Archive for the 'GIS' Category

Place matters: the Location Strategy for the United Kingdom

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on November 25, 2008
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At last the Location Strategy for the UK has been published here.  It was started in 2005. I have not waded through it all yet….

An initial skim suggests the main recommendation is more integration of public sector data through common references (DNF is mentioned).  There do not seem to be any radical “Free our data” type statements, but they do say dataset owners should:

…simplify their licensing
arrangements so as to facilitate the sharing
of data to realise greater overall value

Oh, and we would get a new government “Location Council” to deliver the new Location Strategy.

Yahoo!’s spatial thinking

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on November 21, 2008
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I have been taking some time to explore there latest spatial thinking and innovations by Yahoo!.  Setting aside some of the current business politics, I think Yahoo! are doing some of the most interesting stuff at the moment. 

It started a while ago with their Where On Earth (WOE) IDs.  Basically these provide a hierarchical identifier system based on location.  I must admit it took me ages to realise what these are all about.  I have a map centric view centric view of the world and places, so it seemed very odd at first.  WOE IDS geo-tag (i.e. locate) things in a very different way (with no need for a map or lat/lon).  When talking about a place all people really care about is what place it is and how to ensure that they are all talking about the same place (even if you might individually define its extent differently).  Lets take an example, if we want to share data relating to Soho, how do we make sure we are talking about the same place?  So with this system we do not have to argue endlessly about what the lat/lon of Soho is (or even worse try and define it’s extent), all we have to agree on is that Soho is in London which is in England which is in Great Britain, give it an ID and then we know we are talking about the same place… 

So what I love about WOE ID is it is a simple non mapping solution to an age old spatial problem.  In fact a map is ultimately relegated to just a display function.

So ahy has this now got really interesting?  Well Flickr has been storing WOE IDs for geo-tagged photos.  From this Yahoo! have been able to predict the extent of places (with WOE IDs) based on the geo-tags for the relevant Flickr photos.  The resulting geometries are know as Alpha Shapes.  So this is a completely different way to discover more about the geo-extent of a place.  Taking the Soho example (which BTW is not an officially defined area) we can define it’s extent by what most people (taking photos) think it is.  There are examples and details of this approach here on the Flickr development blog.. 

What I love about this is that, by taking a non map-centric view of place, Yahoo have developed an approach that can tell us more about what the the perceived geographic extent of a place is.  No GIS person would ever think of doing it this way round!

Even better you can get the data yourself (as ESRI shapefiles) and try the software Yahoo use to create the Alpha Shapes (called Clustr).

More details on Alpha Shapes are blogged here too.

Lets hope this innovation continues!

Day 2 - AGI 2008 @ Stratford-Upon-Avon

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on September 25, 2008
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agi08geocommunitylogo

So I survived the 80s party last night and enjoyed some great conversations and debates on Day 2.  As before here are some of the highlights for me…

Charles Kennelly - ESRI

Charles did a bit of a defence of ‘traditional’ GIS.  Although he stated that “Understanding mapping is at a historic high” he made the argument that “…understanding of GIS still lags behind”, saying that the neo-geographers are a “community that does not realise that this [GIS] is hard”.  Of course ESRI can solve these hard problems for you! 

He gave a demo of integration of GIS for Forestry into Outlook - a great idea as outlook is now the main tool many of us use on the desktop these days. 

Stuart Hayes - Defence Geographic Centre

Stuart’s presentation was really interesting.  I liked the idea of “forensic cartography” (i.e. reverse engineering a map to see how it was made with what data).  There were some interesting approaches to data extraction from imagery and LIDAR for areas with little mapping (e.g. Afghanistan).  The best quote was “Every officer now does to war with their own laptop, because they can’t take an MOD laptop out of the office these days”

Johannes Kebeck - Digital Globes

I just caught the end of Johannes’ presentation which generated a great deal of interest in Virtual Earth and the new features released last night.

Day 1 - AGI 2008 @ Stratford-Upon-Avon

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on September 24, 2008
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agi08geocommunitylogo

I am a the AGI 2008 Conference in Stratford-Upon-Avon, UK.  This is the annual conference for the UK based Association for Geographic Information.

These have been some highlights for me today…

Sean Phelan - Multimap founder

Sean did a great presentation on the history of Multimap and its sale to Microsoft.  The interesting piece of advice was “Understand the economics” or you are doomed.  Sean pointed out that there were very few economists in the GI industry, as compared to say the Telecom industry.  Out of the AGI audience of 600 today there were none!  We are doomed?

Geoff Zeiss - Autodesk

A great presentation on the value of truly 3D models.  My favourite bit was the thought:  “If you show something in 2D, you always have to explain it.  If you show something in 3D  people just get it”.  His example was explaining to a mayor about a new development.

Andrew Hudson-Smith - MapTube (UCL)

Andrew did my favourite presentation today.  It was great sideways look at the 3D modelling work they have done (the Virtual London Project) and MapTube.  The highlight for me was seeing 3D London models within an Xbox 360.  Cool!  My favourite quote was “The world wanted 3D three years ago.  Now Virtual Earth have done it”  And the phonetic tongue in cheek change from London to Phuket after some licensing issues…

Your GIS is Dead…

And I managed to do my “GIS Is Dead” presentation without getting lynched.  Phew…  My slides are on skydrive.

Earthquake Modelling

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on September 8, 2008
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I find it interesting the way web Mapping applications are now moving further and further into the world of GIS…  People now come to expect a rich user experience form one of the web mapping services, but are pushing the boundaries with the analysis.

