The Spatial Miscellany

I’ve been asked many times…

‘I want to share a map with a colleague in a remote office, I want to be able to draw my interpretation, and have them draw their interpretation, can you help me?’

Sounds pretty straight forward eh? Web mapping has got us some of the way, but it’s not elegant. For a while now I’ve hoped the web socket technology in HTML5 would come to the rescue, and it’s great to see this example from Stewart over at SAFE.

Having shared a few beers with my Real Time Web Expert and friend Phil Leggetter of Pusher, I understand the original home for push technology is finance; banks like to make all the numbers on the screen change at the same time; so rather than relying on the client to F5 page refresh, or an ajax script to poll for a new exchange rate, they would use a comet server to push the change in exchange rate out to the client – real time.

Where finance leads the rest of the world follows (don’t we know it), but it’s hard to find use cases for ‘push‘ technology; use cases where a user cannot wait 2, 5 or 10 seconds to poll the server for an update? Multi Player Games? For sure. Social Media, think Twitter? Perhaps. Sports Scores and Betting? Maybe – but the PUSH application that stares me in the face is collaborative mapping. I really think the technology GeoPUSH, can open up a whole new world of collaborative mapping possibilities. So great to see this proto (edit, display) from Stewart, it’s the first that I’ve seen, and I’m sure it’s the tip of an iceberg.

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?

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

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.