Whilst hoboing around California, I happened to be in a certain top-secret location.
The Japanese have not been so keen on the whole Google Street View phenomenon. Apparently, the cameras are too high for Japanese buildings/streets, and are peering into people’s gardens etc.
So the ingenius answer is? Yes, a lower camera -
The AGI conference is the biggest independent Geographic Information conference in the UK. This year #Geomob has been brought on board to organise the Geoweb stream. In 2008, the 2 day residential conference based in Stratford upon Avon attracted over 600 delegates who participated in more than 50 workshops, presentations and debates.
I have been working very hard behind the scenes to bring in Web2.0 and neogeography content. To kick things off, I am extremely pleased to say that Andrew Turner, author of the O’Reilly “Introduction to Neogeography” and CTO of GeoCommons.com, will be giving the geoweb keynote at the conference. Andrew is focused on collaboration and user-generated content around location and time. He is actively involved in open-data projects such as OpenStreetMap and VoteReport , as well as open-source projects like Mapstraction and GeoPress.
So, feel like sharing a stage with the godfather of neogeography? The AGI call for papers is open for another fortnight and I want as much geoweb content as possible, get your paper or workshop proposal in here: http://bit.ly/42sg9g
Steven Feldman, AGI GeoCommunity Chair said “It is very exciting that we will have a full Geoweb stream within what is already a diverse and captivating conference enabling hundreds of policy makers and geo-professionals in public sector, utilities, and retail to learn more about how these new, nimble approaches can transform the application of location within their organisations and enable new services. I believe that combining a mini Where 2.0 with the UK’s largest mainstream GI conference is a significant step for the GeoCommunity and represents a great benefit for all involved.”
There is an event page at #geomob: http://gmdlondon.ning.com/xn/detail/2456365:Event:3626
Keep your eyes peeled for updates, and if we land some sponsorship I might be able to offer some reduced rate day passes to #geomob members.
Tomorrow, or April 22nd is budget day in the UK. With the economy well and truly on the rocks, this year’s budget looks ominous. But forget the small-fry stuff like housing, health care and education, what about geodata?
The Trading Fund Review is also scheduled for release tomorrow, and will effectively decide the Ordnance Survey’s future. Do they:-
a) Privatise the Ordnance Survey
b) Move to a publicly funded model
c) Split the organisation between some publicly funded and privately run functions
d) Do nothing
Everybody has their opinion on the merits of each, personally I would prefer option ‘b’. Stop the mincing around and pretending that the OS is a self-funding enterprise, it isn’t. Its subsidised indirectly by the taxpayer in the form of licence charges to the Public Sector. Define what we actually want and need from our national mapping agency; do we want to maintain high quality mapping of the UK, do we want to keep the luddite data straightjacket of “derived data”?
The single most positive change that could come from tomorrow’s fallout, would be the demise of “derived data”. Nearly all publicly owned geo data will be in some way derived from Ordnance Survey data, and the current Crown Copyright restrictions of “derived data” make it impossible to use the data without paying for an Ordnance Survey licence. Removing the digital straightjacket allows for public sector geodata to be freed up and shared, enabling innovation and better public services. See some great examples of mashups using (mostly screen scraped) public sector data – http://rewiredstate.org/projects
Tomorrow may also mark the death of the Ordnance Survey, who knows, they may be privatised? One thing is certain however, if “derived data” remains the OS becomes irrelevant. To get around the licencing restrictions, even local authorities are turning to OpenStreetMap – Surrey Heath Borough Council is blaizing a trail and contributing to OSM, the first Local Authority to do so (via @nick_b).
If the Ordnance Survey continues to practice the most ridiculous copryight restrictions, their only customer will be the Royal Geographic Society, nobody else cares anymore.
State of the Map 2009, the OpenStreetMap conference, is taking place in Amsterdam on July 10-12. If you’re at all interested in open geodata, it is an unmissable event, and this year marks something special. Its the year OpenStreetMap gets serious as a commercial ecosystem.
OpenStreetMap is no longer a quirky, little open-data project. Its massive. With over 100,000 registered users, albeit not all active, the OSM community is huge and especially passionate. The OSM community cares deeply about creating freely available mapping data, and shows no sign of slowing down.
This army of mappers is busily adding nodes and links to a global mapping dataset, that in many urban centres is more detailed and up-to-date than its commercial rivals. We’ve seen Geofabrik and CloudMade launch and provide geo services with OSM data, and this looks to be the start of a growing commercial ecosystem around OSM. So this year State of the Map has an extra day, “dedicated to the theme of commercial viability of OpenStreetMap”.
Want to get involved?
