3e5302649429a507dc9135200f780bee

issue 34 : June 2010

. . . joining the geography jigsaw

Open source and an open local authority Software as a Service: the future for GIS? London’s Magnificent Maps GI and the surveying professional

Keeping track of the lonely sailor GISRUK: a day with the Saps and daydreamers Google’s serious business app

plus News | People | Products & Services | GiSPro’s columnists

Issue No 34 June 2010

contents p. 11

Changing times for GI GiSPro reports on a fascinating GeoData event that considered the latest developments on the GI scene – so is email dead?

our mission. . . to help grow the business for the whole GIS community by providing an effective, reliable and timely medium for news, information and comment.

Publisher: Stephen Booth Editor: Stephen Booth Deputy Editor: Hayley Tear Features Editor: Robin Waters Advertising: Sharon Robson Subscriptions: Barbara Molloy Editorial advisory board: Chris Holcroft James Kavanagh Dr Muki Haklay Ed Parsons Adena Schutzberg Dr Suchith Anand Robin Waters Editorial and advertising: PV Publications Ltd 2B North Road Stevenage Hertfordshire SG1 4AT United Kingdom Tel: +44 (0) 1438 352617 Fax: +44 (0) 1438 351989 e-mail: editor@pvpubs.demon.co.uk web: www.gisprofessional.co.uk

Material to be Published: All submissions will be handled with reasonable care, but the publishers assume no responsibility for safety of photographs or manuscripts. Every precaution is taken to ensure accuracy, but publishers cannot accept responsibility for the accuracy of information published or for any opinion expressed.

Reprints: Reprints of all articles are available.

Call 01438 352617 for details.

Advertising: Information about advertisement rates, schedules etc. are available in a media pack. Log on to www.gisprofessional.co.uk or call 01438 352617 Publishers: PV Publications Ltd No material may be reproduced in whole or in part without the written permission of the publishers. © 2009 ISSN 1748-3646

p. 14

Weathering the cloud computing storm Is the debate about cloud computing and SaaS over? Philip O’Doherty, CEO of eSpatial, thinks it is. But what does this mean for GIS?

p. 16

Are you spatially aware?

Robin Waters spent a day at the GISRUK conference – and discovered that daydreaming can be a surprising asset in our business!

p. 18

The power of maps Power, propaganda and art! Readers should not miss the Magnificent Maps exhibition at the British Library this summer, reports the Editor.

p. 20

A plain English guide to GI for surveying professionals James Kavanagh introduces an informative new guide for using GI in land and property development.

p. 22

An open authority OpenData, OpenStreetMap, Open Source – James Rutter details Surrey Heath Borough Council’s experience of the open world and its upheavals.

p. 28

GEE whizz!

The world’s favourite search engine has launched Google Earth Enterprise, reports Robin Waters. But how will the GIS heavies respond?

p. 30

Geocasting: keeping a non-intrusive eye From yachting to reconnaissance, to social networking! A simple technology that can be adapted to your needs says Richard Groom.

> GISPro’s COLUMNS p.25 Adena Schutzberg – Have we lost sight of the story of maps? p.26 Eurofile – Fancy a visit to Solaria? Or perhaps Biomassburg. . . p.30 AGI Column – Opportunities to help promote GI abound. . .

> GISPro’s STANDFASTS p.5 p.6 p.9

Editorial News People

p.32 p.34 p.35

GiSPro Products & Services GIS Calendar GiSPro Classified

Printing: The Manson Group, St Albans

Front cover: What, you may ask, has yachting got to do with GIS? For the answer you will need to turn to Richard Groom’s article on Geocasting. In the meantime, credit to Pelican Racing for this great seasonal pic.

For details of subscriptions, please refer to the bound insert.

read on. . .

GiSProfessional

Next Issue: August 2010 Copy dates Editorial: 5 July 2010 Advertising: 16 July 2010

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Issue No 34 June 2010

from the editor welcome to the June issue of

GIS Professional. . .

Centric to users’ needs echoes down the ages WE LIKE TO THINK OF GIS as something new, modern, sexy. That’s the way we sell it to students and the young as a career choice but is it really? Computers have only enabled faster and more efficient means of delivering “geospatial” information – the adjective itself is only a modern addition to the lexicon of complexity the modern world demands. Place always mattered and things have always happened somewhere. People have been trying to make graphical records of their world since the first cities and for a variety of purposes and reasons. Often their perceptions of the world were very different to our own, at times, too casual and complacent view of the globe as presented to us by mapping agencies or Google.

Known as the Mappa Mundi, the Hereford World Map, made in around 1300, is recognised by UNESCO as an exceptionally important cultural artefact. A copy is now available as a limited edition print from the Folio Society. www.foliosociety.com

If you do nothing else this summer, try to make time to visit the British Library’s Magnificent Maps exhibition (see page 18). Although the focus is on maps as power, art and propaganda, many on show, especially the early ones, were information sources for the people who bought or more likely commissioned them as one-offs. The Roman Peutinger map (not on show but the subject of a separate lecture) records distances between places while the Mappa Mundi from Hereford Cathedral (left) is covered with intriguing information about places that medieval travellers would have felt they needed on their pilgrimage to the map’s centre – Jerusalem. Maps then were highly centric to the user’s needs for an age when the church was the state or was closely bound to it, so orientation was usually to the east: north was of little interest. Galileo’s and Copernicus’ discoveries of a spinning orb amid a planetary system around a star had yet to penetrate the world of mapping.

What these ancient maps tell us is that accurate topographic mapping – although skilfully practised by the Romans and their technical associates, the Greeks – is really a comparatively new discipline; designed for the modern age of vehicle travel, planning, logistics and taxation. Products like OS MasterMap are no more than the base coat for others to overlay information whereas the medieval user would have found little use for detailed records of heights, vegetation, streams even roads. What he or she needed was days of travel or information about the waypoints and the destination so that they were prepared; the other information could easily be picked up on the way.

How will today’s mappers evolve over the remainder of this century (let alone the next millennia)? It seems difficult to imagine that mapping agencies will survive in their current form for too much longer.

Those that do will have either become highly agile market-focused trading bodies or have withered into scientific committees tasked with keeping a wary eye on the geodetic movements of their parent nation. Where will Great Britain’s Ordnance Survey be in this brave new world? The arguments for retaining it within government are getting weaker as the new coalition government grapples with the nation’s deficit. Sell now might just be the favoured option before its value falls in a market already beginning to be populated by competitors.

Sell now might just be the favoured option. . .

“

joining the geography jigsaw

GiSProfessional

“

In this issue of GiSPro, as you travel through it marking the articles as waypoints, I hope you will find many interesting and intriguing things. Three deserve your special consideration: a local authority that is now seriously using open source software and free data; the arrival of Google Earth Enterprise; and a question for you: is email dead? Turn to page 11 for the answer. Enjoy the summer!

