The Spatial Miscellany

This week The Economist has picked up the baton for propagating the ‘geoweb’ meme that has rippled through mainstream media this summer. Obviously, it’s great the see the importance of geography, and geographic information systems (GIS), recognised in such an authoritative publication…but for such a fiercely independent newspaper, I’m a little disappointed with their article ‘The world on your desktop’. Frankly, it amounts to little more than a rehash of material published previously elsewhere…and is no more than a brief introduction to the plethora of Geobrowsers.

The Economist prides itself on informing (and challenging) business, political and financial decision-makers. It was first published in 1843 to take part in ‘a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing progress’. With such a marked purpose, I really think they’ve missed the economists’ story in their coverage of the much talked about geoweb…

How has the emergence of Google Earth changed the business model of data providers? How have geospatial markets responded to such disruptive innovation? What can these markets expect in future? Specifically, I’d be interested to read an article from the The Economist that discusses the present accessibility of UK geospatial data and it’s impact on the geoweb; the merits of the free our data campaign, or a private alternative; and the adequacy of the trading fund model that currently underpins the Ordnance Survey? But then I guess I’m not really the business, political and financial decision-making audience they have in mind…oh well.

That is the question asked in the July\August edition of MIT technology review. In a series of articles, the magazine suggests that a world of virtual earths and mirror globes will eventually replace the internet – a MetaVerse. This idea seems to be flavour of the month with similar articles appearing in other magazines (e.g. business week) and numerous blogs (including the prolific DigitalUrban) throughout the last couple of months.

Technology Review contributor, Wade Roush, talked with Google Maps director John Hanke about the feasibility of the MetaVerse. They suggest a logical first step towards the ‘MetaVerse’ is the representation of real geography, typical of mirror worlds like Google Earth (and ArcGIS Explorer), in virtual worlds like Second Life. Increasingly examples of this can apparently be found in Second Life, for example, researchers at the University of Denver host a dynamic NOAA weather map on a Second Life island. Roush and Hanke suggest the second and marginally more challenging step will be the representation of second life and its avatars in mirror worlds like ArcGIS Explorer and Google Earth. Well with the new OpenGL custom drawing capabilities in ArcGIS Explorer, that’s now possible. The wind vectors in the following video clip are rendered in OpenGL…

Why would you want to render second life avatars in ArcGIS Explorer? I really don’t know. But you can, and what’s more, you can now render any other OpenGL in ArcGIS Explorer. More usefully it may be the output of specialised software unique to your industry that you use to model, wind farms, air pollution, wind vectors or telecom coverage.

Pondering the potential of this new functionality, I discovered OGLE from eyebeam research. OGLE intercepts the OpenGL calls any application makes to the OpenGL library, using this technology it should be possible to extract anything that is drawn in OpenGL – as OpenGL, for example, the building layers in Google Earth, or even the avatars in Second Life. Using the new events and methods exposed in the new ArcGIS Explorer API, such data could now be rendered in ArcGIS Explorer (copyright permitting?).

James, Kirk and Keith remark on the latest release of ArcGIS Explorer elsewhere; and more info on the latest ArcGIS Explorer release can be found on the team blog and at the resource centre.

The NewStatesmen have announced the winners of their 2007 New Media awards; congratulations to everyone at mySociety who secured an award for their ‘contribution to civic society’ with their exemplary website… FixMyStreet.

FixMyStreet is easy to use and demonstrates the benefits of online mapping. Residents can report, view or discuss local problems by locating the issue on a map. The magazine supplement can be downloaded (or viewed online) by following this link…New Media Awards, and you can discover other mySociety projects here…mySociety projects.

Earlier in the week, the BBC reported on the latest research findings from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF). The JRF has been investigating poverty and wealth across Britain, and how its spatial distribution has changed between 1968 to 2005. Despite a heap of academic research having been undertaken looking at poverty and wealth in the UK, apparently little work has been undertaken that investigates the geography of rich and poor; with their latest research, the JRF have aimed to address this.

Buried deep inside the report are a whole host of maps that illustrate a spatial analysis of Britain’s changing poverty and affluence over the last 40 years. The report and supporting data are available for download, as a combination of pdf and xls files; with a little manipulation this data could make for some attractive Google/Yahoo/Microsoft online maps.

The JRF concludes that the most significant change in the spatial distribution of wealth over the last 40 years has been the clustering of wealth and poverty. Urban clustering of poverty has increased, while wealthy households have concentrated in the outskirts and surrounds of major cities, especially those classified as ‘exclusive wealthy’, which have been steadily concentrating around London.

Pretty much every map in the report suggests the overarching spatial distribution of wealth in the UK, the north-south divide, is as pronounced today as it was 40 years ago. As the gap between rich and poor has increased, the report concludes…and I quote…‘average households are gradually disappearing from London and the south east’!

I wonder what other spatial distributions of wealth and poverty have emerged elsewhere throughout the world, over the last 40 years?

…you get Shakespeare, or that’s the theory. Well it looks like something similar has happened in Redmond, Washington; with their 2008 product line just around the corner, Microsoft are about to give geospatial developers a full box of toys.

Two years ago, a knee jerk reaction to Google Maps spawned Virtual Earth; it’s got great data, low barriers to adoption with an easy to use JavaScript API, and a novel and comprehensive SDK. GIS professionals, who had spent years in the basement, with little acknowledgement from others in their organisations, wasted no time in sharing their work with others with Virtual Earth and tools like Arc2Earth and MapCruncher. OK, well it’s not quite that rosy, licensing issues remain a thorn in the side, but you get the idea.

At the time, MS were toiling away at the next release of their application framework, and devised some XML based glue to hold it all together…zammel (XAML). XAML is a pretty wide ranging language concept, for which MS undoubtedly have numerous intentions. Speaking crudely, for geospatial developers XAML provides the rather handy capability of rendering vector graphics (and then some) on a windows form (think WPF), or web page (think Silverlight) – which ever takes your fancy. Critically for the geospatial developer, both WPF and Silverlight provide shape libraries for representing Points, Lines and Polygons.

At this point I’m very tempted to go off on one, and bash the vole for bastardizing the web, and mighty fine W3C standards like SVG (just look at this stuff) – but thats a whole can of worms…

So Microsoft has given geospatial developers two new technologies for rendering maps, or at least a collection of shapes, both online and via the ubiquitous windows form. But they didn’t stop there…

As people noted a few weeks back, they’ve gone one further and added spatial support for SQL Server 2008, providing two new types (Geometry and Geography) and in the region of 70 spatial operations. Apparently this has been implemented using their CLR User Defined Types architecture, which should mean full access to this stuff from .NET allowing you to tie it all together. If you’re a Microsoft shop…2008 should be good fun.