The Spatial Miscellany

The Google Maps API was never meant to be free. It was an inspired accident. Clever developers reverse engineered the Google Maps site, and rather than send a cease and desist, Google published the API…more here.

The rest is history. The ‘system integrators’ day rate was slashed as the ‘mashup’ was born, and a wave of web API’s followed. The general consensus is that this is just good business sense, ‘we’d hoped advertising would have funded the API, it hasn’t, so now we need to charge some money’ – hum, I wonder if there’s more beneath the surface?

When considering this news alongside other press releases in the Google Geo space this year, like this one last week announcing GeoEyes investment in Google Earth Builder, it appears to be a deliberate shift in focus from consumer GIS to enterprise GIS. I really struggle to understand, why?

Why does an advertising & search company, who revolutionised advertising by removing the large sales force and middlemen, staff up to sell enterprise software?

Last week news broke that Wayne Rooney Senior had been arrested on grounds of involvement in a betting scam. This story wasn’t just about daft footballers and bags of money, this story was really one of Geography! In an attempt to better understand what happened, I mapped this story from the Daily Mirror using ArcGIS.com.

A bunch of guys from Liverpool decided to bet notable sums of money on the sending off of a Motherwell FC player. In the 83rd minute of the game, Steve Jennings had an argument with the referee and was sent off. Steve used to live in Liverpool, once playing for the mighty Tranmere Rovers before retiring to Motherwell in the Scottish Premier League. Steve’s sending off resulted in some hefty pay outs for the bookies, not unusual perhaps… until we map them:

Mapping the payouts show a number of payouts in Liverpool, some 200 miles south of Fir Park (home to Motherwell FC). Now if this was Man United, whose fans do actually live more than 200 miles from Old Trafford – no bother, however, this isn’t Manchester United, this isn’t even an English League club, this is Motherwell FC.

Idiots. Or do we just need to get them a copy of ArcGIS?

Last month the National Audit Office (NAO) shared their findings from a review of value for money delivered by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) £40 Million investment in GIS. For every £4 spent on GIS, Defra delivers a £1 return on investment – ouch.

It’s worth casting an eye on the findings from the NAO, especially if you are in the process of drafting or updating your Geo Information strategy. The review suggests the existing strategy is technology heavy, and it’s hard to pass further comment with no exposure to the strategy or its implementation.

The key ‘finding’ in the report is familiar to all who work with GI – how do you quantify the value of GIS? It’s not tangible, it supports better decision-making, it’s a platform supporting the work of other departments, all of this is true, but frustratingly it doesn’t cut the mustard when it comes to establishing return on investment.

Executive Summary (PDF)
Full Report (PDF)
Methodology (PDF)

So finally it looks like the penny may have dropped, INSPIRE is an out of date, complex, mess, that’s destined to fail in its overarching goal to provide a European platform for geospatial powered decision making. Of course, nobody actually said as much during the recent Edinburgh based INSPIRE 2011 conference, but watching the videos and PowerPoints the message was clear…”go beyond INSPIRE”, because if you don’t, your wasting your time. Well, Maybe.

INSPIRE and Politics

INSPIRE is first and foremost a political project, and for this it should be recognised as a massive success, by hook or by crook, European government agencies will (eventually) provide some sort of access to their treasured data. But those involved in delivering INSPIRE must now draw a line under the politics (that job has now been done), we have a mandate – the first question of the open floor panel session questioned if capitalism is the real issue? Now, there may be a topic for discussion here – over a beer, but lets first focus on addressing the short comings of what’s in our control, our politicians have granted the GI community a mandate to share our information, but unless we start to tackle the short comings of INSPIRE, our failure will be of our own accord.

Open Data, Open Source and Open Standards – they aren’t the same things, you can have one without the other, unfortunately this is often forgotten by those driving INSPIRE, it appears to be all or nothing. INSPIRE is about Open Data – forget about the rest, if it works for you as an organisation to use open source software, do so, like wise if you feel open standards mean you can provide access to more data and with more convenience for the consumer, then do so, but if using expensive open source software and overly complex open standards means you are attempting to deliver open access to data with your hands tied behind your back, recognise that.

INSPIRE the technical Implementation

All that snazzy new technology that gave us Web 2.0? Slippy maps and tile caches, web Mercator, KML and network links streaming gigabytes of data, user centric system design, human and machine understandable REST API’s, GeoRSS and a number of other simple data formats. The stuff that actually allowed us (the enlightened GI people) to reach out beyond our own community for the first time – forget about it, we’ve still got our 20th century open standards designed by committee.

INSPIRE and the User

This is where INSPIRE really falls short. It may be just an innocent consequence of technology and society moving faster than the system, rather than a complete oversight of the fact that systems actually have users. Perhaps once upon a time, somebody really did want to know where the library was, that contained the index, that located the book, that might just answer their question – but for better or worse I came of age post Internet, and ignorantly I just want to know the answer to my goddamn question…and now.

It looks like several INSPIRE Geo Portals where demonstrated during the conference in Edinburgh, many of the published PowerPoints contain screen shots and links to implementations. Perhaps one of the most successful portal implementations I’ve seen is that developed by CEH which appears to be an ArcGIS Server GeoPortal Server implementation, available here. Now lets consider the user approaching the portal for a ’simple’ search…

Now, lets imagine a non GI user approaching the portal to find the pollution indicators for the River Mersey and River Dee? Where would they start? With a search for ‘other’? Or a search for a ’service’? To a non GI user, that probably means a consulting service? Or do they search for an application (apparently not the one they are using)? Or another catalog (again, not the one they are using)? It’s an excellent implementation of a metadata driven GeoPortal, but its not intuitive, its not designed with the user in mind.

Here we must ‘move beyond’ view and download services, towards an infrastructure that provide real access to the data, to the features. People don’t want to search metadata records, they want to search data. Moreover, people don’t want to maintain metadata records, they want to maintain the data. Sure there will always be a place for metadata (especially metadata intrinsic to the data itself), but we must shift the focus of INSPIRE from being a metadata driven infrastructure, to being a data driven infrastructure. To help us with this we can look towards recent developments in web search technology and successful API implementations (of which there are plenty).

In this post I’ve vented some long held frustrations (if it wasn’t obvious ), and the intention isn’t to dismiss all of the hard and admirable work undertaken by those involved with INSPIRE to date, it’s good work, good progress, but we really do need to look up from the map and check our bearing (and perhaps pick up a TomTom) if we wish to celebrate an SDI people will use come 2020.

Further web commentary on the conference can be found here:

Ed Parsons, Google
Ian Painter, Snowflake

It was whilst researching HTML5 mobile phone development that I stumbled on ‘App Inventor’. App Inventor can be found in Google Labs. It’s a web based application that allows you to develop applications visually with ‘lego blocks’.

With the aim of helping children learn maths and computing, a few years back some very bright people at MIT set about building a visual programming language called Scratch. Instead of writing lines of code, you arrange lego blocks that represent events, actions and logic. For those working in the GIS space think FME or Model Builder. Google have now taken this work, and built upon it, with ‘App Inventor’. Drag and drop building blocks, from within your web browser, to build an application for your Android mobile phone – the web development environment even includes an emulator. Sounds good, but does it really work?

In short – Yes. It’s a beta service and you can only deploy to phones connected to your PC (no Android market place distribution yet). It’s a Google beta, which means comprehensive, robust, and well supported. Everything I need for my mobile apps, is already there, location awareness, read-write-web, rich user forms, local storage and graphics.

It’s remarkable that mobile phone applications can now be developed within hours. I hope Google continue to grow this initiative, and can only recommend you try it.