cloudsourced

Way back in October 2009, I contributed to the AGI’s Foresight Study; predicting the shape of geo in 2015. Seeing as the future is rapidly encroaching, and I have yet to see the study be published, I thought I would share.

After presenting our predictions, some of the surrounding discussion was a sad reflection on the shape of the geospatial industry – the constant clinging to the security blanket of “but we are GIS *Professionals* and our skills are essential” was a particular low point. To me, GIS means clunky desktop software with terrible usability, ugly cartography and elitist terminology – wearing that as a badge of honour is an odd concept.

That aside, my five takeaway predictions for 2015 were:

1) OpenStreetMap to have over one million contributors.
2) Large scale investment in OSM from commercial organisations.
3) Widespread crowdsourcing of geodata to utilise excess cognitive capacity.
4) ‘Big data’ – huge, real-time, actively/passively crowdsourced datasets from the sensor
web.
5) Legislation requiring central and local government to release nearly all PSI to the public
domain.

Even Gary Gale gave me a strange look when talking about point 4, though in the brief time since then he has admitted I was correct. I stress that many of the big datasets coming from the sensor web will be closed, and that new commerical opportunities for geo lie there – whether it be for the data or services with the data.

Point 5 is practically enshrined in law now. I would add one little caveat to point 2 though, I expect government and commercial investment in OSM.

Agi Foresight Study – Christopher Osborne

Part two of videos from the geoweb stream at the AGI GeoCommunity Conference 2009 – Andy Allan talking about innovative uses of OpenStreetMap data.

Expect similar at tomorrow’s #GeoMob meetup, a few slots left here.

Andy Allan – Crystallising Anarchy (Innovative Uses of OpenStreetMap Data) from Christopher Osborne on Vimeo.

This September, I had the pleasure of chairing the inaugral geoweb stream at the AGI GeoCommunity 09 Conference. Over the next few months I will be releasing videos of the best talks here for all to see. First up, is the talented Tom Taylor, who amongst other things is working on Newspaper Club – a service to help people make their own newspapers. I recently had the luck of contributing a little bit (a map) to the incredibly useful Postcode Paper, made as a demo for the recent data.gov.uk experiments.

Here, Tom is talking about his use of the Flickr alpha shapes and how crowdsourced data can be used to create the shape of neighbourhoods:

[To see more geo related wondery, come along to #Geomob on November 19th.]

Tom Taylor – Crowdsourcing the Shape of Neighbourhoods from Christopher Osborne on Vimeo.

Amongst the many, many highs of last week’s AGI GeoCommunity conference came a personal low:

Being outed as a paleotard by Gary Gale.

You swine!

OSM Flight - Stratford Theatre

When we are not talking about bus stops and transport mapping, at Ito World we are usually editing OpenStreetMap or planning how to take the glorious OSM to even greater heights.

While talking at the Society of Cartographer’s summer conference, we heard from UKMap; a new dataset for certain areas of the UK created entirely from scratch, and designed to rival the OS’ MasterMap in detail. Its market, and the reason for its creation, is those who are fed up with the Ordnance Survey’s onerous licensing regime. Critically, those who pay to use UKMap data are not bound by Derived Data, the practice where the OS claims copyright over any data you create.

Although we currently licence some proprietary mapping data, our future is an open data future. We are constantly working with the OSM community to improve the coverage and richness of OpenStreetMap data.

What was of interest though, was the process for creating the UKMap dataset. It provided some real insight into what we do well in OpenStreetMap and what we can do better. UKMap is created in two stages: tracing aerial imagery and then paper and pencil surveying on the ground.

In this day and age I was expecting to hear of fleets of trucks with GPS units, or hundreds of surveyors armed with tablet PCs and customised mapping software. But no! Tracing over aerial photography and then a follow up ground survey, with people on the ground annotating paper maps which are then scanned in and digitised.

Sound familiar? Well, that’s how we’ve been building OSM of late, tracing aerial imagery and ground surveys, usually with a GPS.

We have long had aerial imagery to trace over, thanks to our chums at Yahoo!, but the arrival of Mike’s fantastic Walking Papers has given us the most powerful addition to the OSM stack. Choose the area you will be mapping, print your Walking Paper, draw on the map adding details, scan and upload the image, and thanks to Mike’s technical wizardry the annotated Walking Paper is then available for you to trace and digitise online.

Annotated Walking Paper for Tottenham

Before, we relied on GPS tracks to give us roads and paths, but it is a steep learning curve for those not already familiar with geogeek technology. Now, its as simple as scribbling on some paper while walking and tracing over the top. Listening to the UKMap talk it was very interesting to learn that the Walking Papers approach, was found to be much more efficient and just as accurate as surveying with a tablet PC. Importantly, the fact that UKMap have created a commercial mapping product with the same approach as OSM, validates our methods.

What are we lacking? High resolution aerial imagery. The aerial photography we have is getting old now and is not very detailed. We need higher resolution, and more recent aerial photography to improve OpenStreetMap. To kick things off, at Ito World we have sponsored OpenStreetMap’s first aerial photography flight. We sent up the intrepid John Robert Peterson, armed with a camera to photograph Stratford-Upon-Avon from the skies. We are organising an OSM mapping party at the AGI Geocommunity conference today to follow up with some ground surveying.

You can see the results here. Using MapWarper, created by the effervescent Chippy, you can reference the images to groundpoints and rectify the imagery. This is by no means perfect, but it is a first step into new territory for OSM. We need better aerial imagery and the cost is steadily decreasing, and there are many local authorities who already have the data. Indeed, Surrey Heath and Devon are working to make their aerial photography available to OpenStreetMap.

OSM Tiled Aerial Photography for Stratford

We hope this is the start of many Local Authorities and organisations to make data available to OSM, we will do the hard work such as image cutting, tiling and hosting for you. Make it available and help make a better open mapping dataset of your area. If you are at GeoCommunity and interested in donating some aerial imagery or any other data to OSM come and speak to me (I am chairing the Geoweb stream). Or drop me a line and I will point you in the right direction.

This year I was drafted onto the Association for Geographic Information conference organising committe, to bring all things geoweb to this venerable event. I can also offer reduced day passes to #geomob members wishing to attend, see below.

As Chair of the geoweb stream, I am extremely proud of the strong lineup we have put together. From big players in the Web2.0 world, small internet startups, and old hands from the GI world it really reflects how mainstream the geoweb is becoming. Indeed, the two distinguished keynote speakers for this year, Andrew Turner and Peter Batty, will be talking about the ‘How Neogeography Killed GIS’ and ‘The Geospatial Revolution’, respectively.

Photo credit http://sigizmund.com/

In the geoweb stream we have Terry Jones talking about the just released FluidDB, the database with the heart of a wiki, which looks like it might just be *the next big thing* on the internet. I was lucky enough to host him talk at #geomob in January, an attention grabbing speaker working on some amazing technology. Worth the ticket price alone.

Other marvellous geoweb talks include -

Tom Taylor on ‘Crowdsourcing the Shape of Neighbourhoods’ with Flickr alphashapes.

Andy Allan on ‘Creative Uses of OpenStreetMap Data’

John McKerrell on ‘OpenStreetView’ (when do you launch John?)

Peter Miller on ‘Location Specific Promotion of Public Transport’ (*disclaimer: he’s my boss*)

And the fantastically titled ‘Human Sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria’ from Martin Daly. (Bonus points to those who spot the reference).  There are many more besides these, check the full programme here.

And an exclusive discount for #geomob members, get a day pass at the rate normally reserved for AGI members. Click here and remember to select ‘#geomob member’ as your registration type.