State of the Map

If you follow things geo it is difficult to miss the buzz that is building around Open Street Map and their sister company Cloudmade. The "wikipedia of maps" recently passed 100,000 contributors and the level of detail now matches or exceeds that avaialable from other street level mapping providers in the most mapped areas such as London although inevitably coverage and detail varies as you move out of major urban areas.

But if OSM was only going to mimic commercial street map products with a different licensing model (albeit with the potential for the community to provide updates faster than commercial providers) it would not be attracting as much interest as it currently does. 

For me there are two things which make OSM a truly game changing and exciting innovation, OSM to paraphrase the beer advert "reaches the parts other maps cannot reach"

1. OSM provides a framework for mapping the parts of the world that aren't going to provide a commercial return driven by Satnav and advertising revenues. There is potential to support local communities, relief agencies and help to breach a global digital divide (at least in the geo bit)
2. Looking closer to home, OSM allows the community of volunteers to determine what additional information they wish to capture. So we are seeing more detailed footpaths and cycle routes (Berlin cycle routes below) than are availalble in any other products and there is potential for much more over time. The potential richness of the OSM data could well be the competitive edge that will drive mainstream adoption (and a lack of restrictive licensing will not do any harm either)

In the past I have been a bit of a sceptic about OSM data quality and coverage, those reservations stilll remain to some extent, particularly the impact of volunteer demographics on the coverage and currency. However the potential of the wiki model to allow richer attribution and additional layers of information could well be OSM's killer capability.

The OpenStreetMap Foundation holds its annual gathering of the clans (aka conference) State of the Map in Amsterdam from July 10th to 12th. Should be fun and even if you are a sceptic you might want to come along and be inspired by the passion of the founders and volunteers within this unique geo-data project.  Details, registration etc here

22 days to bthe budget and counting ...

People's Map

People's  Map is a newly launched service from getmapping.com and partners. It seems to sit somewhere between Open Street Map and a commercial data product combining user volunteered content and free for private use licensing but with a perpetual license fee for commercial use (not clear from the web site how the licensing will work). Unlike OSM, content creation is "moderated" by the People's Map team before going live. 

I am not sure that I get the compelling reason for another crowd sourced mapping project, are they expecting the OSM community to switch allegiance or is there another group of contributors that they are targeting?

23 days to budget and counting ...

Mobile Blogging

Excuse this is a test

I have been wondering for a while where the cross over from tweets to mobile blogging was. I am trying out an iPhone app called LifeCast to see whether it is really viable to post from iPhone.

So the first question is does this actually link to my blog. Well if you are reading it obviosly it does and if not ....

Posted with LifeCast

OS Open Space spruced up

I haven't looked at OS Open Space for a while so I don't know whether this is a newly spruced up set of pages. Anyone notice changes?

I wonder if this is in anticipation of announcements on budget day?

25 days and counting ....

Communia - Open Knowledge Foundation

Yesterday I was at the Communia workshop co-organised by the Open Knowledge Foundation and the LSE, listening and talking about opening and unlocking public sector information.

It was a sort of deja vue morning, with a large part of the morning taken up with discussion on geographic information. I think we all agree that the base geography is key to understanding a lot of the other data that is and hopefully will be avaialble from public sector. It seems to me that the discussion on this is almost over now, there will be a resolution or at least a partial resolution when the budget is delivered on 22nd April, I could not see the point of focussing a large part of the morning on this subject - it won't change government thinking, the decisions have been made.

Professor Rufus Pollock, one of the authors of the economists report on Trading Funds, spoke with passion about the importance and benefits of opening up data, paricularly geographic. He was very clear though that the costs of collecting and maintaining high quality data could not be ignored either 

1. the goverment pays
   
2. the person or organisation that initiates a change to the map that requires an update or edit pays
3. the user pays

His preference was for option 2. I think Bob Barr first suggested this about 4 years ago.

Jamie Love, Director of Knowledge Ecology International, made a breathtaking suggestion when he posed the idea that a vast amount of data held in private sector databases about organisations' interactions with the public sector ought to be in the public domain. He cited examples of the time corporate lobbyists spend with individual members of government, the volumes and prices of drugs sold worldwide on a country by country basis to enable comparisons and details of contracts signed with government. One can imagine some businesses that have been arguing strongly for free access to public sector information having a slightly different reaction if the tables were turned. Tax paid in all jurisdictions worldwide might be an interesting starter for ten.