Stephen Booth, editor

www.gisprofessional.co.uk

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Issue No 34 June 2010

news Mapping cities at night

‘OS is reviewing the future delivery of data to schools in the light of the changing status and governance of many schools with the increase of academies and so on. There is no central funding available to support OS’s services to schools and in recent years our input has been funded from our own revenues, including free maps for 11-year-olds, which has been running since 2002. We are looking at new ways to supply data using the latest technologies and have been taking part in trialling new methods, but have not as yet made a final decision on the future delivery of data to schools’.

A new service will provide night sky photomaps of Britain’s cities and towns to record the location of street lights, illuminated road signs and other night-time sources of light. The light emission maps can provide a base for asset inventories, light pollution assessment and energy optimisation for electricity plants. Using specially developed technology to capture night orthophotos, Bluesky’s map accurate images can be used directly in a desktop mapping tool or GIS. Providing additional intelligence for local authorities and other organisations that are responsible for lighting infrastructure, the maps can also help identify units for routine maintenance or fault repair and support projects to dim or switch off selected streetlights to save money and reduce carbon emissions. Image: Copyright IWB Basel

Source: Grough (www.grough.co.uk).

Waite asks for OS rethink ‘Ordnance Survey should re-consider plans to charge schools for using its data,’ says ESRI UK’s MD, Dr Richard Waite. Addressing an audience at the Geographic Association’s annual conference, Waite stated that ‘Under the OS MapPilot trial, local authorityfunded schools have free access to a range of OS datasets. This trial will close from 14 May and be replaced by a scheme to be run by Edina [Edinburgh University data library], under which schools will each be charged £50 a year for this data

access. On behalf of all schools, I am astonished that the OS is intending to start charging schools for its datasets’. He concluded: ‘I fear that many schools will simply give up on geographic information and the use of digital maps or choose not to engage with it, if this charge is imposed’.

OS has countered that it has not yet made a decision on supporting schools’ use of geographic data. They say the changes it was making were in response to ‘alterations to schools’ status and governance’. A spokesperson for the national mapping agency said:

New lidar data portal A new web-based portal launched by the Environment Agency’s Geomatics Group allows customers to access and purchase elevation data from the group’s archive of lidar data. The collection of lidar data for England and Wales includes many major urban areas, as well as rural flood plains and coastal zones. Currently, with over 65% (98,225 sq km) already mapped, at spatial resolutions ranging from 25cm to 2m, the archive is constantly updated, with new areas surveyed and existing areas re-flown to gather higher resolution data. To access this service, users can register at www.geomatics-group.co.uk/ GeoCMS/Order.aspx.

GIS innovation awards The winners of ESRI UK's GIS Innovation Awards were recently announced at the company's annual conference entitled "Shaping your vision". The Forestry Commission won the innovation in central government

category for its enterprise GIS for forest and estate management in the UK. Also, the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site won the innovation and best practice - communities category for the use of GIS to help monitor and predict the erosion of Monmouth Beach on the Jurassic Coast. Other award winners were: South Yorkshire Police, innovation in defence national security and public safety; Wales and West Utilities, innovation in utilities sector; The Crown Estate, successful return on investment from a GIS implementation; Sellafield Ltd, innovation in the private sector; and Digimap Ltd, innovation in local government plus the visionary thinking award for its tax on real property system for measuring and rating properties for the purpose of property taxation on the Islands of Guernsey and Alderney.

CONTRACTS & PROJECTS Mapping Isle of Wight highways MapNow, a mapping system from Mayrise Systems, has been used to prepare for a £1bn project set to transform the Isle of Wight’s highway infrastructure.

Following recent approval of the council’s outline business case for the Highways Private Finance Initiative (PFI), the UK government has allocated an initial £364.6m of grant money to the project. A detailed highways asset inventory, created using the company’s highways software, supported the council’s submission, providing up-todate information about the road network and related infrastructure.

Supporting fire control

Modelling a toxic river

GiSProfessional

Computer-generated 3D visualisations are helping to study pollution of the River Doe Lea. The research project, carried out by the National Trust with partner institutions the University of Sheffield, Environment Agency, Natural England and other consultancies, aims to develop a multi-targeted catchment management strategy. Airborne remote sensing data, supplied by Bluesky, was used as part of a PhD study carried out within the project. The digital aerial photography, colour infrared imagery (CIR) and photogrammetrically derived digital height models were used to model the flow of agricultural pollutants and assess the diffusive effect on the landscape.

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www.gisprofessional.co.uk

FiReControl, England’s national fire and rescue emergency response infrastructure, will use map-based incident response management system to help enhance public and fire fighter safety and provide rapid response for over 50 million citizens. A network of nine regional control centres will manage all fire and rescue resources across England through a unified system providing cross-regional interoperability and improved resource joining the geography jigsaw

Issue No 34 June 2010

news 3D model helps shape waterfront A 3D computer model of Dundee’s waterfront area is helping planners, architects and the public visualise a plan for its transformation. To reconnect the city centre with the riverside area, Dundee City Council is using the model to map out possible developments along the river Tay. The model from Bluesky helps to show the impact of developments on the existing environment and skyline and communicate plans and decisions to interested parties. The bespoke building model was derived from aerial photography to produce a vector mesh file showing real world heights and locations for the existing waterfront development together with the underlying ground terrain.

The latest version of the EDINA National Data Centre’s Digimap service has gone live. Launched in 2000, the service delivers geographical data resources via the Internet to over 150 academic institutions. National digital map data ranging from Ordnance Survey products to geology, marine and

are facing an increasing demand for asset data and geospatial services from across our organisation as well as from external contractors and stakeholders,’ says Sean O’Boyle, asset information development manager. ‘Our old system had limitations in terms of user access and GIS tools, so our new solution’s functionality is all about empowering a greater number of our users to communicate changes to the CAR in a more streamlined manner’.

Improving communication Northern Ireland Water will use a new GIS Viewer+ system to provide intranet access to the company’s corporate asset register (CAR) and improved system integration with corporate datasets such as customer services and data warehousing. The system will also link to a real-time asset monitoring system. The new GIS installation will be based on Innogistic’s Cartology.Net Web GIS. ‘Like all utility companies, we

Monitoring resources Cleveland Fire Brigade has selected SIS Map Modeller software and the associated Workload Modeller application to improve the efficiency of its resource deployment. Cadcorp’s Workload application will help model current resource workload against historic incident databases. It will allow the brigade to monitor levels of efficiency, model various planning

scenarios and to plan for “what if” situations. The application will be underpinned by the analytical and GIS capabilities of the SIS software.

