Searching for “google” from maps.google.co.uk fails to return Google’s London HQ, instead it gives this set of results, which shows their Manchester and Zurich locations, as well as a paid listing:
Google’s real location is here.
Archive for the ‘Geodata’ Category
Can you find Google HQ?
Monday, January 28th, 2008ZXV and the Week of OpenStreetMap
Monday, January 21st, 2008This week, we’re going to be working on OSM, all week long. Check out the ZXV blog for more details.
South East London Mapping Party
Tuesday, January 15th, 2008Come map the streets of South-East London:
The OSM South East London mapping party will aim to fill in the blanks in the OSM map of the area. Greenwhich, Lewisham and Blackheath are all well covered by Yahoo!’s aerial imagery, so lots of roads have been filled in but most of them don’t have a name and there’s lots of mistakes with junctions not joining up properly and so on. We’ll also be collecting point-of-interest data; schools, hospitals, shops, pubs and restaurants all make OSM’s map richer and more useful.
There’s more details on the OSM Wiki. As always, OSM Mapping Parties are open to everyone – if you are interested,
OS OpenSpace Preview
Saturday, December 15th, 2007It was great to spend the day in Southampton yesterday at the Ordnance Survey, to preview the new OpenSpace API:
The API has been a long time in the making, having first been announced at the OS Mashup Event last year. The API is based on the OpenLayers Javascript library, an interesting decision in itself and one which should see bug fixes and improvements fed back into OpenLayers.
Essentially, OpenSpace is just another slippy map API, with most of the features everyone’s come to expect and a few features that make it stand out. It uses the OSGB (OSTN02) datum projected onto the British National Grid (transverse mercator) rather than using WGS84 Latitudes and Longitudes and a mercator projection, as most other web mapping APIs use. To ensure compatibility with the growing volumes of geodata based on WGS84, OpenSpace includes Javascript libraries to transform from WGS84 to projected OSGB – which it seems to do pretty accurately.
Another notable point is the cartography. The Ordnance Survery have a far richer dataset at their disposal, so its not surprising that they can produce map tiles like this:
Whilst the “Street View” (the name for the highest zoom levels) cartography has been criticised by some specialists, its undoubtedly an improvement over Google’s. Its going to be interesting to see if the new map content spurs new types of mash-ups – people can now pinpoint the exact position of their houses and countryside users now have, well, something compared to the nothingness of the Google countryside. I spent at least an hour yesterday just browsing around the map – just having a nice, fullscreen slippy map of the UK is really cool. Take a look here
The license is a license, so some people are going to love it, some will hate it and most will just get on with hacking. One thing that the guys from the OS were emphasising yesterday, was that they really want people to consult with them. That’s why we were there yesterday – so that the people who made OpenSpace could see what we thought. I think the desire of the OpenSpace team to listen to people’s feedback and act on it is a genuine one, so maybe we could all try some constructive criticism before trashing it. But hey, this is the internet.
The most interesting thing about OpenSpace is that the OS own the data. Google, Yahoo, MicrosoftMultimap etc all license their data from other providers, which is why they do things like this. Google don’t want you to hate them, they want you to love them and use their services but are restricted from doing so by licensing regimes with data suppliers. The OS shouldn’t have this problem – its their data so they shouldn’t suffer from the problems that Google et al blame on their providers.
During my first play with the OpenSpace API, I stuck a pin on a map to invite you all to the ZXV christmas party, and grabbed an NPE WMS feed from GetMapping, so you can overlay 50 year old mapping onto the latest OpenSpace tiles. Take a look here.
FOSS4G OpenStreetMap Slides
Sunday, September 30th, 2007Incase you missed the talk, here are the slides:
To accompany the slides, here’s a condensed version:
Some guys with GPS units on vans donated their traces to some other guys who made a collaborative map. This was cool, so lots of people joined in, collecting lots of traces, making nice maps and writing software tools to edit the map. The project is now growing very quickly and a Foundation has been set up, which does things like fundraising and organising conferences.
The most valuable thing to OSM are the people. But people are often disparate and hard to organise. For OSM to work the people need to be motivated by incentives other than money. The people won’t do stuff unless its fun, they trust the organisation and they see the results of the hard work.