The OpenStreetMap Foundation will be holding its annual conference in Amsterdam, from the 10th – 11th July 2009. The conference will feature three days of talks, workshops and discussions by the people who are changing the face of mapping. This is a conference not to be missed by anyone interested in joining OpenStreetMap’s mapping revolution. Weekend tickets cost just €100 – and you can still get your ticket at a special early bird rate of €75. You can find out more about the event here .
If all of the talk of the mapping revolution has got you excited, you can join OpenStreetMap’s efforts to re-map the world. Signing up is easy and takes just two minutes – to sign up and start mapping, click here.
Google Latitude has been out for a few weeks and now the furore seems to have died down, its time to take a less sensationalist look at it.
Google is Not a Social Network and Latitude is not a Finished Product
To me it looks like they’ve been waiting for other apps to soften up the public to sharing their location and now they’re gently venturing into what can be a very contentious area, and I’m sure they were expecting the negative and downright sensationalist press they received.
Something that shows me where my friends are and their Google update status is essentially useless, unless its opened up to third party apps – very few of my friends/family/associates actually have a Google account or update their status. If they do they use Facebook or Twitter; a location enabled social network should facilitate socialising and right now nobody actually socialises on Google, they do it on a proper social network.
So what is Latitude? Its a first step: they need users to get used to sharing their location with Google, learn how to process this data effectively and then figure out how to monetise your location.
Latitude’s strength is Google’s strength, the Google brand. People use Google, people trust Google and I’m a classic example: I let Google store my search history (you do know they keep your search records don’t you?), I use GMail so they have access to my email data, I even have a few documents up there in Google Apps, and now I’m playing with Latitude so they also have my location information too.
(If you think that’s scary, I accidentally gave Ed Parsons a business card with some of my hair stuck to it. Yes, they have my DNA now. Just imagine what they are doing with that.)
I’ve made the point that Google is not a social network, and I really believe they don’t want to become one either. What they do want is your location data, so they can target better adverts at you. Latitude will provide some data right now, but nowhere near enough for a fully fledged location targeted advertising network.
Latitude Will be Opened up to Third Parties Via an API
I’d bet my house on that point. The success of Google Maps is based on the exposure of mapping services to third parties via the APIs, not just its own market share. They will certainly attract GMail and Google Docs users to Latitude but even that reach has its limits; on my last check, precisely two of my lengthy GMail address book had signed up for Latitude. They need third parties to extend user reach and turn location targeted advertising into a profitable business.
How Google Plan to Monetise Your Location
Well, according to the patent they’ve filed here, its as simple as this:
Google Targeted Mobile Advertisements
So there you have it, Google’s ultra secret method for monetising your location data looks like it was drawn on the back of a beermat.
Latitude and Gears provide the location data, funnel it through the cloud and mash with the AdWords system. Easy.
Credit: Aaron Koblin: http://www.aaronkoblin.com/
This article orginally appeared as a thought piece for Agit8, a blog where “people at the leading edge of their discipline or field to offer insight into where they see the future of their work going.” Its not written for geo-geeks, more as an introduction to digital cartography and the challenges ahead.
Digital Cartography of course. While paper maps aren’t going to die, its a limited medium and all the fun stuff is going on in the digital sphere. Remember this – all paper maps are produced from huge amounts of data, 1s and 0s describing our planet down to centimetre accuracy. The AtoZ in the bottom of your bag, the grimy tube map stuck to the station wall and the dog-eared road atlas in the glove box are all renderings of digital data. Lets make it really simple:
A Map = Data x Visualisation
So the paper map and the online equivalent are produced in similar ways, but the output medium is different. True, I can draw on my paper map but apart from that there isn’t much else you can do with it. The online map opens up a whole new world of possibilities, and while we’re at it lets not limit it to an online map. In many circumstances a map is perfect, in other contexts I might not want to see a map at all, just directions. There is a raft of location enabled applications out there, from your mobile phone to your car navigation system to the browser you’re using now. Its a really exciting time to be a neogeographer, especially when you read articles like Trendwatching’s 2009 Briefing which declares “maps are the new interface”.
Web2.0 isn’t possible without APIs and web services. Indeed, back at the Where2.0 Conference in 2005, Tim O’Reilly pronounced “Google Maps with CraigsList is the first Web 2.0 application.” The recent proliferation of map mashups and location enabled devices points to a big future for location. As any geo-geek will tell you, “its all about the data”, and the rise of Web2.0 and semantics (well, its getting better) has fuelled these fires. Looking at ProgrammableWeb’s API directory, three of the top ten APIs are mapping services:
Top Ten APIs from www.programmableweb.com
There is also the larger trend of companies opening up their services with APIs, and the possibilities now are just so much greater with all that data being piped around the world. Visiting Flickr tells me that 2.7million photos have been geotagged this month alone. The mapping services are out there, the data is too and people are flinging mashups together all over the place.
