The price of free is currency

Simon sent me a link to an article on the BBC website about the vintage of aerial imagery in Google Earth for Liverpool.

Regeneration bosses in Liverpool have complained that the internet giant Google is ignoring the regeneration changes going on in northern cities.

Liverpool Vision has complained that developments, such as the 42-acre Paradise Project, are not visible on aerial view website Google Earth.

The site shows London landmarks such as the new Wembley and Arsenal FC stadia.

Jenny Douglas, planning director of Liverpool Vision, said: "The current Google Earth images show roofing work still under way at Lime Street train station.

"This work took place between 2000 and 2001, which means the Google Earth images are at least five years old.

"The city centre has changed dramatically since then. It is important that the millions of people using Google Earth have access to the latest images showing the city's transformation."

The spokeswoman for Google Earth said images are updated as quickly as possible.

Well this is a real beauty - loads of observations.

First of all as an Arsenal fan I can fully understand why the enlightened folk at Google are keener to show the magnificent new Emirates stadium (even if no one knows exactly where the Emirates themselves are) than Liverpool Lime Street station. Nice of a Liverpool fan to send me the link really, I would have thought it was one to keep quiet about.

But more seriously this article illustrates some interesting, albeit misguided opinions about the role of the GYM (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) in delivering "free" mapping. Let me drift a bit to explain my understanding of the business model of the aerial imagery providers as I understand it (if any of the UK players read this no doubt they will correct any errors for which I apologise in advance). To produce aerial imagery these guys hire or buy specialist planes and photo kit and then weather allowing (which is a big problem in the UK, clouds mess up aerial photos) they fly over a target area capturing thousands of photos which are then orthorectified (long word which I think means fitting photos to BNG and adjusting for curvature of earth and lenses) and delivered to clients like local authorities in digital format. Now there are two business models for this quite expensive activity - either a client sponsors the activity to gain up to date imagery or the company takes the risk and hopes to sell the imagery to one or more buyers who are interested in that specific area - often it is a combination of the two. Bottom line is likely to be that unless lots of organisations need to purchase very up to date aerial imagery then a re-flying cycle of 5 years will be quite common. GYM have been buying a lot of digital map and aerial imagery recently - however they are not that bothered about the issue of currency, price relative to number of viewers and links to paid advertising are likely to be bigger factors, these guys are not charities.

So back to the article - why should Liverpool or any other city council expect Google to provide the most up to date aerial imagery to promote their city? Isn't that what they should be investing in? In the US many municipal authorities pay to have aerial imagery captured by commercial companies and then give it to Google to host in the GE platform to provide greater access to their citizens and potential visitors. Realistically GYM provide some engaging applications based around street level mapping and imagery they do not and should not be expected to provide a sustainable alternative to a local authorities own GI presence on the web.

I wonder whether the people at Liverpool Vision have discussed this with the super GI team within their own council? I guess not.

AGI Awards Dinner

I am not a big lover of awards dinners, black ties or other industry bashes. But the AGI Annual Awards Dinner is an exception worthy of note, particularly this year. I should say at this point that I am a big fan of the AGI and that the current chairman is our Director of Consulting, Simon Doyle.

The Awards Dinner brings the geo-industry together in a celebration of the achievements of the year. It is a particularly fun evening because for a while competitors become colleagues and we realise how much more links us than seperates us.

As usual GDC clients were up for awards and my congratulations to the Mosaic Utilities Group for their partnership in Northern Ireland who were commended in the central govt category. Congratulations to Nigel Mason, GDC's Director of Business Development for being commended in the volunteer of the year category. A full list of the awards and commendations is not yet on the AGI website so have a look in a few days (I think everyone from the AGI team was "a bit tired" after the event)

The one strange thing about the Awards evening is that it attracts over 200 people whilst the annual Conference struggles to attract over 300. Next year the AGI Conference and Exhibition willl be trialling a new format that will hopefully attract a lot more people. Because I mouthed off about what needed to change I have drawn the task of chairing the Conference group. Hopefully we will be able to come up with some ideas that appeal to the people working within our community including practitioners, policy makers, academics and industry.