Interestingly Tom Steinberg of MySociety said that Steve Coast of Open Street Map thinks "the battle with Ordnance Survey has been won" I don't know whether that is an accurate quote of Steve's views but if it is and the battle has been won, why are so many people still so anxious to open up OS data? I guess the battle is not completely won yet, or maybe there isn't a battle or .... Tom also gave us a great tease talking about a community sourced alternative to PAF that will launch in a few weeks but we will have to wait for an announcement (I thought there already was Free the Postcode)

A great keynote from Tom Watson and several excellent presentations including Naomi Korn talking about orphan artefacts (works of art and items owned by galleries and museums) where the public sector does not have clear and undisputed rights to use the content in digital format. 

Simon Field, CTO at ONS, was both amusing and thought provoking as he explained the amount of data that was already available from ONS and the challenges in providing sufficient metadata to ensure users could understand the data without making it over complex. He showed us how newspapers and others had presented seriously misleading interpretations of the staistics by making some quite elementary errors in presentation, not a reason to make make statistics available but a good reason for wanting ONS to continue providing authoritative interpretation.

My colleague Simon Grice and I talked briefly about the importance of accessible information in empowering communities to have a balanced dialogue with local government and the BeLocal project that will launch soon.

The day faded into an almost laughable (if it hadn't been so tedious) debate about the wording of a simple aspirational statement to come out of the event. We started with 

Public sector content and data should be made available, both legallly and technically, for public re-use

About the only word that seemed to be uncontested was "and"

And the final outcome? I am afraid that i don't know, after 45 minutes of what seemed pointless but heated debate, I had to go.

That little rant out of the way. I have to say thank you to the organisers for an excellent array of speakers, stimulating content and a great venue. I hope I get an invite to the next event.

You can follow the very active tweet stream or search here

26 days to budget and counting ...

Geoweb stream at GeoCommunity

We have just announced that there will be a full Geoweb stream running through GeoCommunity. This will be in partnership with the team at #Geomob

Lot's of bubbling excitement around breaking down the barriers between neo and paleo from all involved. First plenary speaker confirmed but you will have to wait for the formal announcements.

Need ideas for workshops and papers submitting through the AGI site before the end of April.

Remember to follow GeoCommunity on Twitter and use the tag #GeoCommunity

Location Privacy

A very enjoyable evening at Mashup Events Being Location Aware talking with a very knowledgable panel and audience.

My slide on Google prompted a laugh particularly when some crafty person re-used it while Ed Parsons was talking without his own slides.

Privacy prompted a lot of discussion and some passion including the view that the age of privacy was just about over. 

I think that there is a cumulative effect each time we disclose another detail about ourselves, add a location history or trail to our posts in Facebook, Twitter etc, leave all sorts of browsing information with Google and others and potentially have some of this forwarded onto others without our knowledge. Not many people realise the extent to which these fragments of information can be mashed together to create a detailed picture about us. Of course we are going to make our location available to services that offer us some benefit but there is a need for education so that users understand what they are doing when they say yes to the question "Use your current location?" Yahoo's Fire Eagle is a good start at enabling people to manage different levels of location granularity and privacy accross different applications. I should have asked how many people are using it?

My prediction: Within 2 years there will be a celebrity divorce because someone has been "playing away from home" and has neglected to switch off the location features in their ultra hip phone

The slides are here:

Location Based Social Networks - Killer App or Blind Alley?

View more presentations from Steven Feldman.

Street View

A flurry of misinformed opinions about Street View in the media. This morning's Radio 4 had someone who clearly thought that Google had a camera continuously observing their house! 

Lost property

I went down to Bentley in Hampshire today to visit SeaZone. Managed to leave my coat on the train, cursed thinking "well I was due for a new one" but walked into the tiny station office where the sole employee just picked up the phone and called his colleague at the next station (end of line) and sure enough someone cleaning the train handed my coat in and I was able to pick it up later on. Why do I think that would not have happened if the train had been going in the other direction towards Waterloo?

