The Spatial Miscellany

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

Something had to change, that point we all came around to agree on. The Sunday Times suggests tomorrow that the Ordnance Survey along with other state owned organisations (think the MET Office and Forestry Commission) are being prepared for sale by the government.

Parliament? An MP? The Cabinet Office? The Shareholder Executive? No, read it here first…

The Sunday Times : Treasury in state-owned assets sell-off

I recently shared a few beers with an old university lecturer. We noted the ever improving access to the excellent Ordnance Survey mapping data but tongue in cheek he pondered…

“Is the writing on the wall for the OS grid reference?”

Here is a guest post from University of Edinburgh GIS lecturer, Bruce Gittings…

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I see multimap have become the first to offer OS data on a slippy map
interface to a web service.

The writing is certainly on the wall for anyone contemplating a system which isn’t slippy – - that’s now the benchmark, anything else is dead technology. We’ve known space is continuous for a few years now and the average GIS toolkit gave up on ‘coverages’ and ’tiles’ a while back.

At the same time multimap also seem to have moved to using latitude and longitude, instead of eastings / northings on the national grid, probably as a function of the software they are using. The map is actually skewed to the window – most unusual. So, as more and more applications want WGS84 / GPS compatibility will the OS grid reference disappear? For decades this has been the de facto (indeed virtually the only) referencing system use for locating places on maps in the UK (excepting one-off grid systems used on town plans for example), despite a lat-long grid appearing subtly on the edge of OS sheets. Yet, the dash to lat-long driven my pan-national web services seems to be quickly moving the amateur place-referencer quickly towards lat-long too, if the dreaded wikipedia is anything to go by (wash my mouth out with soap for mentioning that word!). I wonder if they realise the implications?

There’s a lot more misunderstanding about lat-long than the good old simplicity-itself national grid. The oft-used precision (e.g.
55.12345678901234556 degrees north) – just because the computer can calculate to that number of decimal places – takes positioning to a ridiculous sub-atomic level. Even multimap – who should know better – have fallen into that trap. Also, most people don’t understand it is not possible to convert between lat-long and eastings/northings terribly accurately, and that, unlike eastings and northings, two numerically identical lat-long positions don’t necessarily refer to the same point. But let’s not pretend I’m a mathematical whizz who actually understands coordinate systems and transformations, but its all here if you want the details: A guide to coordinate systems in Great Britain.

But all of that only slightly undermines multimap’s achievement. I wonder if they had to get special permission from the OS to use their data in this way? It makes OS copyright a little easier to infringe, but also again (like google’s first) shows the remarkable usability of the slippy-interface and its underlying AJAX technology. This ‘blogger’ particularly likes multimap’s feature which identifies the ‘locality’ which continually updates as you move cross the map. They must have built a load of theissen polygons from the OS gazetteer to underpin this. The result works well in some places, but there’s no sign of the name on the map in others. Less good is the use of getmapping aerial imagery, which seems to have a lot of gaps, many more than it should have – people’s map wins there. And performance seems to be a struggle, you need big banks of powerful servers before you can offer a professional slippy / AJAX service – the demands of the clients are probably two orders of magnitude more than the previous technology.

Good try though – 6 out of 10.

Above Cartoon by Peter Steiner. The New Yorker, July 5, 1993 issue (Vol.69, no. 20) page 61

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.