Salting winter roads A project

by Derbyshire County Council, aimed at increasing the efficiency of its winter maintenance operations, has led to a new software application to assist highway authorities with the spreading of rock salt on roads. The CDR Group worked with the council to provide MISalt, an application that runs within MapInfo Professional and provides a link between route planners and vehicle operators. Detailed route plans for each depot can be based upon data such as street gazetteers or Ordnance Survey’s ITN data. Plus, planners can provide navigational instructions to the vehicle operator, along with control points that will instruct them to start or stop salting, including detailed instructions

environment information at your fingertips Visit

www.bluesky-world.com/gp $HULDO 3KRWRJUDSK\ ' %XLOGLQJ 0RGHOV /L'$5 3UR[LPL75(( 7KHUPDO ,PDJHU\ Call: 0 1 5 3 0 5 1 8 5 1 8 Web: www.bluesky-world.com Email: sales@bluesky-world.com

GiSProfessional

Web mapping for education

historical maps can be accessed by staff and students free at point of use.

Based on Cadcorp’s web-mapping software, GeognoSIS, the service also utilises licences of the company’s Map Modeller desktop GIS. The new software from the company has enabled EDINA to build an updated service for faster response, improved stability, cleaner looking maps and improved print functionality.

BS0058AD/GISPRO/0610

management. Operators at the control centres will use Intergraph’s geospatial computer-aided dispatch software to record and manage information needed for efficient incident response.

Control centre personnel will use interactive, real-time map displays of the location and status of incidents and nationwide resources, integrated with automatic call distribution and call handling software, action plans and pre-determined attendance plans for resource mobilisation.

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Issue No 34 June 2010

news such as to salt all the way around an approaching roundabout or to salt after the roundabout. Other functionality includes: warning when sections of a route are being salted more than once; reporting key statistics such as route length, salting length, route efficiency etc; and route planners can edit/update existing routes or transfer a route from one depot to another.

Four aerial imagery providers – Midwest Aerial Photography in the US, Kyodo Surveying in Japan, Beijing Guodian Jingwei Engineering Technology in China and Geoplana Ingenieure in Germany – have all recently acquired the new Intergraph Z/I Imaging DMC II camera.

Canterbury City Council is using computerised mapping to help allocate allotments as fairly as possible. The council used a database of properties – part of the National Land and Property

Gazetteer – to create a new allotment strategy based on location, accessibility and current provision. The exercise won the NLPG exemplar award for most innovative use for the council.

OneGeology, a global initiative to improve the accessibility of geological map data, will expand its use of GIS technology from ESRI. The 116 nations that participate in the programme will benefit from ArcGIS Server Geoportal extension technology (formerly GIS Portal Toolkit) as more data will become available on its geospatial portal.

BRIEFS The Intergraph 2010 international users’ conference will be held on 30 August to 2 September at the ARIA Resort, CityCenter in Las Vegas. The conference

will feature nearly 200 focussed sessions led by industry authorities and customers from around the world.

Intelligent Addressing has released the 2009 Exemplar Awards case studies booklet, which is available on the National Land and Property Gazetteer (NLPG) and the National Street Gazetteer (NSG) websites.

Details of the 2010 Exemplar Awards will be available during June.

The Open Geospatial Consortium is inviting members and non-members to its “Deriving business value from geospatial standards” one-day business session on 17 June at the NOAA Silver Spring offices in Maryland, USA . Attendance is free and you can register at: http://portal.opengeospatial. org/public_ogc/register/100617busin ess.php. Further one-day business sessions are planned for the OGC meetings in Toulouse, France in

September and in Sydney, Australia in December 2010.

The European Address Forum workshop, led by Intelligent Addressing’s MD Michael Nicholson, will take place at the Inspire 2010 conference in Krakow from 22-25 June. The forum was to originally launch in April but was postponed due to the volcanic ash situation. For more information, visit www.europeanaddressforum.eu/EAF. The StreetMapper 2010 international user conference will take place on the 2 December 2010 in The Hague, Netherlands. The conference will feature a range of technical presentations detailing the latest developments in laser scanning and mobile data capture together with end user case studies. For more information, email info@3dlasermapping.com or call +44 (0)870 442 9400.

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Issue No 34 June 2010

news & people

A programme of one-hour trainerled webinars on GeoConcept and TruckStops software has been launched by MapMechanics under the name MM Pointers and will run regularly every month until the autumn. For more information, visit www.mapmechanics.com/training.

Landmark Environment has launched a new website (www.envirocheck.co.uk) to enhance usability and accessibility for customers. The site offers a range of products to enable consultants to deliver accurate reporting and site assessments.

A new source of address data is now available to housing associations across England that enables compatibility with the National Register of Social Housing (NROSH).

Through Aligned Assets, data from the National Land and Property Gazetteer can be purchased in subsets right down to district and borough council level. This will enable associations to attribute unique property reference numbers (UPRNs) from the NLPG to each of their housing stock records.

Lining Up Data in ArcGIS: A Guide to Map Projections , a new reference guide by Margaret M Maher from ESRI Press (ISBN: 9781589482494), helps resolve the problem of aligning disparate map projections with GIS technology. While written specifically for users of ArcGIS, this book aims to be a guide for anyone working with map projections, coordinate systems and data conversion.

Ordnance Survey now has its own blog site (blog.ordnancesurvey.co.uk), which aims to provide a new way to communicate with customers, stakeholders and the public. The site includes posts on topics ranging from walking guides and product news to how GI plays a role in people’s lives.

MapMechanics has published the 2010 edition of its data catalogue: a full-colour, 92-page A4 guide that gives specifications and prices of digital mapping products. The catalogue is complemented by an online version, which can be consulted freely at www.mapmechanics.com. joining the geography jigsaw

The Snowdonia National Park Authority has been supplied with aerial imagery captured in 2009 covering the majority of Wales, the Scottish borders and many English counties, totalling 77,000 sq km. The imagery from Getmapping will help with landscape conservation.

Officers can use the aerial photography in the authority’s GIS to identify future priority areas for control of, for example, Rhododendron – a major threat to native plants and animals in the park. The photography also supports the maintenance and restoration of the Migneint Arenig Dduallt blanket bog (right of image), which has been slowly damaged over the years by the opening of drainage channels.

Officers use the imagery to identify and digitise drainage and target problem areas where the drainage channels are to be blocked.

PEOPLE Director joins Inspire group

Feldman joins geo.me

Ramage joins the OGC

A director of Intelligent Addressing has been selected as an expert by the EU Inspire team. As the UK local government nominee, Simon Barlow will be part of the “buildings” technical working group tasked with the development of the buildings theme data specification for annex three of the EU Inspire directive. A surveyor with a masters in property valuation and law, Barlow joined IA in 2000 from a background in property asset management and geographic information. He will bring his knowledge of the processes behind recording and maintaining property information to the group and will also represent the interests of the local government community.

Steven Feldman has joined geo.me Solutions as an investor and chairman of the board of directors. The company creates interactive mapping apps that visualise, analyse and chart information to aid communication and add insight across organisations.

Feldman has previously headed two geo businesses, GDC and MapInfo UK, and was the founder and chair of the AGI’s GeoCommunity conference.

He advises on location and business strategy within technology businesses through his consultancy, KnowWhere.

