Google wants your geodata

Last week Google Maps Mania had a post about a soon to be launched feature in the Google Maps API.

Google have announced that in a few weeks time they will be adding new functionality to the Google Maps API v2 that allows Google to log the location and content of the markers and/or infowindows that are displayed in Google Maps mashups. Google then plans to use the gathered data created by Google Maps developers within the main Google Maps site.

Can you see where this is going? If Google are building their own map of the world as they phase out Tele Atlas then all of the mashedup content provides an additional source of information and content to add to that gleaned from collecting StreetView and whatever other smart collection techniques Google have in plan.

This takes crowd sourcing to another level or is it the ultimate in Derived Data?

I would be fascinated to know how Google will extract features and infer information from the mashed up points and info windows?

Of course if you don't want your geodata to be absorbed by Google there is a way to stop them by switching off indexing in your API settings (but I guess that means that less people will find your app when they search for it).

You can sort of understand why OS lawyers were getting a little heated about the "perpetual rights" clause in Google's T&C's a few months back.

The end of dodgy offside decisions

I was chatting with Mike Sanderson of 1spatial last week at Where2.0Now about the potential of geo-rules in his company's Radius Studio.

Somehow (can't think how) the conversation managed to get to football and he said that it would be easy to write the offside rules into Radius if only you knew where the players are at any point in time (and where the ball was). Ubisense's real time location tracking would seem to be the answer to that offering sub second tracking at high accuracy.

So it could be that two veterans of the geospatial industry could hold the answer to all of those disputed offside decisions. Just need an enlightened football authority to run some tests.

And a happy 40th birthday to 1spatial (formerly Laser-Scan).

Vermeer 3 - iPhone 3

Yes it was a draw at AGI Northern's Where2.0Now event in Harrogate on Tuesday! In a great day of geoweb presentations and conversation the audience were treated to 3 pictures of Vermeer's "The Geographer" as a token paleo and surprisingly only 3 pictures of an iPhone breaking the apparent trend that every presentation has to have a picture of an iPhone and a reference to OSM.


The attendees seemed to enjoy the event although there were some baffled faces when John McKerrell was showing how he tracked his location history on mapme.at and linked it to his Weasley Clock. Surprisingly the academic contingent of the audience were most sceptical about the value of tracking personal location history which seems strange to me considering some of the topics that academics chose to research.

The presentation of the day (IMHO) was Tim Waters on a community powered project to take the New York Public Library's collection of scanned historic maps and rectify and warp them over OpenStreetMap and then to digitise features from the maps. Defying the demo gods Tim did a great demo of the tools that are used and finished with a spectacular display of ancirent maps draped over a Google Earth globe. You can play with the warping application and view the maps, or even participate, here. What use? Well Landmark have built a very substantial business deriving previous land use data and inferring potential environmental contamination from historic maps for a start.

John Fagan of Microsoft talked about the dangers of taking a too simplistic approach to thematic mapping in web applications and came up with one of the quotes of the day "Do we really want web developers carrying out spatial analysis? It could all go wrong!" as he illustrated how John Snow could have got his famous identification of the contaminated water pump wrong if he had use the wrong boundaries. It got a bit technical for me but the academics seemed to be nodding with approval when he mentioned MAUP, the slides are here.

Ed Parsons closed the event with a presentation entitled "Lessons from a Blind MapMaker" not sure that I understood the title but the presentation was good particularly Ed reassuring us that there was no Google plan for world domination!

Rollo Home and his helpers are to be congratulated on putting together this event. Joking aside, the Geoplan offices and the towns of Harrogate and Knaresborough made a wonderful setting for the event.



Oh and attending a GeoCommunity offshoot event without having to speak, organise or promote was a new and very enjoyable experience. It gave me plenty of time to tweet and even if you are not a twitterer you can follow the back channel of conversation in this tweetdoc.

Not a good week for Geowebbers in London

Just as the northern geoweb folk gather in Harrogate for AGI's Where2.0Now, comes news/rumours of layoffs at Microsoft and Cloudmade's London based engineering teams.

For Microsoft this is probably an inevitable part of the gradual absorption (aka disappearance) of the Multimap acquisition although it may not feel like that for any of the remaining long term mutimappers. For Cloudmade the layoffs follow the departure of a CEO and previous layoffs of community ambassadors - it looks like they are battening down the hatches to ensure that they manage costs until revenues start to pick up (or the next round of funding).

So there are going to be quite a few very clever geopeople looking for an opportunity in London. The germ of an idea is forming ..... multimappers and cloudmaders you KnowWhere to find me.

Norf London

Well it's a matter of place really - which side of Norf London do you come from? Red or White?

One can apply all sorts of socio-economic and geo-demographic analysis to the regional distribution of excessive proclaimers (sometimes referred to as Keanites or Redknappers) within the northern reaches of London but it does appear this morning that they all seem to be concentrated around N17. Whilst the quietly confident and sometimes gloating will be found in N5.

It would be good to measure the "bragging index" between N5 and N17 but as a substitute I have used the tweetometer to show that at least in the twittersphere it is another win for the Arsenal.

It has been a good weekend