The Spatial Miscellany

It’s that time of year again, the Developer Summit and a trip to Palm Springs are just around the corner. The Q&A has just been posted on esri.com, here is one interesting question…”Will there be a replacement for MapObjects?”

For anyone not able to make it out to California, lots of sessions from the Dev Summit last year are available online as videos on the EDN website.

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a program that offers student developers cash to write code for various open source projects. Google will be working with several open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over a three month period.

I think it’s a great opportunity for students, surely better than spending many summer months obsessing on an esoteric thesis that will never see the light of day – perhaps that was just my experience? Christopher Schmidt and others have offered their support for students wishing to further develop OpenLayers, it would be great to see some of the stuff on the list tackled.

This time last year I stumbled across a report from Deloitte, a consulting firm, with telecommunication predictions for 2007, they painted a big roll for location based services (LBS) in driving the mobile industry forward – they were right.

March 2007 saw the release on the GPS enabled Nokia N95, assisted GPS followed shortly after. August saw a national campaign from Vodafone advertising location based services from UK property website Rightmove, and traffic updates from the AA. If in any doubt of the impact LBS would have on the mobile industry in 2007, October saw Nokia stump up $8 billion for mapping data provider Navteq; and only last week, news broke of a location enabled Apple iPhone.

The 2008 report strikes a more bearish note for LBS, at least with regards to GPS enabled mobile phones. Deloitte acknowledge that the convergence of successful technologies in their own right, doesn’t always add value to the converged device…just because we can GPS enable mobile phones, does it add value?

I have sympathy with this view point, and recall with anxiety, last weeks news from the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) of the MP3 enabled Stun Gun:

Yep, you can sing along to your favourite tracks while shooting anyone who causes you distress with a 50,000 volt electric charge. What would your song be?

The 2008 Deloitte report can be found here: Deloitte Telecommunications Predictions 2008.

The release of SQL Server 2008 will see two new types for representing spatial information, namely GEOMETRY & GEOGRAPHY. Geometry will be used for their planar (”flat-Earth”) model and Geography for their ellipsoidal (”round-Earth”) model, it’s a unique approach and seems to make sense, time will tell how popular it proves. Perhaps the most interesting difference between the two types reared its head on the SQL Spatial forum a few weeks back (see thread)…

When Microsoft released a preview of SQL Server 2008 in November, the order in which they returned coordinate pairs from one type, was the opposite of the order they returned coordinate pairs from the other type. The problem seems to stem from the widely held assumption that ‘What is your Lat Long?’ is the same question as ‘What is your XY?’

However, Latitude is a measure of distance from the equator, so it’s really more analogous to the distance Y in a planar model; likewise, Longitude is a measure of distance from the Prime Meridian and is therefore analogous to the distance X in a planar model. So ‘What is your XY?’ in a flat earth model, is really more comparable to the question ‘What is your Long Lat?’ in a round earth model. Traditionally GI professionals, and the software they use, have simply switched Latitude and Longitude, conveniently storing all coordinate pairs as XY…or Longitude \ Latitude.

There is a whole load more behind this issue than covered in the description above, check out the forum thread for a full brief. The good news is Microsoft have listened to the community, and indicated they’ll make efforts to switch the order before release; fingers crossed they can do this in time, and the spatial team has the priority to delay release if necessary. Their responsiveness earned a box of chocolates from Paul Ramsey; elsewhere, Morten Nielsen and Bill Dollins have a number of informed posts on SQL Server Spatial.

This Christmas the Scottish Government teamed up with Microsoft to encourage safer driving on Scotland’s roads (press release). Anti drink driving adverts were to be displayed on the virtual billboards within popular Xbox 360 games like the Need for Speed and Pro Evolution Soccer. Microsoft seems to have used ‘GeoIP’ to ensure the adverts were only displayed to online players in Scotland and not elsewhere.

This is a remarkably innovative trial by the Scottish Government, and I’m sure it will prove successful - although how its success will be measured I don’t know? And great foresight from Microsoft to build this functionality into their games before release, once again recognising the value of ‘where’. In the longer run, could the ability to embed local advertising content into computer games be disruptive to existing business models? In a similar way to the impact of Google Maps on geographic data providers, perhaps one day games will be free, subsidized by adverts for the video and pizza shops at the end of the road?