‘I am very excited to have been invited to join geo.me, I cannot think of a better time to be launching a cloud based geo-business and I relish the opportunity to guide the company in bringing their services to the market,’ says Feldman.

Steven Ramage has been appointed as the executive director for marketing and communications for the Open Geospatial Consortium.

Ramage will be responsible for the planning and execution of a range of marketing, communications and education programme activities to raise awareness and increase application of OGC standards by technology providers and users worldwide. Reporting to Mark Reichardt, president and CEO, his activities will include encouraging membership participation in OGC programmes, as well as sponsorship.

Ramage joins from 1Spatial.

The OGC has also appointed Lance McKee as a senior staff writer and Dr Nadine Alameh as a director for interoperability programmes. www.gisprofessional.co.uk

GiSProfessional

Author Richard Saul Wurman will speak at the 2010 ESRI International User Conference taking place on 12-16 July in California. He will discuss his latest project, called 19.20.21, and how GIS technology plays a part in it. The 19.20.21 project is an attempt to understand comparative data on 19 cities that will have 20 million or more inhabitants in the twenty-first century. For more information, visit www.esri.com/uc.

Imagery supports park protection

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Issue No 34 June 2010

people – cont’d Automating image processing

GiSProfessional

Dr Richard Mather has been awarded the Institution of Analysts and Programmers (IAP) prize for software engineering for his MSc dissertation “A workflow application and XML datastructure for processing geo-referenced images”. Completed at the University of Oxford, it allows the automation of image processing, in contrast to existing techniques, which can be ad hoc and circumstancespecific. The work was supported by various institutions, including Bluesky International. Dr Mather, a lecturer at the department of new media and technologies at Buckinghamshire New

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University says: ‘As a result of the recognition of IAP, Bucks is in a stronger position to seek external funding to expand this work. We aim to continue working with UK, EU and overseas partners to develop a web-based service to automate map production from satellite and aerial imagery, to be made available for environmental and education purposes’.

Edinburgh GIS students win prizes

her paper “Giving and receiving direction: requirements for automated pedestrian wayfinding technology”. This was followed by the AGI Scotland conference where Christopher Barber presented “Latyourlife”, a personal planning aid that seeks to incorporate a geographic context into a traditional time-based calendar. Developed by himself and fellow students Amin Abdalla, Laura Mason and Dimitris Stratoulias, they beat competition from eight other entrants to win the prize for “the most pragmatic means of enabling realisation of the aims of ‘One Scotland, One Geography’”.

Image from left: Dimitris Stratoulias, Amin Abdalla and Christopher Barber.

Jones joins sales team Two GIS students from the University of Edinburgh have recently won prizes.

PhD student Catherine Schroder won the “best paper by a young researcher” at the GISRUK conference in London for

Chris Jones has joined Getmapping’s sales team and will focus on the telecoms and insurance sectors, plus special projects such as the recently launched Parish Online web mapping service. Jones previously worked for

Thomson Directories where he pioneered their online search tool and for the AA where he promoted their web-based route planning application.

Awards for giCentre Researchers from City University London’s giCentre won two awards at the GISRUK conference (see p. 16) in April. Dr Aidan Slingsby, Dr Jason Dykes and Dr Jo Wood took the best paper award for their “OAC Explorer” study, which used data visualisation to better understand uncertainty and variation in the output area classification (OAC); a technique that simplifies census data by grouping geographic areas according to the key characteristics of the population living in them. Also, the UKMap challenge asked researchers to develop new ways to exploit the mapping database.

The giCentre’s winning proposal was to extend the role of the traditional map legend by applying interactive overlays to aerial photographs.

Issue No 34 June 2010

GeoData report

CHANGING TIMES WAS the theme of this year’s series of GeoData events. Covering Dublin, Cardiff, Liverpool and London, the events provide an opportunity to hear about the latest developments on the GI scene from software and system vendors, consultants and data providers on the challenges they face from things like increasingly free data, open source software, Inspire and other changes of which we may only just be on the cusp. Run by The Cities Revealed Group’s Training4GIS department, they are ‘not about selling’ says MD Dr Alun Jones.

Jones kicked off the day with a little questioning of the 140-strong audience about their business social networking habits. He naturally assumed that we all

the US there’s a novel website, escapemydate.com, where those who find their expectations dampened can quickly tweet friends to come to their rescue.

Survival is not mandatory The message was summed up by Dr Matt Perrier of Envitia: ‘We’re in the middle of a revolution in communications’ and for the worried and cynical he quoted W. Edwards Deming: “It is not necessary to change – survival is not mandatory.”

Standards, Crowd Sourcing and Platforms & Sensors were the focus of Perrier’s presentation.

‘Standards enable us to share data and they reduce the cost of data sharing’. They also make the Internet

Changing times: is email dead? GiSPro reports from a

“

. . . his 17-year old daughter only used email for staying in touch with her grandmother – the young use Twitter and Facebook.

used email. Unsurprisingly in the mainly public sector audience there were few hands up for You-tube.

Higher numbers went up for Twitter and even higher for Linked-In. But an interesting revelation for all of us over the age of 25 came when Star-Apic director Tom Timms revealed that his 17-year old daughter only used email for staying in touch with her grandmother – the young use Twitter and Facebook.

Jones describes the massive changes that we’re going through as “tornado issues” (taking his cue from the book Inside the Tornado: Strategies for Developing, Leveraging, and Surviving Hypergrowth Markets by Geoffrey A. Moore). It’s not just about how we cope with rapid change that may affect our business adversely; it’s also about what happens when demand rockets, as it did for companies like Microsoft and Google. ‘We never thought it would happen to GI,’ said Jones, ‘but now we have global players like Nokkia, Google, Yahoo! and Bing all aware of the significance of location’. Such has become its importance that Google is hiring 300 surveyors in the US to check their mapping. The growing location apps for mobile users through the iPhone and other devices, coupled to the increasing influence of 3D from the gaming environment, are having a massive influence on the business world.

Where would it lead? No one knows but already in

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happen and through the OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) underpin most GIS applications.

On crowd sourcing, Perrier believes this is a paradigm changer. TomTom’s Map Share has over a million “surveyors” out there capturing data; just wait until Twitter is location enabled. Although there are issues on coverage and accuracy, relative accuracy for Google Maps and OpenStreetMap is good.

Platforms, enabled by standards, are allowing massive data fusion of feeds from cameras, GNSS, instant messaging, thematic mapping, etc. For those whose businesses depend on GI, Perrier advised them to ‘constantly innovate, adopt standards, embrace Web 2.0 and because you don’t know who’s watching, keep your curtains shut!’

Although we live in exciting times for techies, there are some topics that just bring on narcolepsy.

The EU’s Inspire initiative is one that only serious geeks can usually stay awake for. But it’s a serious topic. Data compliance is going to happen and many organisations need to pay attention. The best way to make them sit up and listen is to get someone with a little sparkle, wit and Irish charm.

