Mapping Hacks

A couple of readers pointed out that i seemed to have upset Ed Parsons, the CTO of the Ordnance Survey, not a little bit with my reference to the display in his presentation of viably unnecessary, easily outsourceable techno-toys, at the recent Society of Cartographers conference session on Public Access to Maps/Data

Ed’s slides showed a 1 million pound plus plane for collecting high-resolution aerial imagery of the UK. Yet getmapping provide an equivalent service, up to 12.5 centimetre resolution, on the market. Acquisition of aerial imagery could be put out to tender, with the OS doing subsequent orthorectification and production work on the imagery - although this would probably be outsourced to Delhi anyway.

Ed also showed a schematic of a GPS rig for the Ordnance Survey’s ’stringers’, ground-truthers, which costs 20-30 thousand pounds, and needs constant maintenance and service. I would like to know how much of the OS’s ground-truthing activity actually takes place in areas that would be regarded places of market failure. The OS receives a handsome supplement from the state in the form of the National Interest Mapping Service Agreement and the Pan-Government Agreement. There is talk of putting both sets of services out to commercial tender when the current set of agreements expires.

The Ordnance Survey’s R’n'I department is producing GPS videogames as part of its innovation development. To me they looked like bland versions of art and academic originated projects i’d seen a couple of years before.

Ed writes:

OK Jo - why don’t you try and capture some data to the OS specification the details are here (3mb pdf), without access to the “toys” of the trade.

As I have noted before I think there is a place for open geodata and await developments with interest, but this is a case of somebody without a true understanding of the professional geographic information industry pushing an agenda despite the facts.

As of writing, almost 450 people have signed the Open Geodata Manifesto. They are academics, economists, small business owners, professional GIS developers. These people
share a lot of the ideas that i emit. Are they all subject to an agenda which reflects no true understanding of professional and commercial concerns in the domain of GIS?

I am an enthusiastic amateur who writes software, yes, not a GI industry professional. I’ve never engaged with the Open Geospatial Consortium’s standards base other than through application servers. On the web and the semantic web there are specialised domain vocabularies; there are simplified expressions which translate into more complex ones; there are a myriad ad-hoc standards in different domains. Applications built on the geospatial web have been described as the “long tail” of geographic information science; an effort which helps grow the ecology for everyone. Here in the UK, i cannot help grow the ecology, unless by participating in grassroots map-making efforts like OpenStreetmap, because i cannot freely use and redistribute the data that is collected by the Ordnance Survey in any form.

The needs i have, the needs shared by the people i hope to help to make maps, are not for bay-window-level building detail, nor for ‘Spatial Data Infrastructure’ level of application complexity. A generalised data set which gives a good outline of street features and points of interest would be enough for Google Maps mashup level of activity; a KML profile would enable amazing applications on Google Earth. Like it or not, this activity is bringing into the public mind what can be done with maps and spatial information; a sense of how we all become mapmakers.

Maps have tremendous social value, the ability to make one’s own maps confers a kind of power. Geodata has tremendous economic value; attempts to toll its distribution are choking innovation. The Ordnance Survey has probably the highest-quality vector map data available anywhere in the world, of this small corner of it. Release a generalised version of it for civic information mapping; this will not impact the OS’s core business model severely; it will enable a flourishing of research and commercial mapping applications that would enrich society and the economy. Is the role of the National Mapping Agency in the 21st century to make maps, or to vouch for maps, and facilitate their free and fair use by government and citizens alike?

The OS is conferred protected status in the market by Crown Copyright. With the erosion of its public services and innovation role by the market, this protected status becomes less meaningful, more open to inspection. Ed Parsons states the rationale, “we must recover costs from our users because we need to support this infrastructure investment”. I believe that a combination of market action, and state sponsorship cheaper that present commitments to map areas of market failure, obsoletes the role of the traditional National Mapping Agency. I think there is still a role as a broker, but this should aim to facilitate the flow of information to where it is needed by citizens and government, not impede it in pursuit of greater intellectual property rights.

Crown Copyright is impeding a valuable debate on reuse and redistribution of public sector information. The OS is a ‘Trading Fund’, neither in government or out of it. As ‘e-government’ really materialises its role will also change materially. The INSPIRE proposed Directive going through the EU process aims to consolidate the role of the NMAs in an immensely complex European Spatial Data Infrastructure, to get onto which will involve the reading of more than several 206-page specifications. Research and industry oriented solutions to immense problems of correlation and analysis would emerge if the geodata were open. Instead, debates over IP rights of different kinds delay the process; the public is granted the prospect of a ‘view’ of information; and nothing gets done.

Sorry, you can’t leave comments on the Mapping Hacks blog; as i think Danny O’Brien put it, that’s why you get your own blog.

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