Premier League map makers

Conversation in a cab.

"If OS are like Liverpool, what team represents OSM?"
"Gretna"

Your suggestions?

Posted with a flaky Voda dongle on a train from the East Midlands to London

Wouldn't you have liked to have said this?

Off topic, except that Smithy drives a van to the FA coaching centre perhaps using GPS. 

Every England football fan would have liked to have had 10 minutes with this lot

Submit a paper to GeoCommunity and I will donate £1 to Red Nose Day

If you are thinking of submitting a paper to GeoCommunity, do it before the end of next Friday, 20th March and i will donate a pound on your behalf to Red Nose Day. submission forms can be found here. Just tweet me or GeoCommunity to confirm that you have submitted and want me to donate on your behalf.

Go on everyone you could cost me £100, create a major challenge for the selection committee chosing the best papers for GeoCommunity and support a good cause. if that's not a win, win, win i don't know what is.

Hope your knows is red.

Cheers

Red Nose Maps

I wondered whether anyone would have created a Red Nose marker for Google Maps or something similar to mark todays lunacies. If you google "red nose map" this OS site comes right at the top of the list. Apparently there really is

"a Blowup Nose, Rock Nose, Long Nose, Friars' Nose,

 even a Pig’s Nose"

But best of all has to be this picture of the Director General of the Ordnance Survey of Great Britain

Looks good on you Vanessa

And yes, I know this is old stuff but it is still fun so smile and go make a donation to Red Nose Day.

Beyond the metre ... To the centimetre

I have been getting interested in micro-location or local/indoor positioning systems recently. There seem to be a lot of potential applications if we can take positioning off the street and into the office or hospital or shopping mall.

This is an article that I just wrote for Jeff Thurston at Vector1

Our favourite location based social network app is ....

Last night Luke Razzell and I spoke to/with the BCS Geospatial SIG on the subject "Location based social networking - a killer app or a blind alley?". 

It was less of a presentation and more of a guided conversation which I think is appropriate since I view  social networks as a digital conversation. The audience was an interesting mix with nearly all professing to use a social network and most at least once per day (about 20% were once a week) predictably the audience were all over 20s and quite a few were over 45's so perhaps the attitudes were somewhat different to the famed generations X&Y let alone my younger kid's group who will be avid users of technology in 5-10 years. 

We reviewed some of the factors driving location enabled social networks in particular the topic of timeliness and granularity/proximity and also some of the challenges around privacy which prompted a couple of net savvy people to say "Ahh, I hadn't thought of it that way". 

I guided the group through a selection of current applications that covered the "buddy finder", "social recommendations" and "planning for a business trip" topics using as examples, Brightkite, Loopt, Rummble and Dopplr. At the end of that part of the discussion I asked for a show of hands responding to the question "In the last month has there been an occasion when you would have wanted to use this application?" The overwhelming favourite that appealed to about 60% of the audience was the social recommendations app (that is good for the guys at Rummble), a long way behind in second place was the meeting up on a business trip app (aka Dopplr) and languishing with less than 10% interest was buddy finding (sorry Brightkite). The results may be skewed by the age profile and perhaps a younger audience would have leaned towards buddy finding.

As to how the startups would make a return for the VC's who have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into this space - no one seems to have a clue.

And the conclusion ...... well you should have been there to hear that. I am doing a reprise of the content in a short slot at the Being Location Aware event on March 19th, it looks like fun. Come along and find out whether I thought location based social networks were a goldmine or a dead end.

GeoCommunity is back blogging

The GeoCommunity blog is back with updates and news about the conference. The latest post can be seen in the blog links section on the right.

Location based social networking - opportunity or blind alley?

Some 2008 research predicted that location based mobile social networking will be a $3.3bn market by 2013. When I first saw this last year I was impressed at the apparent degree of accuracy in their prediction, I wonder how much they have revised their prediction over the last few months? 

The report was too expensive for me to subscribe so Luke Razell and I have done a little of our own research and blue-sky thinking. We will be reviewing the opportunity, current players and trends and discussing our thoughts, opinions and ideas at the BCS Geospatial SIG on Thursday evening. If you want to come along mail me through the blog and I will try to get you added to the guest list if there are any places left.