Ali Robinson of Compass Geomatics had these qualities in spades. Her presentation “Clear steps to INSPIRE compliance while gaining real value” was a benchmark. She believes Inspire will change how we

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fascinating event in the de luxe Emirates Stadium, home of Arsenal, that brought users, developers and suppliers together. Alas the beautiful game was not on the agenda.

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GeoData report Maps to seek alternative means of getting from Cambridge to Dublin when flights are disrupted by volcanic ash, suggested walking and calculated a modest 2 days 16 hours!

‘Quality requires effort,’ said Timms, ‘free can lead to death by pushpin!’

Above: Though there was no talk of footy on the agenda, GeoData still offered delegates lots to think about.

view and use spatial data across Europe. But if you’re one of the data holders there is serious work ahead.

After a quick resumé of the data – boundaries, roads, railways, hydrographic, elevation models, topography and more – she outlined the steps to be taken. Cataloguing, network services, translation, migration, schemas and many other actions are all aimed at driving organisations towards greater rationalisation and centralisation of data. ‘The fragmented approach will have to change where so many local authorities have disparate services each with databases. But the benefits will be rapid access to datasets through harmonisation and integration’.

Stop that yawning! Another topic on the big yawn

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. . . “free” GIS may be fine for personal use but if you want robust public services there has to be a cost.

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agenda is service oriented architecture. Fortunately, CadCorp’s Paul Wither also has the self-awareness to recognise this – plus abundant presentational skills to surmount it. SOA is what makes the Internet happen for us, he explained. It’s the underlying structure that supports communication between services with standards as the key to success. At it’s simplest, it can be summarised as enabling the process of “Request” and “Respond”.

For those in GI however, Wither argues that we have to wake up and join mainstream IT because people want information now. SOA will help to eliminate those data silos, converting them into service providers: SOA enables mash-ups.

David Martin of specialist flood modelling consultancy, Ambiental, talked about the need for “reliable” elevation data and gave us some scary stats about the number of properties in the UK liable to flooding – around 5.2 million properties are at risk of a 1000-year flood. One of many problems in calculating risk however is that pluvial flooding (from rainfall) requires very accurate elevation models to predict the effect – topography is all important. For those interested in discovering more about flood risk and elevation models, Richard Groom’s article “Flood risk insurance – are surveyors missing out?” in Geomatics World September 2008 is an authoritative source.

For data suppliers, the arrival of free data and open source software is a serious challenge. But Tom Timms of Star-Apic believes that “free” GIS may be fine for personal use but if you want robust public services there has to be a cost. Even the free services can throw up some odd results. A query to Google

Uncertainty in a bog In an ideal world we all want perfect data, accurate and up to date. But in the real world we have to work with what we’re given and deal with fuzziness and uncertainty. Dr Katie Medcalf is a director at Environment Systems and focused on the problems of using and capturing data on blanket bogs, a topographic feature with which your writer was hitherto unfamiliar.

They are usually found on hilltops and slopes where overlying vegetation helps retain moisture and protect villages and properties lower down from rapid flooding.

Surveying the extent of these bogs can be very difficult unless you are prepared to spend hours on damp windswept hillsides. Using remotely sensed data – often at only 10m resolution – can miss much detail. Medcalf advocated using software from eCognition to help you deal with uncertainty.

For those aficionados of horror movies, Snowflake Software’s Ian Painter provided an interesting analogy.

Jason, the man with the mask and cleaver, represents the silo mentality all too common amongst data holders; take the mask off the web portals and open them up.

‘Data needs to be legally and socially open,’ argues Painter. ‘Social, because you need a community of users.

It also needs to be technologically open otherwise it will only frustrate users. Open data means feedback’.

He offered two approaches. Think big for B2B, Government2Citizen and use OGC standards, GML/XML and Inspire. But for consumers, think small – W3C, KML, GeoRSS etc. Don’t force a particular view of your data onto users. Publish in XML not Excel, Word or PDF. It will help build a community around your data.

For many publicly funded bodies, the rapidly changing environment presents new problems. British Geological Survey is changing the ways it delivers maps while coping with the complexity of the UK’s legislative context. The UK Location Strategy, Inspire, Making Public Data Public and other initiatives in recent years have all to be factored in. Dr Keith Westhead, Head of Knowledge, says there is ‘a spirit of openness’ at BGS these days but they do have to wrestle with added value products and services against their non-commercial products. He explained how their strategy has allowed others, such as F!ND and EDINA, to easily build portals into BGS datasets. For those who must have these things, BGS’s DiGMap GB-50 will soon be available as an iPhone app.

For more on BGS's OneGeology initiative, subscribers can refer to Ian Jackson's article in GiSPro, February 2007.

The oracles speak The AGI’s Foresight study that asked some 38 industry gurus to look into their crystal balls and say where they thought our industry, technology and changing society would be in five years time, is still joining the geography jigsaw

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• Our thanks to Fiona Cocks of GIS4Training for facilitating an interesting and well run day.

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‘The cloud is a global business’ and amid this rapid driver ‘who needs Inspire?’ when it will probably be overtaken. . .

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There remain good commercial opportunities.

Feldman predicts a demand for Smart Logistics – people will be willing to pay a premium for delivery within a half hour window, he believes. Other sectors like Insurance are heavily underdeveloped where location is concerned.

‘There will be services with location and you won’t even notice them,’ he predicts. He concluded by reminding us that location is not special, context is essential and privacy must be managed. We also have to find a way of communicating with users who don’t use maps.

The final presentation of the day came from Leica Geosystems’ Nathan Ward who unveiled the coming age of multi satellite systems. Alas, this is not open data (unless you’re very clever indeed at hacking) but it will enable many new apps and make existing ones far more accurate.

Although many of us continue to use the acronym GPS, in reality we are now in the age of GNSS – Global Navigation Satellite Systems. The completion of a reliable Russian constellation, GLONASS, the impending European Galileo system and wide area geostationary satellites like EGNOS will ‘change the way we capture data in the future,’ argued Ward. And the Chinese too are working on a system, which has two satellites in orbit but no one has yet managed to hack their signals. Clever people those Chinese. . .

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awaited. In the meantime, Steven Feldman was on hand to deliver a trailer. ‘Geography is the context for so much change’ these days, he argues. ‘The cloud is a global business’ and amid this rapid driver ‘who needs Inspire?’ when it will probably be overtaken by ad hoc techniques.

Feldman gave us some predictions. In the age of the cloud ‘Big software companies can no longer resell solutions developed for others’. The elephant in the room, however, is privacy. He predicted that within 3-4 years there would be a scam involving location and a celeb reported in the News of the World. With over 50% of mobile phones predicted to be GNSS enabled by 2014, how many remember or even know how to switch location off on their mobiles?

Feldman also says that generation Y, those born in the 1990s, have a different attitude to work and play.

They merge the two, playing in traditional work time and working at odd hours, sometimes through the night.

