The Spatial Miscellany

So ArcGIS 10 has been out for a month, and it’s all very quite? A recent project threw up the opportunity to get down to work with the new JavaScript ‘2.0’ API and ArcGIS Server 10 – I’m really impressed, and it really distinguishes the ESRI web mapping kit, from the ever popular GYM & OpenLayers.

Most impressive is the level of abstraction in the API, ESRI are really delivering on the sales pitch on this one, its small and powerful – this makes it super quick to develop with, case in hand being the handful of lines required to build a custom identify dialog. In three days last week we went from a handful of Feature Classes to a full-blown web app (and it’s robust). But it’s not just the lean API that makes for rapid development, the close coupling of ArcGIS Server to the Map Document also starts to pay dividends. I’ve always been cautious of MXD driven web services, as its eating up the full set of ArcObjects under the cover, which eats memory on the server, SOC processes rarely start the day on less than 60MBs for breakfast, but the trade off is access to all the goodness of the MXD, in this case some VBScript labelling and scale thresholds – this would be a nightmare and time consuming to code on the client.

Hungry Soc Monsters from Mandy Jouan – helping to make nice web maps =)

From a consultancy perspective, how do you make a business model of delivering JS, Silverlight or Flex based solutions, when the pre-sales associated with securing the work could often be larger than the job itself?

The governments ‘snap’ decision to free OS data seems to have taken many by surprise, and according to reports, the list of those surprised would also include the incumbents at Romsey Road – but to anyone some distance from the small world of UKGeo, what’s the big deal?

To Joe Blow, the OS is best known for its pink Landranger paper maps. Twenty years ago, anyone in Britain could pop out to the high street on a Saturday morning and pick up a large-scale map of their county for the reasonable sum of £5. Children could buy a map with their pocket money, moreover, they could use that map pretty much however they liked, for example, making nice collections like this one:

Well the kids grew up…they got a spectrum, a 520ST, a 486 and then a MacBook – but they could no longer get their map, well, not on their computer, OS maps were now rather expensive (or came with a lot of restrictions).

How this came about is subject to conjecture, but during the period since the £5 map, something changed. In the mid-nineties her majesties government tasked the OS with a new purpose, namely, an annual 5% return on investment (of which, they’ve done a good job) – perhaps the easiest way to deliver ROI is to sell to as few as possible (i.e. lower investment), for as much as possible (i.e. high return) – who could blame them?

What now?

Well the word on the street is the OS ain’t sure? So I take liberty and offer a few suggestions (seems to be the new model of government):

Look to the Landranger – how did it work twenty years ago, sell a few, to the many.

Now anyone who has purveyed the OS accounts will shout “but paper map revenue is tiny”. True, but perhaps that’s because it’s no longer the desired medium? Sell digital data to the masses, people, especially Brits, like to own, so sell them their digital property, there’s upside – have you seen house prices these days? The serious point being that consultancy (e.g. a value added data service) is like prostitution, you’re limited to the number of hours in a day – you need something that scales.

Look to the banks – don’t stop at your borders, grow too big to fail.

In his new blog Thierry Gregorius notes the crude way in which data has been dumped, it would be nice to think this was by necessity (short notice) and not design, but this needs to be improved – quickly. Yahoo has tried, and GeoNames are succeeding, in building a world gazetteer, but the OS has the brand to make it happen. Position yourself at the heart of the ‘geoweb’ – yep, that means codepoint in WGS84 and a restful end point for every toid! Don’t get hung up on how you will fund it, just do it.

We don’t know quite how it happened…perhaps it was an epic press campaign, the weighty voice of Tim Berners Lee, or even a combo of lobby groups and cabs for hire, but make no mistake, UK geospatial data is free, and it’s a game changer – time for Micro GIS!

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?