The history of this discipline was grounded in the traditional RDBMS; chunks of data sitting in a machine on the same network as you, that you have control over. Now I treat the cloud as my database – I can juice data from any API, mash it with my own data, stir in some geotagged photos from Flickr and serve on a GoogleMaps platter to any device. Suddenly Everything Has Changed.
Where do we go from here?
The fundamentals remain the same: data and visualisation. This is going to come in two sections, first a sober look at visualisation and then a ranting finale about data.
Visualisation
We need to make better location enabled apps; getting some points on a slippy map was a triumph in 2005 but its getting pretty stale in 2009. I love the variety we get with paper maps, the styling, the history and sense of culture that comes through a vintage map (remember seeing your first map that wasn’t centred on your home country?) Nearly everything on the web is so, so homogeneous. Now I’m not criticising Google Maps, they provide a wonderful service that I use extensively myself but right now we have a one-size-fits-all mapping paradigm. The little variety that’s out there comes from someone using Yahoo! Maps instead of the Google.
A paper map was limited in its interactivity, slippy maps are limited too: they are pre-rendered image tiles that fit neatly together in the browser that you can drag around with the mouse but you can’t do anything more. I can layer as much data as I like over the top, but I can’t access the underlying data because its just a static pre-rendered map tile.
Michal Migurski of Stamen Design has written an excellent piece about a talk he gave called ‘Tiles Then, Flows Now’ over here at his blog. Its a fascinating piece, about moving beyond map tiles to flows of data, utilising real time web technologies and even a little game development theory in there. However, as someone so wisely told me, I’m getting ahead of myself here.
I want to talk about vectors, the underlying data that is used to create those map tiles that everybody is so busy throwing data on top of. Why is this important? Look at a regular search engine, it understands text but it can’t read text written in an image. The text is locked in the image and no amount of searching is going to find it, take that text out of the image and record it as HTML and suddenly you have a very searchable site. Exactly the same principle applies to mapping applications – expose the underlying vector data and it becomes searchable, queryable and customisable.
Right now, none of this is possible with any of the current crop of mapping services, presumably because they pay huge sums of money to get that vector data, process it, host it, and want people to use their own services. Some enlightened countries have openly shared all public mapping datasets but this is by no means wide-spread. Enter OpenStreetMap, the crowdsourced movement to create a free map of the world. Without going into too much detail, its gained massive traction and has better data in some areas than the traditional mapping agencies, worse in others. It is by no means complete but it is improving all the time, and crucially the vector data is available under the Creative Commons licence.
So, if you’re a hardcore developer, roll up those sleeves, download some data and delve into the Mapnik documentation and start making your own beautiful customised maps. One of the best examples of this is OpenCycleMap, its completely customised to show the most relevant information to cyclists. Note the contour styling, cycle routes are highlighted and the display of public toilets that has been queried out of the OSM data:
OpenCycleMap Customised Styling: http://www.opencyclemap.org
Now this isn’t for everyone, its time consuming and requires a lot of specialist knowledge. Indeed, many people do want an interface and style that is familiar, fine, choose what suits the project best. If you’re creating a map to show the location of one shop, then a simple pushpin on a GMap is all you need. Interestingly, CloudMade the startup creating mapping services with OpenStreetMap data is aiming for the middle ground between these two extremes. They expose enough control over the vector data to allow custom map styling without the headaches involved in a full Mapnik implementation. I would expect the other major players to follow suit and start to offer MapCSS as part of their APIs.
So the challenge is to think of what’s relevant to the user and site style – do they need to see every minor street, should I emphasise certain features, can I match the map’s palette with the site’s? Start making beautiful, customised maps.
Data
We all now what a map is, its a diagram that tries to represent the real world on a flat piece of paper. As a geographer, there is something deeply comforting about a map; its something I understand, that tells me about the world, where I need to go, where things are and what they look like. There is something almost Victorian about it, an obsession with putting the world in order – controlling space. Lets ponder that thought: if you understand something then you can control it, if you can control it then you own it. Property. I’m no Marxist, but issues of ownership and the control of information have been the main preoccupation of governments since they were established.
The Ordnance Survey, the UK’s national mapping agency, has its origins in the quashing of the Jacobean uprising in the Scottish highlands. The military needed maps to protect, plan and control the UK and it was only in 1983 that it became a civilian government organisation. Until recently this model worked well, map making was an expensive and labour intensive process and the format for delivery was always the same, a paper map. Things have changed a bit since then.
How do you get your information? As an Agit8 reader I assume you’re pretty tech savvy. Our methods of interacting with information have been blown away by computers and the internet, and more recently the mobile phone. When I’m looking for a book I don’t go to a library and search through index cards, I Google it. When I’m driving somewhere I don’t carry around a massive road atlas and five 1:25,000 maps, I punch in the destination on my car navigation system and it takes me there.