Their culture will affect GI’s decision makers of tomorrow.

“Free” is the big issue, says Feldman. ‘Everyone has to find a business model’ in a world where 90% of under 21s admit to “stealing” music by downloading.

As we become used to sharing information we will see GI being used in ways that we cannot see as yet. The really bad news, Feldman told his public sector audience, was that probably one in four of them would not be in the same job soon, as cuts began to bite.

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computing: SaaS

and the cloud changing the way software is bought and deployed, but also the very notion of software itself. Software suppliers attempting to catch up with the new SaaS era have to be able to adapt to the fact that SaaS is not about selling and supporting software – its about providing a service. It’s the fact that SaaS is a “service” that’s turning everything on its head and fundamentally differentiates it as a way of delivering functionality such as GIS. Businesses are adjusting to the concept with staggering speed and are already starting to think in terms of paying for services to achieve their business goals, rather than buying software.

Above: eSpatial's iSMART WebGIS, delivered as SaaS, comes with built in Business Intelligence tools.

THE DEBATE ABOUT CLOUD computing and software as a service (SaaS) is well and truly over. SaaS has so many advantages for customers and end-users that it is difficult for anyone to credibly argue against it. The pay-as-you-go service model provides ease-of-use,

A philosophical leap So where do GIS and the mapping software companies stand as regards the cloud and SaaS? Certainly a lot of organisations are paying lip service to the concept and a few vendors have introduced SaaS offerings. But for existing GIS software vendors to successfully provide GIS as a service they first need to make the significant philosophical leap: stop thinking like software companies and start thinking and acting like service providers.

There is little evidence so far that the larger GIS software suppliers have made this leap. This mirrors the pattern in other software categories. Just ask Marc Benioff, founder of probably the best known and most

Weathering the Cloud Computing Storm Is the debate about cloud computing and software as a service (Saas) over? Philip O’Doherty, CEO of eSpatial, thinks it is and details what that could and should mean in the world of GIS.

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It’s the fact that SaaS is a “service” that’s turning everything on its head and fundamentally differentiates it as a way of delivering functionality such as GIS.

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scalability, reduced maintenance and support effort and lower total cost of ownership, which means that more and more customers expect SaaS or cloud options when they evaluate new business software.

But what does this mean for the GIS sector, where change and technical advances have perhaps been a bit slower than in many other business software categories? We know the potential that GIS and online mapping and analysis can offer to solve complex business problems. Can GIS software and the use of spatial data evolve to meet the needs of a business world that consumes cloud based services or do we need to rip it all up and start again?

A game changer Cloud computing is dynamically scalable, with shared and often virtualised resources including hardware, software and information being provided as a service over the Internet. Software as a Service is a significant sub-set of the cloud paradigm. Also known as software on demand, SaaS vendors license applications, such as GIS and location intelligence, for use over the Internet – or in the cloud – on a pay-as-you-go or subscription model. For customers, this should mean no large upfront implementation investments and significant ongoing reductions in their in-house IT support and maintenance burden.

SaaS is a complete game changer. It’s not only

successful cloud computing company, Salesforce.com. He claims his big rivals in the customer relationship management space, Oracle and SAP, don’t have what it takes to be successful in the new ‘cloudier’ climate. He could be wrong, but history would support his point of view. Innovation and major paradigm shifts – such as what is required to move from providing traditional onpremise solutions to offering software purely as a service – are not easy for large incumbent technology vendors.

It is ironic that inability to innovate is one of the major problems plaguing large established software companies. The ability to bring new products and solutions to market tends to be inversely proportional to size, previous success and profitability. It can be argued that this problem is obvious in the GIS sector, dominated as it is by a few large incumbents, which have been slow to move from traditional business models and philosophy. On top of the software industry infrastructural problems, which conspire to stymie technical advances, SaaS probably represents a more significant technical and business revolution, even than the change from monolithic mainframe applications to client/server in the 1980s and 1990s.

It is probably going to take newer, smaller and hungrier vendors to provide GIS customers with credible SaaS and cloud offerings. Even if some of the more established vendors are in a position to overcome the

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A shift to the mainstream For any nonbelievers still out there, however you define or classify cloud computing, it is a growing phenomenon gaining momentum as businesses gain confidence in the model.

I’ve been following the market since SaaS first emerged in the early 2000s and it’s interesting to see how it has shifted to the mainstream in recent years.

The reasons for this change are manifold, but the primary attraction is, in my view, the fact that it fundamentally shifts the burden of IT management and maintenance from the customer to the vendor.

Easy to configure, and maintain, SaaS requires limited operational support – or none at all – from an in house IT department. It accelerates time-to-results and offers an affordable, predictable, and scalable subscription-based pricing model. This is a massive change of emphasis that enables organisations to focus on their core business without having to invest heavily in IT infrastructure and personnel and all the headaches that go along with that.

In the early days of SaaS and cloud computing these benefits were seen as a way for small and mid-sized organisations, with tighter IT budgets and fewer technical resources, to gain access to enterprise applications that were previously the preserve of large organisations with deep pockets. GIS immediately comes to mind. But bigger companies and government organisations are also investing in cloud-based solutions, and GIS customers are already starting to ask the question: how can they justify the in-house costs and management overheads of a client/server application for something that is still not usually a core business application?

Do we transform GIS into a more essential business application or will it be banished to the cloud? I don’t believe these are mutually exclusive – in fact the “SaaSification” of GIS could be just what the doctor ordered. This new deployment model could be what finally delivers GIS capabilities to a much wider corporate audience and user-base. GIS is not the most recognisable three letter acronym in the information technology lexicon. If you were to mention CRM in passing over dinner conversation these days nine out of 10 people would probably have some idea as to what you were talking about – try to drop GIS into the conversation however and the statistics would go the other way.

Those of us who have worked with GIS and mapping software for decades know the power and potential of geospatial technology, but we also

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recognise that it has failed to set the business world alight on a global scale. The widespread availability of basic online mapping functionally such as Google Maps, Google Earth and Microsoft Bing Maps are enabling organisations of all sizes, and even individuals, to benefit from GIS-like functionality via the Internet. Their entry into the spatial market has created consumer interest in mapping solutions and importantly, also the acceptance of the geospatial metaphor as an intuitive way to access, analyse and visualise business data. I believe that fully functioned GIS services in the cloud could take that interest one step further and could finally lead to widespread use of GIS technology in all types of businesses.

About the author Philip O'Doherty, CEO, eSpatial Solutions Ltd, brings nearly 30 years of industry experience at director and senior executive level to his role. He also has extensive international experience in organisational development coupled with the building and consolidation of senior management teams to successfully deliver on strategic objectives.

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. . . it fundamentally shifts the burden of IT management and maintenance from the customer to the vendor.

