Earlier in the summer Ed Parsons noted the recruitment of a GIS analyst for the Obama campaign…

On the campaign trial John McCain struggled with the Iraq-Pakistan border…

A slip of tongue, or a clue to future foreign policy? Kevin Burke has noted similar geography hiccups from Barack Obama.

Of course long before November 4th, geography and GIS are at work carving the outcome of the election, the folks over at WhyTuesday have posted a clip to YouTube raising awareness of ReDistricting and the dark art of Gerrymandering…

I often work on the assumption that location adds value to an application, so it was intriguing to discover that a greater percentage of location aware applications are given away for free (40%), in comparison to the larger pool of iPhone applications, of which only a quarter are given away, and the remainder are sold.

Her book ‘Envelopes: A Puzzling Journey Through the Royal Mail‘ is on sale shortly.

Google have acquired a new JavaScript engine (V8) written from the ground up to work more efficiently with websites that have large amounts of JavaScript rather than the little snippets of JavaScript which was typical of websites developed when JavaScript was first integrated into Netscape Navigator in the mid 1990s.

Typically JavaScript engines use a dictionary-like data structure as storage for object properties - each property access requires a dynamic lookup to resolve the property’s location in memory. V8 works differently…the first time V8 encounters an object it interprets how the object would be represented as a class, creating a hidden class, which means the next time the object is encountered, its properties can be accessed from memory without the time consuming dynamic look up.

Google give a far more comprehensive introduction to this approach in their documentation of V8, conveniently they use the example of an object common to all GIS developers…a Point.

So What?

The novel approach taken by the V8 JavaScript engine, presents a new opportunity for GIS web developers to work with Points, Lines and Polygons on the web client instead of the web server as is typical of a web based GIS. Using JavaScript in the web browser removes the need for lengthy round trips to the Server, which will make for faster web mapping applications.

Here and now, this will allow web mapping API developers to work with more markers, the typical 100 marker limit of Google Maps applications (and similar web mapping API’s) - is no more; Mike Williams and his team have reported working with as many as 2000 markers when using Google Maps within Chrome.

Chrome isn’t the only web browser to recognize the importance of working with JavaScript heavy web sites, for example, much work is being done on a new JavaScript engine for Firefox. Perhaps in the future, as this approach gains support, spatial analysis functionality can move from the server to the client, which would make for a more engaging web mapping experience?

If anyone is looking for a dissertation project, or has time of their hands, it would be interesting to see the outcome of taking some topological operators (e.g. Java Topology Suite), Google Web Toolkit (GWT) and GWT for Google Maps, all served up with Google Chrome?

Unfortunately, not everyone would agree, with the Dave & George show, Eric Pickles MP, the tax payers alliance and their collective voice asking if it’s not all just a waste of public money?

What do you think…is Eric Pickles MP, an uninformed and short-sighted member of parliament? Or is he right on the money?

An abstract from The Telegraph below:

The mystery £34,000 a year job has been advertised by the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG).

The successful candidate must have “a strong focus on Place” and understand “what is happening at particular places, what factors influence success and how location impacts upon them”, according to the advert.

“Traditional spatial analysis is embedded with out analysts but we wish to extent into quantitative techniques such as spatial statistics and spatial modelling” it reads.

The Conservatives branded the new role a waste of money.

Eric Pickles, the shadow local government secretary said: “The public will be outraged that when the people are losing their jobs the Government is using taxpayers’ money advertising for such pointless positions.”

The full article can be found here, and perhaps of more value, the job here.

I talked it over with my well informed friend at the council, who cast some light on the interaction between Local Government, the Royal Mail and the Ordnance Survey…

…local government has an inescapable business need to store data about a multitude of non-addressable objects (ATMs, bus shelters, you name it…they probably need it). Ten years ago, no such dataset existed, historically the old OS address products (AddressPoint etc.) only contained entities that received post, as they were all based on the Royal Mail PAF. To address this business need Local Government set about creating a National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG) because no dataset existed which met their needs. Now, here is the Chestnut, enter stage left, two government agencies tasked with delivering a Return on Investment\Capital Employed, and a fictional property developer…

Watson PLC decide to build some new properties. Having identified and procured a suitable site and decided what you would like to build the next step, by law, is to apply for Planning Permission from the appropriate local authority. As part of that process you are required to submit detailed, scaled drawings showing precisely what you are proposing to build and where you are proposing to build it. So… local government is always the first to know about new developments.

