The Spatial Miscellany

A Christmas stuffing for the OS, a cold Turkey, or a Christmas Cracker?

The consultation paper on the Government’s proposal to open up Ordnance Survey’s data relating to electoral and local authority boundaries, postcode areas and mid scale mapping information has just been published:

Policy options for geographic information from Ordnance Survey

It’s probably closer to art, than the maths of geodesy, but wouldn’t it look great on an iPhone navigating the streets of New York?

Here and There – a horizonless projection in Manhattan – the work of Schulze & Webb, a creative design agency based in London.

Last week the Power of Information (POI) Task Force published a draft report that they plan to hand over to the government, advising how government can deliver benefit to the public from new developments in digital media and the use of state generated information. Their coverage of Trading Funds, and their suitability as a model for running organisations such as Ordnance Survey is a worthy read.

Over the last nine months the POI task force have blogged and discussed pertinent issues openly, ran a competition (Show Us a Betterway) to engage with the public and subsequently canvassed opinion from entrants, and they’ve also spoken with several organisations in related industries. A marked contrast to the ‘we know better’ approach taken by the GI Panel and their Place Matters report, and the work of the Shareholder Executive in their role assessing the suitability of Trading Funds.

Hopefully – it would make sense – the findings of the POI taskforce feed into the review of trading funds and OS business model by the Shareholder Executive? I guess we’ll have to wait for the budget to see if it’s a case of ‘joined up government’, or left-arm right-arm. The POI task force report, in its current form, gives the Shareholder Executive a clear alternative to an ‘off the shelf’ Ordnance Survey privatisation.

Given the potential impact this interest from the cabinet office could have on the UK GI Industry, I’m surprised at the lack of discussion among stakeholders? The AGI have just posted a response to the UK Location Strategy…it would be interesting to learn of their input into the work of the cabinet office and Shareholder Executive, or their take on the draft report from the Power Of Information task force?

ProgrammableWeb reports of a new open source mapping control from Microsoft named DeepEarth. The control integrates their Virtual Earth mapping service and their Silverlight web platform.

A demo has been developed by Soul Solutions here.

For some background on the history of DeepZoom, the underpinning technology, TED have a video:

Inspired by the recent rather uninspiring Microsoft campaign (I’m a PC), and the prospect of hacking together an application for the Apple iPhone, I’ve just splashed out on a MacBook.

John McKerrell has been posting recently on his experience developing an iPhone application for the ‘Free The Postcode‘ project – the project aims to build a free collection of UK postcodes (why?).

Interestingly, I found John’s application surfing the application store on my iTouch; it’s a smart move by Apple to put such consideration into providing a market place and distribution channel for application developers. John has shared the download stat’s for his FreeThePostcode app…a staggering 3000 downloads in just a couple of months – for an application that targets a niche audience – all very impressive.

Matthew Somerville has also built a similar iPhone application for FixMyStreet.