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systemic flaws in the GIS software industry, it’s not going to be easy to ‘SaaSify’ something that wasn’t originally built with the Web in mind. It will not be enough to offer piecemeal solutions. If GIS is to avoid being left behind in the basement of the business application hierarchy we need to put spatial data in the cloud and offer our customers fully functioned Web GIS and location intelligence applications in the cloud sooner rather than later.

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Education gisruk

conference

THE TITLES OF ACADEMIC PAPERS do not make good headlines. Some of the contents are difficult to read to anyone outside a very small sub-set of the discipline in question. Some are full of Greek letters arranged to baffle anyone but a maths graduate. All of these self-evident truths were on display at GISRUK 2010 but all can be overcome by enthusiastic presenters. Fortunately there were enough of the

tracking through time (snapshots) – the major issues of reporting units changing through time, cellular automata, agent based models, events; and transactions and multidimensional data.

Whether you understand all these terms or not I can assure you that the majority of the papers at the conference were in this domain. Under CyberGIS we are very much in the world of SDIs and INSPIRE – distributed enterprises with service oriented architectures and – we hope – full interoperability.

Goodchild suggested that many problems have been solved and standards have been created that enable the discovery, viewing and downloading of datasets. But GI is still organised in layers and the true ‘spatial join’ is still illusive because we need to deal with vernacular references, fuzzy concepts and ill-defined semantics. Existing systems with huge numbers of (often obscure and overlapping) functions need these to be standardised, made interoperable across all servers and, often, made invisible to the end user!

Dream on If you are (still) reading this article you are likely to be a SAP – a spatially aware professional – and Goodchild, under the heading of

Are you a SAP?

Robin Waters spent a day amongst spatially aware academics at the GISRUK conference and was surprised to discover that day-dreaming can be a useful characteristic for those in our business!

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GI is still organised in layers and the true ‘spatial join’ is still illusive. . .

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latter to keep me sane during my one-day trip to the ‘Fundamental spatial concepts’ showed Howard conference at UCL in London last April.

Gardner’s classification of ‘intelligences’ that can be The planet is now covered with freely accessible separately recognised in children. These include aerial or satellite images and satnav databases. ‘liguistic’, ‘logical-mathematical’ and ‘spatial’. The Electronic access to land registers and cadastre is latter involves thinking in images and pictures, taken for granted. fascination with jigsaw puzzles, drawing and Lego GI is in everyday use from the classroom to the or – and this is the punchline – daydreaming! He boardroom. Geo-spatial information is ubiquitous suggested that although some spatial intelligence is and available on every platform from printed atlases indeed acquired in childhood, there is still much and maps to in-car devices and mobile phones. So remaining to be taught in higher education – to why do we still need any research departments in make us into SAPs. Those interested will find much academia and why is there said to be a shortage of more at www.teachspatial.org. So the concluding GI professionals across the world? comments were actually further questions: What is our future vision? What will our geospatially Mike Goodchild, Professor of Geography at the enabled world look like in 2015 or beyond? And University of California, Santa Barbara, answered how will society cope? those questions and posed some of his own. His keynote address, entitled ‘Challenges in GI Research’ laid out the challenges and inspired everyone in the Paper prizes All the best conferences have prizes packed lecture hall and in the GISRUK there where he launched the were three normal best “. . . spatial thinking is pervasive; it is vital opening plenary session. paper prizes and a new across a wide range of domains of practical He concentrated on prize sponsored by The and scientific knowledge; yet it is underthree topics. SpatioGeoInformation Group recognised, undervalued, under-appreciated temporal GIS that for best project using and therefore under instructed. includes tracking their new UKMap through space (not least dataset. This produced From the 2006 NRC report: Learning to Think Spatially with ubiquitous GPS); two projects that TGG

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•

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Overall (sponsored by AGI) to Aidan Slingsby et al. from City University “OAC Explorer: Interactive exploration and comparison of multivariate socioeconomic population characteristics”.

Young Researcher (sponsored by Cadcorp) to Catherine Schroder from Edinburgh University. on “Giving and Receiving Directions: Requirements for Automated Pedestrian Wayfinding Technology”.

Spatial Analysis (sponsored by UCL’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis) to Didier Leibovici, et al., from Nottingham Uniiversity on “Spatially Clustered Associations in Health GIS”.

Some commentators have been a little disparaging about some of the research presented at such conferences and it is all too easy – even if you are a SAP – to dismiss some research as boring, samey or apparently repetitive. But I think that the prizewinning papers above; the healthy interest shown by industry as sponsors; and the range of challenges outlined by Professor Goodchild should be enough to keep us interested for a few years to come!

• Many thanks to Muki Haklay from UCL for the invitation to GISRUK and the hospitality for the day on which I was able to attend.

Psychologist Howard Gardner’s seven distinct types of intelligence 1. LINGUISTIC Children with this kind of intelligence enjoy writing, reading, telling stories or doing crossword puzzles.

2. LOGICAL-MATHEMATICAL Children with lots of logical intelligence are interested in patterns, categories and relationships. They are drawn to arithmetic problems, strategy games and experiments.

3. BODILY-KINESTHETIC These kids process knowledge through bodily sensations. They are often athletic, dancers or good at crafts such as sewing or woodworking.

4. SPATIAL These children think in images and pictures.

They may be fascinated with mazes or jigsaw puzzles, or spend free time drawing, building with Lego or daydreaming.

5. MUSICAL Musical children are always singing or drumming to themselves. They are usually quite aware of sounds others may miss. These kids are often discriminating listeners.

6. INTERPERSONAL Children who are leaders among their peers, who are good at communicating and who seem to understand others’ feelings and motives possess interpersonal intelligence.

7. INTRAPERSONAL These children may be shy. They are very aware of their own feelings and are selfmotivated.

HOWARD GARDNER www.professorlamp.com/ed/TAG/7_Intelligences.html

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Some commentators have been a little disparaging about some of the research presented. . .

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will take forward. The first from Claire Ellul at UCL seeks to enhance the performance of 3D model display for various on-line or desk-based applications. The second from Aidan Slingsby at City University is a more complete end user solution for the dynamic display of map legends using underlying vector data to interpret a foreground image.

The best paper prizes – covering a wider range of applications were:

conference

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Professor Goodchild’s keynote focused on identifying what spatial thinking is and whether it can be taught.

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exhibition historic

A fragment of the Forma Urbis Romae, AD 200, on loan from the Capitoline Museums, Rome.

mapping

ON UNTIL 19 SEPTEMBER at the British Library, this exhibition brings together some of the world’s rarest and most unusual maps around the themes of Power, Propaganda and Art. These themes are a reminder that maps are not

art designed to decorate state and formal rooms for their owners to impress guests and visitors.

There are two rather striking aspects of the display. As mapping emerged from the mystical and often impenetrable schematic depictions of the medieval world, the bird’s-eye view perspective with exquisitely drawn houses and buildings emerged as the popular form. A giant 3m wide woodcut map of Venice is typical, showing the Serenissima’s imposing state and authority in very great detail and drafted from somewhere 500ft or so in the sky above the Adriatic! By the late 17th century things were changing (or perhaps we should say reverting) to plan mapping similar to that of today. Yet almost half a millennia later we are back with those bird’s-eye views via Google.