The methods of interacting with data have changed, but those producing it haven’t. Anyone who has dealt with the Ordnance Survey can tell you just how restrictive their licensing terms are. Indeed, the Show Us a Better Way competition was held last year to encourage the civilian masses to come up with innovative ideas to mashup government data. It was a very Governement2.0 initiative from the Cabinet Office, and innovative approaches like this must be applauded, the reality of licensing geo data is somewhat different. You can only imagine the look on their faces when the OS promptly informed public bodies that using any data derived from an OS map cannot be used on an online mapping platform (apart from their own). So that was pretty much every idea out the window then.
We are faced with the rather ridiculous situation that every public body pays another public body, the OS, for mapping data. Then, if they create any new information with reference to the OS maps, like recording the location of every public toilet, then that data is classified as “derived data”. This derived data effectively cannot be shared with anyone who isn’t also licensing data from the OS. Confused? Essentially, it means that nearly every government dataset with any kind of location information is under lock and key. Its not just the OS, they receive a regular bashing from the Guardian but all aspects of government data policy are out of whack.
Things are in a real tangle here, various government departments are trying to free up data to encourage innovation and the information economy, but how can this be accomplished? There are real positive steps that can be taken to start loosening the bonds that tie publicly owned datasets. Start by reading the excellent “Power of Information Review”, commissioned by the Cabinet Office and was the instigation for the Show Us a Better Way competition. It is a sign of the government waking up, the juggernaut is slowly turning but needs prodding and poking to get it on the right track. Following its publication The Power of Information Task Force was established by Tom Watson MP. If you’re a Twitter fan, you can follow him here.
The Office of Public Sector Information has an ‘Unlocking Service’, make a request for access to information and they are supposed to unlock it for you. I am not sure of the success rating of this service but the idea is sound, try it here.
Perhaps more effective is the MySociety run ‘What Do They Know‘ where you can easily make a Freedom of Information request and monitor its progress. What’s more any data that is released is automatically posted online so that anyone can access and use it. So USE IT! Put in requests, work the system and start unlocking some of the value in public datasets, mash it and get it out there.
But what about the maps you say? Well without wishing to repeat myself I have to refer back to OpenStreetMap. If you want truly free data, that you can edit, share and do whatever you want with then pick up a GPS unit and start mapping. Then make some beautiful maps.
Gary Gale introduces Yahoo! Fire Eagle at #Geomob
Signup for the #Geomob London Geo/Mobile Developers Meetup here to stay informed
Back in September I started looking around the London web scene for a meetup group of like-minded Geo geeks and was pretty surprised to find that none existed. The Valley has a flourishing meetup scene, in London we’re getting there but its still very much in its infancy. After a great chat with Catherine Burton who runs the Web2.0 Mapping Meetup group in the Valley I decided it was time to create something similar here in olde London town.
So, the #Geomob event (or London Geo Mobile Developers Meetup if you prefer the full title) was conceived. After a couple of months of incessant networking, virtual stalking and a fair amount of pleading I had assembled a red hot lineup and a venue, all we needed now was an audience. Well, we weren’t disappointed and with a turn out of around 40 developers from the London geo scene including Nestoria, CloudMade, Yahoo!, not to mention our lovely hosts Google and many others.
Big ‘thank you’ to Google for hosting us, not only did they give us a great venue but lots of snacks and all important beer. They will be presenting at the next event (tail end of January 2009) so stay tuned to hear more from them.
An event is nothing without its speakers and our trio of geo experts really set the bar high, you can experience their wonderful talks in video below. Its a bit quiet so turn up the volume.
First off we had Gary Gale from Yahoo! introducing the really exciting location broker service, Fire Eagle:
Find more videos like this on #Geomob – London Geo/Mobile Developers Meetup Group
Next was Nick Black of CloudMade who ran through some great examples of customised mapping and gave a few hints as to where they were headed (hint: ROUTING):
Find more videos like this on #Geomob – London Geo/Mobile Developers Meetup Group
To cap off a wonderful first night we had Andrew Grill asking “What Will it Take for Mobile Advertising to Find Itself?”
Find more videos like this on #Geomob – London Geo/Mobile Developers Meetup Group
It didn’t end there, lets just say a few beers were had after.
Feel like reading more? There are reviews over at the Google UK Developers Blog, Yahoo! Geo Technologies Blog and London Calling. Full picture gallery here and here.
Signup for the #Geomob meetup here.
Christopher OsborneFounder of #Geomob - London Geo Mobile Developers Meetup
Passionate about neogeography and the future of the geoweb as a platform. "Not social media expert, have real job".