The Spatial Miscellany

The release of SQL Server 2008 will see two new types for representing spatial information, namely GEOMETRY & GEOGRAPHY. Geometry will be used for their planar (”flat-Earth”) model and Geography for their ellipsoidal (”round-Earth”) model, it’s a unique approach and seems to make sense, time will tell how popular it proves. Perhaps the most interesting difference between the two types reared its head on the SQL Spatial forum a few weeks back (see thread)…

When Microsoft released a preview of SQL Server 2008 in November, the order in which they returned coordinate pairs from one type, was the opposite of the order they returned coordinate pairs from the other type. The problem seems to stem from the widely held assumption that ‘What is your Lat Long?’ is the same question as ‘What is your XY?’

However, Latitude is a measure of distance from the equator, so it’s really more analogous to the distance Y in a planar model; likewise, Longitude is a measure of distance from the Prime Meridian and is therefore analogous to the distance X in a planar model. So ‘What is your XY?’ in a flat earth model, is really more comparable to the question ‘What is your Long Lat?’ in a round earth model. Traditionally GI professionals, and the software they use, have simply switched Latitude and Longitude, conveniently storing all coordinate pairs as XY…or Longitude \ Latitude.

There is a whole load more behind this issue than covered in the description above, check out the forum thread for a full brief. The good news is Microsoft have listened to the community, and indicated they’ll make efforts to switch the order before release; fingers crossed they can do this in time, and the spatial team has the priority to delay release if necessary. Their responsiveness earned a box of chocolates from Paul Ramsey; elsewhere, Morten Nielsen and Bill Dollins have a number of informed posts on SQL Server Spatial.

This Christmas the Scottish Government teamed up with Microsoft to encourage safer driving on Scotland’s roads (press release). Anti drink driving adverts were to be displayed on the virtual billboards within popular Xbox 360 games like the Need for Speed and Pro Evolution Soccer. Microsoft seems to have used ‘GeoIP’ to ensure the adverts were only displayed to online players in Scotland and not elsewhere.

This is a remarkably innovative trial by the Scottish Government, and I’m sure it will prove successful - although how its success will be measured I don’t know? And great foresight from Microsoft to build this functionality into their games before release, once again recognising the value of ‘where’. In the longer run, could the ability to embed local advertising content into computer games be disruptive to existing business models? In a similar way to the impact of Google Maps on geographic data providers, perhaps one day games will be free, subsidized by adverts for the video and pizza shops at the end of the road?

This week news broke that Microsoft have acquired Multimap, a UK based web mapping company. Multimap is a popular website for looking up an address and\or finding travel directions. As a company Multimap have a proven business model based on selling location based advertising (long before Sergey met Larry at Stanford), and a consultancy service for the provision of bespoke web mapping solutions. But why do Microsoft want Multimap, and what do you get for $50 Million?

The obvious answer is clients. With a client list in excess of 1200 companies, which reads like a who’s who of business, the acquisition gives Microsoft a big foot in the door to sell similar services based on their Virtual Earth platform.

Perhaps Microsoft may find use for some of the datasets acquired by Multimap, who recently pulled off the remarkable feat of displaying OS mapping data online via their mapping API. In addition, one suspects they’ll also pick up some canny developers, some of whom even blog (here and here).

But for a company whose name is often spelled with a dollar…Micro$oft, and whose nickname is that of a small rodent (The Vole), could their intentions be somewhat more sinister? In acquiring Multimap, and their intellectual property, one assumes Microsoft now has that all embracing patent for displaying a map online…

#6,240,360 - Abstract
A map of the area of a client computer is requested from a map server. Information relating to a place of interest is requested from an information server by the client computer. The information is superimposed or overlaid on a map image at a position on the map image corresponding to the location of the place of interest on the map. The information (or “overlay”) server may contain details of, for example, hotels, restaurants, shops or the like, associated with the geographical coordinates of each location. The map server contains map data, including coordinate data representing the spatial coordinates of at least one point on the area represented by the map.

I don’t think I’m alone in thinking this patent borders on absurd, firstly for its breadth of coverage, and secondly its filing date- long after maps were displayed online alongside textual information. Multimap never had the deep pockets required to defend this patent, and perhaps not the inclination, can the same be said for their new owners?

Related posts from James, Kirk and elsewhere.

With the next Community Technology Preview of SQL Server 2008 rumored to be around the corner, Isaac Kunen & Roger Doherty have shed a little more light on SQL Server 2008 Spatial support.

…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.