The Spatial Miscellany

Another rainy weekend proved a good excuse to sit down and put some theory into practice…

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?

…the Power Of Information taskforce is asking that question; and is prepared to stump up £20,000 to take your idea to the next level! The reasoning behind the competition is to get an understanding of the data and information the government needs to share to move things forward. To get the competition underway they’ve just released some new government datasets; for example, a list of all 22,000 schools.

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…

This post builds on a previous post from earlier in the week, when I gave mention to some Nokia\Apache software that runs as a mobile web server on my mobile phone (a Nokia N95). The first thing that jumped out was the architecture of the software, ‘software above the level of a single device’ as coined by Tim O’Reilly. Then Phil jumped in with a comment agreeing with O’Reilly that such software has the potential to simplify the user interface of devices with small screens, but there is more to this software. A Google blog search revealed Ricky Cadden asking the same question…”I think there’s some serious potential here [MWS], though I can’t quite put my finger on it”.

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.

There will be a live webcast of the Geospatial Web Services workshop held at the University of Nottingham today:

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

Last month saw the annual event that is [Where 2.0], a conference hosted by O’Reilly in San Francisco. Over the past couple of years it’s been somewhat of a landmark event in the geospatial calendar, often playing host to a raft of new and exciting location aware technology…Woodstock for Neogeography?

I’ve never managed to attend the conference, but always made a conscious effort to follow online; this year it felt different, no headline announcements or cool new products, and very little chatter.

One announcement that did grab my attention was made by John Hanke from Google during the ESRI\Google keynote (you can watch the keynote here). Hanke remarks that Google have provided access, via their search API’s, to the Google ‘GeoIndex’ – an index of results returned by Google robots as they crawl the web for geospatial content. On the surface, this is significant news, but it seems to have received only little comment.

Hanke suggests the Google search API’s will provide access to the “content, attribution, linkbacks and the urls” that make the geoweb…but where are the underlying resources, where are the KML files?

Barry Hunter has knocked up a useful php script that queries the GeoIndex and nicely formats the JSON response. Try it out and you’ll notice you get a handful of Google Maps url’s, but no links to the underlying resources? Hopefully, there is more to come; providing access to the GeoIndex, and the underlying content files, really would move the ‘geoweb’ forward.