The Spatial Miscellany

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!

A Christmas stuffing for the OS, a cold Turkey, or a Christmas Cracker?

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

One thing that often frustrates me when working with a map is the absence of meaningful neighbourhoods. For example, try finding ‘Marchmont’ in Edinburgh, Scotland using Google Maps. You might find ‘Marchmont Road’ but that only gives an indication as to the area that the people of Edinburgh consider to be ‘Marchmont’ the neighbourhood.

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.

Last month Google released a web browser…Google Chrome. It appears to have debuted to mixed reviews, personally I really like it, but others have had less favourable experience. On the surface, it looks much like any other web browser, but underneath, it’s a bit of an animal.

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?