If you are granted Planning Permission then you are advised to contact the “Street Naming and Numbering Officer” of the Local Authority concerned to agree the addresses of your new properties with them. This is a statutory duty of local government that, legally, no-one else can do (The legislation under which this happens varies but it’s most often Sections 17-19 of the 1925 Public Health Act). If you’re building new streets the Local Authority name them and add them to the National Street Gazetteer. They also allocate the individual property numbers.

Now the daft bit; clearly the only organisation that can assign a postcode to new properties is Royal Mail as postcodes are their property (and exist solely for the purpose of facilitating the delivery of mail by Royal Mail). The Local Authority Street Naming and Numbering Officer therefore has to give their new addresses to Royal Mail for them to add the postcode and, if one is necessary, the post town. As soon as an address contains a postcode it becomes Royal Mail’s Intellectual Property as they own postcodes! They then pass the address to OS who geo-code it, link it to the OSMM TOID, stick it in Address Layer 2 and sell it!

The real choker for Local Government and the UK tax payer is that if Local Government wishes to use address data with postcodes in, which of course they have to, then they have to pay royalties to Royal Mail to do so! They are forced to spend taxpayers money “buying back” address data most of which they created in the first place!

…my friend at the council puts his spin on the process to underline his frustration, just as the man from the OS, or the woman from the Royal Mail might put their spin on the process to underline their frustration. But the real issue here is…this is the system working?! All organisations are doing a good job, working to direction from the government, and delivering their targets. However, this doesn’t disguise the fact that… millions of pounds of tax payers money is being spent in duplicating what should be a single, definite and accessible resource.

The theory goes…take a GPS enabled mobile phone; some beta software from Nokia; a handful of HTML, Javascript and PHP goodness; and you have all the components for a dynamic tracking web service and mapping website?

Well, the theory works! I’ve put a demonstration together at the following link:

Mobile Phone Tracking with a Nokia N95 Demonstration

Given all the current hype regarding some telecomunications technology; I’m puzzled by the apparent lack of interest in the mobile web server. Sure, there are a few pieces to still fall into place, but if the mobile web server’s graduation from Nokia research labs, results in widespread deployment, it must have a profound impact on the web?

Their website to harvest ideas (showusabetterway.co.uk) has been up for just over a day and seems to be getting a terrific response, I ran the ideas to date through Wordle to get a flavour of the requests being made, here are the results:

Congratulations to the POI taskforce; it’s a great step forward for the Free Our Data campaign. So if you’ve got ideas, get over there and jot them down. I’ve thrown my hat in the ring with the suggestion of a Road Works API…

Here is one reason I think it’s a real game changer - it completely removes the necessity of a network operator?

The likes of Skype and Gizmo already threaten the network operators’ phone call revenues, with VOIP based services; the mobile web server goes further. Let’s assume all mobile phones run with a mobile web server and have access to a wireless internet connection. Now write a one sentence webpage and host it on your mobile web server; restrict permission to view that web page to your best pal; make a request against a web service, running on your friend’s mobile web server, that alerts them of the new page you’ve created; and essentially you’ve just sent a text message - but without the network operator.

Moreover, replacement of the 160 character text message is only the beginning, this is revolutionary technology and a whole host of innovative applications can be expected to follow. What form might they take?

If we do move to a situation where the world’s 3 billion mobile devices ship configured as web servers, it would represent at least a doubling in the size of the internet (if there is a suitable metric by which to make such a measurement). What is more, if recent trends continue, and phones are equipped with GPS, these new web servers will be location aware and mobile.

http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/geography/geowebservices/