InLET (The Internet-based Loss Estimation Tool) is a great example where you can do earthquake modelling for a specified event (e.g. you choose the epicentre).  It predicts the number of damaged buildings, injuries etc.  You can’t get more hardcore GIS than that!

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Is this the death of traditional GIS or a new renaissance?  I hope to explore this further at AGI 2008. 

Cloud computing and GIS

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on August 21, 2008
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I have been pondering Martin Daly’s post on the cloud and GIS:

Is The Cloud?

  1. Not new, just the same as The Grid.
  2. Exactly what GIS has been waiting for all along.
  3. Neither of the above.

I’m tending towards 3; 1 and 2 being more-or-less mutually exclusive.

I’m tending towards 2 (Exactly what GIS has been waiting for all along.)  But in fact is this not what has happened already with Web Mapping API.  Who in their right mind would now host their own background mapping and imagery as a default?  And now you can consume advanced geoprocessing tasks within web mapping and web mapping data within traditional GIS.

Update 25th Aug

This sums it up for me…

AGI 2008 - a month to go…

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on August 20, 2008
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The AGI 2008 event will be on 24-5th September in Stratford-upon-Avon (UK).  I have just realised that the 1st AGI event in 1997 (when it used to be in the NEC).   Now I’m feeling old :-(

I really recommend this event, it grew out of the GIS industry, but has been constantly reinventing itself over the years and always takes a frank look at both the positives and negatives in the industry. 

There are some great speakers lined up including Sean Phelan (Founder of Multimap) and Vanessa Lawrence (Director General of Ordnance Survey).  They could have some interesting things to say and perhaps some challenging questions! 

I’ll be there and presenting on the differences/relationship between web mapping and GIS.  I may live to regret the title…

SQL Server 2008 Released - Now with spatial!

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on August 7, 2008
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SQL Server 2008 was released yesterday and can be evaluated from here. 

The bit I am excited about is the new Spatial Support.

Johannes Kebeck has some great posts on how to use this with Virtual Earth.  Also see this white paper.

‘Community’ Mapping – so much choice

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on August 1, 2008
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This is certainly the time for ‘community’ mapping, there are so many organisations to choose from!  So if I want to contribute to a ‘community’ spatial data set I could choose from:

1.       The original Open Street Map, with the famous parties…

2.       MapMaker from Google, as endorsed by our Ed

3.       AND’s map 2.0

4.       TeleAtlas MapInsight

5.       Navteq’s MapReporter

6.       TomTom’s MapShare

7.       Geonames - an open place name gazetteer

8.       And more I am sure I have missed…

Hmmm, which one should I choose?  Is there any relationship between any of these datasets? Do I need to update each one to make sure my updates have the maximum impact from my change?  And most importantly WiiFM (what’s in it for me)?

Meanwhile there endless blog debate about who is better than who, see here, here and here.

Well I’m holding off for now…

Virtual Earth - Now in ESRI

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on July 30, 2008
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Coming form a background in GIS and working in Web Mapping I am always really interested in closer collaboration between GIS and and Web Mapping.  In my mind one provides the great interface and the other the sophisticated spatial analysis.  Basically they have different strengths.  Recently I have got really tired of the paleo vs neo geography debate.  It should be about using the right tool for the job and working to integrating them together.  So this is why I am really excited about today’s announcement of the integration between Microsoft Virtual Earth (VE) and ESRI ArcGIS.  VE provides great web mapping, data and performance, while ESRI has always provided a strong, advanced GIS platform (which I grew up with!).

There are 2 aspects to the integration:

1 - VE Data in the ESRI ArcGIS ’stack’

Global, detailed VE mapping and imagery can now be used within ESRI ArcGIS software (e.g. ArcMap, ArcGIS Explorer) as a Premium content layer (at a very reasonable price).  This provides fantastic background data for ESRI users without the headache of having to maintain your own data store.  I wish I had this when I was working with ESRI implementations in Local Government, maintaining our OS Mastermap data store was a nightmare!

You can even use VE maps and imager in ArcGIS Explorer:

Users can preview Virtual Earth street maps, imagery and hybrid map layers at http://resources.esri.com/arcgisonlineservices.

Chris Pendleton has blogged with more detail on this.

2- Using of ArcGIS Server in the Virtual Earth JavaScript API

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It is now possible to build a performant VE JavaScript API mapping application which consumes ArcGIS Server services for advanced geoprocessing tasks.  So you can use the benefits of a Web Mapping API (e.g. performance, global coverage, high availability) combined with the benefits of ‘true’ GIS (e.g. advanced analysis, local/custom data, mapping rendered on the fly).  You can do this with the ESRI ArcGIS JavaScript Extension for Virtual Earth“.

What I love about this is that it gives the best of both worlds!

There are some great examples in the interactive SDK.  My favourite is the ‘Message in a bottle app’ in the ‘Work with Geoprocessing tasks’ section.  I now know that if you drop a bottle in the ocean off the costs of Namibia it will end up at Cuba 300 days later.  Cool!

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I messed around with the examples and did this enhanced application for calculating drive time zones.

Chris has a perspective on this.

The full press announcement is here

More blogging on this to follow…

Update 8th August:

Just found this diagram which helps show the architecture:

y1pCvGqD9WMuJw-MCuW2vcAVWJvKyqKomu53asoHY4H02c11-5oFv1bl-YG1J4OjjxD6KZ6hs_XZFj3FoZUiZ8M2Q