The Spatial Miscellany

A tantalising blog post from Steve Coast in his new role at Microsoft. What if we could build vector datasets from a raster image? Well it’s been tried before, not least by my friend and colleague Bong Khin Fah, but Microsoft have stood up an experimental service specifically designed to capture roads from their BING imagery.

You can see a video of the new service from Microsoft in action below, or click here to try it out. Fingers crossed this is the tip of an iceberg of some pioneering R&D in Seattle.

I’m back in the UK for the weekend and this TV advert caught my eye:

This app would really work for me (and other customers of Albert Heijn) – Nick Lansley has kept a fascinating blog on Tesco Technology R&D for the last couple of years, it’s really worth a read.

Yesterday, I spotted this article over at ReadWriteWeb, it’s the first article in a forthcoming series of posts that will review new developments in the ‘Internet of Things’ – the Internet of what?

The Internet of Things is a horrible name for something that frankly I can’t wait to see gather more pace. It’s actually such a horrible name it justifies the use of its acronym – IoT. The big idea behind IoT is that lots of things (e.g. fridges, dog collars, cameras) are all connected to the internet and can talk to each other. It’s such an obvious evolution, it prompts the question of why hasn’t it already happened? For a good while the necessary hardware was expensive and big, but the prevailing smart phone boom is evidence that this is no longer the case – Ron Callari asks what’s holding us back, and wonders if it might be government?

I would stop short of suggesting the government (US or UK) is holding back the IoT, but I do feel strongly there is a big opportunity here for government. Most Western governments are currently in a bit of a pickle with some hefty debt commitments, high unemployment and low growth – so here’s a suggestion for the UK coalition government.

Essentially, regulate (or nudge & bump) mobile network operators to prevent them selling ‘mobile internet’ to the same person several times. At home I pay for one single Internet connection, and many ‘things’ in my house can use that connection, they are connected, but when I step out of my door the rules change. I would need a mobile data package for my smart phone, a mobile micro sim for my iPad, a mobile Internet dongle for my laptop, and a mobile subscription plan for my dog collar. Now, I’ll resist talking about what is, and isn’t, fair, but let’s consider the economics.

At first glace the status quo looks good for the economy, I’m paying the network operator four buckets of money for my mobile Internet, they pay dividends to shareholders and tax to the treasury, all that extra money escaping from my moth ridden wallet is funding new ventures and generating growth, yes but, no but – because, you have to be very wealthy or a few screws loose to actually own all four devices with four duplicate mobile internet contracts. If regulation was in place that meant mobile Internet subscriptions could not be tied to a single device, I would dash out tomorrow and splash the cash on the iPad and SmartPhone, and I’d sure be tempted with the dog collar.

The government really could lead on this issue and facilitate a move in this direction, and then we would see many more dog collars and other things (many yet to be conceived) on the Internet. It would be a voter friendly policy and open a world of new opportunity.

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!