Mapping Hacks

This morning i got a rare piece of snail-mail: production prints from this year’s Society of Cartographers Bulletin, of the essay that i was honoured to contribute on the subject of Open Geodata, Free Software, and Civic Information. It talks about why we wrote “Mapping Hacks”, and why UK based geo***kers are finding it hard to make interesting Google Maps hacks because of a lack of supporting culture of open access to state-collected geospatial information.

I only got prints of my own article, but i know the bulletin contains pieces by Steve Coast about progress and plans for openstreetmap.org, and another by Richard Fairhurst of geowiki.co.uk on how he replaced a multi-million-pound proprietary GIS that used to run waterscape.com with a web map made in his free time using free software, that actually works better.

The talk that Richard gave during the Society of Cartographers half-day session on Public Access to Maps/Data back in September, pretty much brought the house down, and was much better than my own talk, into which i tried to pack too much information, Too Many Ideas At Once, and my writeup reflects some of the jetlagged mania that i was experiencing at the time.

This reminded me of something i meant to talk about here sooner: the BBC Radio 4 show on Digital Mapping and Tracking from Jan 3rd 2006, in which Steve Chilton (who’s the chair of the Society of Cartographers and did all the running for the publication) is engaged in a dialogue with Ed Parsons, the CTO of our friends the Ordnance Survey.

Coincidentally enough, the show was aired on the same day, at the same time, as the NPR show on digital mapping tech that Rekha Murthy produced in Boston. It seems almost as if the publically funded radio stations of the world are engaged in a vast neo-liberal conspiracy to - oh, never mind. As i learned from that experience not to make arbitrary, nontrue blog statements about media i havent actually consumed, i thought i’d wait until i made time to listen to it, until i talked about it.

I got good and riled when i did finally listen to it. The presenter actually brought up the subject of open access to geospatial data for a minute or two. (This is at around minute 9:45 in the RealAudio recording of the programme on the BBC website). I may be hearing what i want to hear, but Ed Parsons sounds increasingly on the defensive on the subject of open geodata.

He brings up the hoary, misleading old factoid that US Geological Survey maps for some areas are 20 years old; a subject he raised in his talk in September, comparing the investment in and value delivered by the OS only to the USGS. He chooses not to mention the fact that US street mapping and addressing is handled separately by the Census Bureau, whose TIGER/Line dataset is updated for the whole country twice a year, incorporating tremendous investment in information gathered at a state and local level. All of this activity is in the scope of what the OS does. And all of this data goes into the public domain, and underpins a remarkable amount of commercial activity and grassroots innovation. “You get what you pay for” doesn’t strike me as a reasonable refutation to the available evidence. Enough ranting, though; i am thrilled to hear even a few seconds of open geodata discussion on BBC Radio, and can’t thank Steve Chilton enough for his efforts to rebroadcast that message in different ways. If you’re thankful too, please consider buying this year’s SoC bulletin.

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