the geo sphere, just didn’t have that much to say. Google’s presentation focused on StreetView, which is nice but not-that-amazing, Microsoft showed us some very impressive looking shots from Virtual Earth, which is nothing new, and Yahoo! talked about Pipes and mentioned their involvement with OSM. Meanwhile, Sean Gorman (founder of Fortius One) gave a lightening talk about their new service, Geo Commons. ESRI weren’t there. They should have been.

Geo Commons is to desktop GIS what Google Docs is to Office suites. The site lets you upload a dataset in Shapefile format (support for other formats is planned in the near future), to which you add a description and tags. Through a slick drag and drop interface, you choose the fields that you want to display, before creating a heat-map using the GeoIQ (also by Fortius One) web API – a service that is well worth playing around with. If it wasn’t for the need to work to pay my rent, I’d by making heat maps all day long.


Cancer Death Rates in the US

With GeoCommons, Fortius One have captured 70% of the most fequently used functionality of desktop GIS. As the site matures, we can expect to see them capturing 90%. You don’t need to pay a huge license fee, or have a degree in GIS to start making meaningful maps any more. If I were ESRI or Mapinfo, I’d be worried. I’d opensource or my main Desktop GIS (which in the case of ESRI Arc-Map is just a shell), or at least start making it available freely and then sell custom plugins and extensions (things like Spatial Analyst, or Network Analyst) to the people who need it. If they don’t, their safe customers will start to look elsewhere for free alternatives.

What’s even better, is that the Fortius One team really understand what matters. Free beer. The emerging gap between the incumbents and the neo-geographic newcommers was superbly displayed during the Open geo-data BOF hosted by GeoCommons, who provided a kit-bag rammed full of free beer. We were still talking an hour into our one hour slot and got turfed out by Microsoft, who had the room booked for their “exploring Virtual Earth” BOF. Geo-Commons’ free beer was countered by the bar that Microsoft set up outside the room they were holding the session in, which came along with a MS employee whose job was to guard their beer. You can only drink from the teet of Microsoft if you sit through their entire session. Meanwhile, the neo-geographers who included GeoCommons, OSM and ShapeWiki representatives shared their Free beer with passers by.

Posted in Free, Geodata, Openstreetmap | No Comments »