Mapping Hacks

The recent UK Geospatial Mashups event hosted by the Ordnance Survey provoked in me some reflections on business models for the production of open geodata which I have belatedly written down.
It was good to see old friends at the event - Mikel holding it up for GeoRSS, Raj on the stump for the new WFS-basic […]

Openness, freedom of inquiry, access to knowledge…one would like to posit
a growing movement towards all things good. Or perhaps the internet just allows
us to hide in our open ghettos…in any event, the Berlin Declaration
on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities says the right things-perhaps in a bit more
formal language than that […]

The names will be changed to protect the, well, guilty, but this
could have been said by lots of companies:

Actual quote:
“We feel that we are a web service.”

To which Schuyler replied “We feel that we are a moribund corpse of a company, awaiting burial by an apathetic marketplace.

Perhaps you had to be there?

The recent floods in Mumbai provoked a crisis in government geospatial data distribution in India. Coordination between emergency services, identification of local residents, modelling for future flood vulnerabilities; open exchange of geospatial information is crucial, and this has impelled the Indian government into liberalising geodata access policy. Shekhar Krishnan of the Mumbai Free Map project […]

Open Access to State Collected Geospatial Data states the case, and calls for an open license (Creative Commons style, with a ShareAlike clause for commercial use.)
If you suffer from lack of open access to geospatial information collected by National Mapping Authorities in your country, or would like to show your support for those who […]

I was pleasantly surprised to see an article in the Guardian about the delays to the UK national street and address database that i mentioned here recently. It alleges that horsetrading and disputes over intellectual property rights in spatial information is holding back e-government infrastructure efforts.

I’ve been lucky enough to be asked to speak at the Society of Cartographers Summer School on September 6th. Steve Chilton, the organiser, has a sharp eye for the edge; my longtime collaborator Saul Albert spoke there on art and mapsploitation two years ago, after we held the Cartographic Congress in Limehouse.
This year, they’re running […]

Before and
after in Zimbabwe. Go ahead, click the link.
200,000 people used to live in the area shown in this picture. Now they
don’t. Shanty towns are being razed. People are running ahead of bulldozers
trying to pry bits of material off of their shacks so they have some material
to use to build again, […]

On June 6th, the INSPIRE Directive goes into the European Parliament for its first reading. This is a Directive that will establish a legal and technical framework for a European spatial data infrastructure.
I suppose one could view this in the way the French have viewed the European Constitution. Too much effort, says the ‘pro’ side, […]

This was an insight offered by Alex Robinson and others at the Open Geodata Forum; why do we, as enthusiasts, citizens and consumers need the very highly accurate data which the Ordnance Survey prides itself on providing?

Working with GPS traces, Steve Coast’s maps at openstreetmap are only accurate to within 5 metres. But that’s perfectly […]