Geo-data in the UK is very good, but very expensive and is sold by the Ordnance Survey. OSM’s data is not as good as the OS’s data, but its free. As OSM’s data gets better, the OS’s data will get cheaper. When OSM’s data is good enough for 80% of uses, proprietary vendors will be forced to compete on a margin of 20% of use cases. This will lead to more innovations in the mapping industry and more price cuts.
Some people say that OSM’s data is crap. Others just get on with making free maps.
Map my Scooter
Saturday, September 29th, 2007Teleatlas have the van and now OSM have the scooter:
Scooter mapping has a lot of potential – you are able to rapidly stop and start, scooters have a small turning circle, you can take voice notes, easily pull out a camera and even stop to make notes. Efficiency compared to cycling is pretty impressive:
Saturday – by bicycle
nick_am_traces.gpx
av speed: 6.03 km/h
distance: 25.56 km
time: 04:14
Sunday – by scooter
nick_am_sunday_trace.gpx
av speed: 16.86 km/h
distance: 28.32 km
time: 01:40
The average speed is so low on the Saturday morning because of the stopping time – I stopped for a coffee half way through the morning and left the GPS running. I decided not to adjust for my stopping time though, as the coffee break time was time I could have been mapping had I not been nackered.
Neogeography and the AGI: Have they got the wrong idea?
Saturday, September 22nd, 2007(continued from the last post
The fact that organisations like the AGI are trying to get to grips with neo-geography is a good thing. Their members have amassed a serious amount of experience working with geoghraphic information and neo-geographers can learn a lot. But in order for this to be a successful two-way exchange, both parties need to understand what neo-geography is. A good starting point would be Andrew Turner’s O’Reilly Shortcut: Introduction to Neogeography. I’m going to try and address a few of the misconceptions and confusions surrounding neo-geography that I noticed at the AGI 2007
Neo-geography is not the same as open source
There’s a lot of cross over between the worlds of neo-geography and the worlds of Free and open source software (FOSS) and neo-geography, but they are not the same thing. FOSS applications exist that fill every space of the geo-stack – from heavyweight databases to desktop GIS to rendering engines. I talked about FOSS for geo-informatics at UCL earlier this year and have a brief list of applications here. FOSS exists to provide free alternatives to proprietary software and to create new software that might not exist if a proprietary form. FOSS projects usually have a focus on democracy and equal access and are based on the fundamental principal that everyone should have access to the source code.
There is no such belief within neo-geography. Projects like OpenSteetMap, which license all of their data under an open license are few and far between. Look through the listings of this year’s Where2.0 conference and you won’t find many open source projects – most companies do not want to give their data away. What you will find is a lot of innovation, ranging from visualisation to 3D modeling. The flagships of neogeography are neither open source nor open content. Applications like ShapeWiki, which lets users derive polygons by tracing over Google Maps do provide their content under open licenses, but are built upon a proprietary platform – Google Maps.
Further more, sites which allow a user to place a pin on a map, or draw a line or polygon on a map, may or may not be infringing the copyright of data-providers. Case law surrounding these issues is far from convincing, but the lack of clarity is enough to question exactly how open the content of sites likes these can possibly be.
Neo-geography is about pragmatic solutions to real problems
Neo-geography represents the democratisation of access to geographic tools and geodata. Before the release of Google Maps in 2005, the options for the amatuer geographer were limited by the barriers to entry to the use of geographic software and in many countries, geographic data. An Arc GIS or MapInfo license is simply too expensive for most people. FOSS alternatives like GRASS exist, but are not easy to use. The proliferation of geo-apps that has characterised the rise of neo-geography has been facilitated by the fast code-fix-deploy cycle that applications like the Google Maps API, and programming languages like Javascript, Ruby and Python provide, combined with the network effect of developing web-based (as opposed to desktop or server) app.
Neo-geography’s reaction against the built-in complexity of traditional GIS has caused a penetration of sectors of society that would be unimaginable using traditional GIS tools. The often voiced criticism that neo-geography is too simplistic represents the divide between the providers of traditional GIS and the consumers of neo-geography. People like neo-geographic apps because they are simple, because they solve a few targeted problems at a time.
Building complexity to ensure exclusivity
There’s also a darker side to the complexity of traditional GIS. The fact that someone needs a masters degree in GIS, to work as a GIS Technician should set alarm bells ringing. By maintaining the complexity of GIS, vendors like ESRI or Oracle are able to justify the costs of their products and consultants are able to justify their high fees and trade organisations justify their existance. Meanwhile, many individuals and businesses that could be using geographic information to make better decisions and operate with increased efficiency are strongly discouraged from doing so. Geographic information will not save the world unless the world’s citizens have access to both the information and tools with which to use it.
