The Spatial Miscellany

…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.

This article in the Times newspaper caught my eye this morning…

“The English Premier League is suing YouTube (Google), the video-sharing website, for alleged copyright infringement.”

Here in the UK, football is our national game, we love it – we just don’t get to watch it. Rupert Murdoch’s Sky television stumped up a billion pounds for exclusive rights to the Premiership (EPL), so the only way you can watch the football is to subscribe to Sky at the princely sum of £60 a month. Logging on to YouTube and watching a game for free is an attractive alternative, and a significant threat to viability of the Sky business model. If they lose their subscribers, they can’t afford the billion pound Premiership deal, they risk going bust – so they go to court.

Here we have parallels with another Google ‘business’…Google Earth. Google purchase their imagery from third party companies, on the assumption it will be used for non-commercial use…but Google seem content to let every man and his dog download Google Earth and ‘use’ the imagery for free. Great Stuff. But such acceptance of breech of copyright, will surely threaten the viability of the imagery providers business model, they will no longer be able to afford the plane, the camera or other overheads, they will risk going bust – is it not plausible, that one day, they too will have to go to court?

Ok, now I know we’re gazing into a crystal ball here, but this is a blog post…

Sky has a market capitalisation of £10 Billion, an imagery provider…maybe £20 Million…orders of magnitude difference. How much will a court case cost Google, a court case they are likely to lose? Much less than buying Sky, but enough to make purchasing an imagery provider good business sense.

Well it’s been six months since the Ordnance Survey (OS) announced a beta of their Openspaces API and we’ve heard no more? Attendees at the UK Geospatial Mashup event held at the OS last October where treated to a sneak preview – it looked good, a Google Maps like API using OS data (slides are online at the OGC). This is just the kind of service the UK public deserve, and in my opinion, the type of service the OS needs to start providing if they are to fully capitalize on future opportunities and compete in a fast changing market place.

Chinese whispers at the Mashup event last October suggested it would go live within six months…or not at all. Hopefully it’s just around the corner, pending execution, and their CTO joining Google was just a coincidence.

Yesterday the British Geological Survey (BGS) announced their intention to map the geology of the planet - OneGeology. They believe the political will and technology are now in place to enable such an ambitious task. The technical details are sketchy, but it’s been planned as a distributed model - a dynamic set of geological map data served mostly on a national basis by individual Geological Surveys and other bodies (e.g. the polar and marine surveys and research bodies). The data will be accessed via a web portal and as such will be frequently updated and improved by them and reflect the most up to date data they possess. The project will make use of GeoSciML, an XML flavour tailored for use in Geoscience. The service should make a great resource for the recent wave of ‘Earth Explorers’.

This is quite a grand scheme, and deliverables are no doubt someway down the line, but if the BGS can make it work, hopefully it can spur the UK government to work with the Ordnance Survey and ‘free our geodata‘ – then one day maybe the OS can lead national mapping agencies throughout the world in a similar scheme. The OS has a great start with a comprehensive GML dataset, and the INSPIRE directive can provide encouragement; all we need now is support of the UK Government. Likely?