I will be blogging about the trials and tribulations of organising the conference over the next few months.

Listening to customers

Almost every company aspires to have good relationships with its customers and usually a key part of that will be listening to what customers say about products and services.

GDC have always tried to be a listening company and our products have been strongly influenced by the feature requests of our clients. That does not mean that everything on the wish list will get into the next release of the product or even any release but it should mean that client's needs and business cases form a core part of our product roadmaps. Last week was a busy week for the listening people at GDC.

On Wednesday we kicked off the initial Cutomer Advisory Panel for our next generation GeoPlatform 2. Ten clients who willl hopefully be early adopters of our new products came together to discuss some of the high level requirements for the first release due next summer. Both the clients and GDC put a lot of effort into preparing for the day and the feedback suggests that it was a true win/win - GDC learnt a lot more about what will be important to our customers (including a couple of surprises to be honest, but then that's why we should be listening to customers) and the clients appreciated the opportunity to influence development and ensure that they got more of what they wanted in the first release. My thanks to all of the client representatives who invested their time.

On Thursday I sat in on the GeoPlatform User Group where representatives from the majority of our clients packed a room at Local Government House (a very nice venue) in Smith Square. It was good to hear the enthusiastic presentations from Southwark about how they had worked with GDC to get their latest public acces site implemented. There were also updates on the progress of GeoPlatform 2 from several of the GDC team which prompted a lot of feedback. In the afternoon the GeoStore team ran a workshop on Oracle stuff. My general pride in the day was based on the sense of strong partnership between the team at GDC and our clients particularly when things don't work quite the way we would like. It isn't always easy to accept criticism even when it is constructive, that is what both sides of a partnership sometimes need to do.

Blogging responsibly

An interesting article on the BBC site today. It is all to easy to blog away criticising any part of government or the "establishment" in general without ever stopping to make well thought through suggestions for a different approach.

Substitute OS for government/establishment and perhaps some of their most vociferous critics should be reading this article. Interestingly Mathew Taylor (Tony Blair's retiring strategy advisor) whose views are quoted in the article is leaving to head up the Royal Society for the Arts who recently hosted the very vociferous Free Our Data debate

Lunatics and Asylums

When you read the latest article in Guardian Technology entitled "One way street to postcode madness" Thoughts about lunatics running the asylum do come to mind.

Local authorities who are the statutory street naming and numbering authorities have provided information to Royal Mail who use it as a major source of change intelligence for the Postal Address File (PAF) which RM maintains to enable them to efficiently deliver mail to our homes and offices (some people in the past may have questioned the efficiency bit). RM have built a substantial business from licensing this data to business, Ordnance Survey (it is the basis for CodePoint and AddressPoint), NLPG and (surprise, surprise) following the new MSA back to Local Government!

Next year RM is proposing doubling the fees it charges Local Government and in the spirit of the Gershon Review to drive down their costs Local Government are crying foul. They have even been told that if they use their LLPG as the basis for any look ups on their web site (without displaying or searching on the postcode that they are still liable to pay RM for the PAF. So Local Govenment are now saying that perhaps they should charge RM for providing change information etc. Confused? Good - that probably means you have not lost all your marbles yet.

On this occasion I am in fulll agreement with the Free Our Data guys at the Guardian. I think the key difference between this and their campaign on freeing up OS data is that the PAF is a by product of RM's core activity (delivering mail in case anyone has forgotten) whilst map data is the core and only activity of OS.

EULAs

That is End User License Agreeements to you.

A funny article on Wired

NIMSA

The Guardian has a good article on the DCLG announcement that the NIMSA will end in December. Basically no subsidy to OS for surveying the big unpopulated areas of the country. Worth a read.