Neogeography and the AGI: ‘What’s neo-geography anyway?’
Friday, September 21st, 2007The Association for Geographic Information (AGI) are a UK-centric trade association for the producers and consumers of geographic information and related hardware suppliers, software developers and consultants. They exist to promote the interests of their members, provide them with a forum for discussion, oversee professional development and organise events like this week’s annual conference, held in Stratford-upon-Avon, UK.
I was invited to talk about OSM and some of the neo-geographic development that ZXV undertake. The AGI conference is a lot like Where2.0 for people who use proprietary desktop GIS and all the trappings of the pre-Web2.0 era, something that the conference tried to address this year by the inclusion of several talks relating to neo-geography, and a conference theme: ‘Building a geo-community’.
It was a tough crowd. These are the guys for whom tagging, folksonomies and the democratisation of, well, almost anything is a scary idea. In a lot of ways talking to groups like this is what its all about – these are the people who use geographic information all day, everyday. Convincing an open software advocate of the benefits of open geodata is one thing, but selling the idea that a bunch of normal people without years of training and professional certification, can make a map that’s actually quite good, to a room full of people who have built their careers upon concept that they are the specialists, is quite a challenge. Its a challenge that I relish and I think the message is really getting across – there was a lot of interest in OpenStreetMap, open-geodata and neo-geography.
Neo-geography – it will never work
The criticisms leveled and OSM and neogeography were nothing new. The usual concerns about ‘how can a trust the data’ and ‘will it ever be complete’, were voiced, along with some misinformed comments from several of speakers and panelists, including David Maguire, VP ESRI UK and one gentleman who’s name I missed, sitting on the far right of the pannel. (I’d like to crowd source the name of the guy sitting on the far right of the panel during the debate on Thursday, so please leave his name as a comment).
Both of these delegates spun the line that the kind of pins-in-maps analysis that neo-geographers undertake is one thing, but if you want ‘proper’ geographic analysis, you of course need a ‘proper’ GIS. Spatatial analysis cannot, apparently be undertaken with open source tools and is certainly outside of the realms of neo-geography. Have these guys not heard of GeoCommons?. ‘They must have heard of PostGIS or GRASS?’, I thought. Of course they have – these guys are board level executives of companies like Oracle and ESRI. Right now, it would be insane for the VP of ESRI to stand up at the AGI and tell the delegates that yes, its true, 90% of the users of ESRI, could actually use QGIS quite happily. Its tantamount to Vanessa Lawrence standing up and telling everyone to use OpenStreetMap maps. These guys are going to keep on peddling their company line, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t understand what’s going on.
Oracle will profess that open source databases are no threat, but they they’ll release a free version. The OS will innovate to keep up with developments driven by the open source and neo-geographic community. And I would be surprised if ESRI don’t release a free desktop GIS that has equivalent functionality to QGIS. The smart guys are already doing so.
This is far from all I’ve got to say about the conceptions of the established GIS community regarding neo-geograhpy.
Satellite’s Launch Scuppers Rumors of Google Space Plans (or does it?)
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007As lots of other blogs are reporting, satellite imagery provider Digital Globe, yesterday launched WorldView I – company’s latest high resolution earth observing satellite which joins the likes of QuickBird in a 500km-ish orbit, with the mission of providing pictures of your house for Google. Those of you blessed with the ability to play Advances System Format videos can watch a video of the launch here. If the video doesn’t play, dowload VLC. On Ubuntu/Debain do:
sudo aptitude install vlc mozilla-plugin-vlc
and sit back and enjoy.
Rumors were rife amongst delegates at this summer’s StateoftheMap conference about Google’s satellite launching ambitions. Maybe its Google’s proximity to and friendlyness with NASA or maybe their sponsorship the X-Prize to land a vehicle on the Moon that makes the idea of Google-in-space seem not that far fetched at all.
OpenStreetMap is Coming to Leeds
Tuesday, September 11th, 2007OpenStreetMap is coming to Leeds. See this page for details.
INSERT_MAP
Come and help map one of Britain’s most interesting cities. As they say in Leeds, come for the mapping, stay for the Naan