OMB

It 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.

Incase 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.

(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.