Interesting how the Free Our Data folk have now started to realise the potential (unintended) consequences of their campaign. Look forward to hearing how the "innovative commercial sector" will come up with a way to keep these areas mapped for nothing.

From the Guardian article

Ordnance Survey said that it would continue to provide some Nimsa-funded services including supplying emergency maps for floods and other contingencies, and coastal mapping.

"We have accepted that we will continue to do these things in the national interest despite the extra cost burden," it said in a statement.

Commercial providers of geographical information have long been critical of the subsidy. Last year's consultation report cites "concern over the potential for cross-subsidy of commercial activities".

Michael Nicholson, chief executive of Intelligent Addressing, which earlier this year had a complaint against Ordnance Survey's competitive behaviour upheld by the Office of Public Sector Information (www.freeourdata.org.uk/blog/?p=55), said: "It seems surprising that they can be so sanguine about losing this money if they needed it so badly."

It does seem that poor old OS are damned whatever they do or say at the moment

GIS and Football

I have to confess to an obsessive passion for everything to do with football. It occurred to me that GI has quite a lot of connections with football.

After all, the teams are each associated with a location so we could map them except for Man Utd who don't really belong anywhere and certainly not in Manchester, a bit like a PO box. Then there are the fans, where do they come from, we could do a series of drivetimes and travel to work type analyses, that would be fun except that the Man U fanbase would be evenly distributed all over the UK with a big clump a couple of thousand miles away in Thailand and of course a neat blank space around the Manchester connurbation. Then we could undertake a geo-demographic analysis of the fan bases and I am sure that would tell us a lot about the clubs - no prejudice here but what would you expect as the dominant types for Milwall, Chelsea and of course man U?

Then we could turn it round the other way and compare football clubs and people to the GI industry. Who would you vote for as the Chelsea, Man U and Arsenal (or evenLiverpool if simon Doyle is reading) of the GI companies? Who is our Abramovitch, Henry or Mourinho?

On Quality

What constitutes value? It takes time and resources to do things well. Quality at any price is clearly not value so how do you judge the right point between perfect/best and good value?

I am not sure that I know the answer, I know in our business it is a constant concern to me - how much can we afford to put into making a product better, will clients value that investment? Not sure that we ever know whether we have got the right balance, some clients would prefer cheaper and some would prefer better.

Overall I am more comfortable with encouraging my team to deliver the best possible solutions to exceed clients' expectations. Sometimes we may not make the most profit from that product at that point in time in the long term I have to believe that we and our clients will benefit.

Free Our Data

Have you been following the Free Our Data campaign? Have you noticed how few people are bothering to comment on the weekly postings? I used to be quite active trying to present a little balance in what seemed to me to be an OS bashing fest but I sort of lost interest. There used to be quite a lot of activity on this blog - has everyone lost interest in this stuff or is it just me?

I think some data should be free but I also think that we need a national mapping agency that maintains high accuracy and currency for the whole country, now how you fund it is another question.

Welcome to GIScussions

Hi and welcome to my GIScussions.

I am currently the MD of GDC, a London based Geo-Consultancy working with clients in UK Public Sector and Infrastructure.

I didn't start life as a geographer, in fact I am an economist who spent 20 years working in building materials before stumbling on GIS. Lots of what goes on in our community amuses and baffles me, some of it inspires me.

Sometimes I wonder why ..... This blog will cover my ramblings - who knows you may find them interesting. I read some great bloggers in the GI Space such as Adena and Ed and thought maybe I had something worthwhile to say. Then again maybe I don't. I guess initially it will only be people who know me who will have any interest in reading my views, no doubt you will tell me if you think this is a worthwhile exercise or not.

My colleagues remind me that
"THESE ARE MY PERSONAL OPINIONS AND IN NO WAY REPRESENT THE VIEWS OF THE COMPANY THAT EMPLOYS ME"
Enough said