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?

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So finally it looks like the penny may have dropped, INSPIRE is an out of date, complex, mess, that’s destined to fail in its overarching goal to provide a European platform for geospatial powered decision making.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

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.

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.

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?

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!

The consultation paper on the Government’s proposal to open up Ordnance Survey’s data relating to electoral and local authority boundaries, postcode areas and mid scale mapping information has just been published:

Policy options for geographic information from Ordnance Survey

A novel approach has been taken to resolve this and similar problems using Flickr’s 90 million geotagged photographs: The Shape of Alpha.

A handy demonstration of the API has been developed by Tom Talyor. A good example of the power of crowd sourced datasets.

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?