The second aspect, only touched on briefly by the exhibition, is from Roman times. Three small pieces of engraved marble are all that remains of what was once a vast marble slab map of Rome some 43ft high by 60ft long. It shows in plan and in great detail (1:500?) every street and building and may probably have been used by the equivalent of the

Magnificent Maps Readers in London this summer, whether resident or visiting, should not miss the Magnificent Maps exhibition and associated events at the British Library in Euston Road. Power, propaganda and art are at the heart of this superb exhibition, reports Stephen Booth.

Fred W. Rose’s SerioComic War Map for the year 1877.

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just scaled plans to help travellers and planners. Prior to the 19th century, as the exhibition reveals, they were often more about demonstrating a ruler’s power, even if they depicted princedoms and empires long since submerged by modern nation states. Whither Pomerania or Bohemia? Many were exquisite works of

city’s planning department. Carved around 200 AD and almost certainly the work of Greek mapmakers schooled in Euclidean geometry, similar plans would not return for almost one and a half millennia.

Readers may already have seen the series of four preview programmes to the exhibition on BBC4. They included Hereford Cathedral’s Mappa Mundi, an insight into the medieval world and mindset; the massive 17th-century Klencke Atlas, which stands taller than a man; and maps as propaganda like the 19th century mapmaker Fred Rose and his iconic depiction of Russia as a grabbing octopus.

An accompanying series of lectures and presentations began on 24 May with Professor Richard Talbert talking about the Peutinger map, a tantalising copy made in the 13th century of a Roman map. The map has an odd history with little known of what it was copied from or why. Various owners faltered along the way and although it was engraved in 1598 it had to await publication until 1753. The original copy was only colour photographed in the 1970s.

The copied map is 23ft long by just 1ft deep, more like a scroll than a map. Talbert believes it would have been even longer and estimates some 6ft is missing. It takes some

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exhibition historic unravelling but you can just about work out, amidst the squeezed land masses and seas, that Britain and Gaul are on the far left and Persia on the right. In between the Mediterranean is squeezed in with Cyprus. The whole package is an elongated schematic road map of place names with distances marked in whatever units of measurement – Roman miles, leagues or Persian units – were deemed appropriate (or more likely reported to the draughtsman).

Peter Barber, map curator at the British Library, has put together not only a brilliant selection of maps covering some two thousand years of mapping but has also backed it up with an array of fascinating talks and lectures. They include topics as diverse as Changing perspectives: mapping global injustice by changing the view? by Danny Dorling. The Maps in Palace - David Starkey and Peter Barber discuss the importance of maps in medieval and early modern palaces. Power, Propaganda and Art: Maps in modern times. Great Cities of the World with historian John Julius Norwich. To Geopolitics: Power and Space and The New Mapping Revolution with a chance to hear Google’s Ed Parsons and Steve Chilton from OpenStreetMap. More details at: http://www.bl.uk/magnificentmaps/events1.html

mapping

Peter Barber and a colleague steady the magnificent Klenke Atlas. The largest book in the world at almost six feet tall, it was presented by the Amsterdam merchant Johannes Klencke to Charles II of England on his restoration to the throne in 1660. It was certainly a gift fit for a king, with forty-one large wall maps in an ornate binding which bears symbols of the kingdoms of Great Britain, and that of France which the English monarch still claimed. The maps are either unique, or known in only a handful of copies. Together they were adjudged to encapsulate all knowledge.

UNI__GIS Study for a postgraduate qualification in GIS by distance learning UNIGIS is a partnership between Huddersfield, Manchester Metropolitan and Salford universities that delivers postgraduate GIS courses by distance learning.

With twenty year's experience, and as a founder member of the prestigious UNIGIS International network, we provide high quality courses that meet the requirements of busy GI professionals and of those seeking to enter the GIS industry.

Our courses can be completed entirely by distance learning, although we also offer optional residential workshops. Assessment is by coursework only - there are no examinations. We support you with personal tutors, online help and a dedicated UNIGIS office.

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• Networking with an international community of GIS professionals

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geo client guides VIRTUAL REALITY, 3D CITY MODELLING, augmented reality, online mapping, crowd sourcing, geo-mash ups – just a few of the latest buzzwords in the lexicon of the internet savvy surveyor! The latest IT functionality and a flood of data from individuals, ground and space-based imagery, not to mention the freeing up of previously expensive or hidden government information, is now impacting the work of the whole of the property professional.

RICS has always tried to keep abreast of technologies and other developments that affect its members and believe that the publication ‘Geospatial Information and the Surveying Profession’ will serve this purpose – at least for the next six months! While coloured map pins may go the way of the pinstriped suit; the coloured screen – sometimes with 3D capability – enables the modern professional to access and utilise a world of incredibly powerful geospatial information (GI). This can provide better and more up-to-date

neologisms such as ‘the cloud’, ‘neogeography’ and ‘interoperability’.

GI is no longer the preserve of highly skilled professionals. Many people use it on a daily basis, sometimes unknowingly. Car navigation systems and instant web access to satellite imagery are just two of the applications to become ubiquitous in the last five years. Most of the examples in this publication are taken from the UK although increasing use of GI is a worldwide phenomenon. Younger generations are very familiar with easy-to-use 3D technology built into computers, handsets and games machines.

The complexity is hidden but enables the ‘mashingup’ of different datasets to provided value added products tailored to many applications.

Informing professionals Property professionals have also been using many of these techniques – though often provided by third parties – to analyse multiple

Geospatial information and the surveying profession James Kavanagh of RICS introduces a new guide to the use of GI by all those involved with land and property development. pictures of the natural and built environment, which will enable the surveyor to deliver a better service with better presentation tools to clients from individual house buyers to corporate investment managers.

A plain English guide to GI RICS Land has brought together a group of surveyors and other experts to help bring this rapidly changing world of GI to the professionals who operate in various sectors of the property market. Hardcore geo technologies and language have been avoided and, as with the other RICS geo client guides at www.rics.org/geomatics, this information paper explains in plain English the potential impact of these all embracing technologies.

Case studies highlight the use already being made of this technology and it explains the most important

property-related datasets and to visualise environments and development potential. They have been particularly adept at cost/ benefit analysis and the economic/social elements of sustainability. This publication therefore aims to inform property professionals about the latest developments and how they can use it to benefit their own businesses.

GI and web 2.0 technologies are set to further eliminate outmoded work practices, but well informed property professionals are well placed to take advantage of these new tools. GI will enable them to better understand the geographic, economic and social elements of any given location and its myriad relationships with its environment. The whole field of web-based technologies and GI applications is going through an extremely exciting revolution and this paper,

Augmenting reality with GI

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Augmented reality is the technique of combining a real scene viewed by a user with a virtual scene generated from GI on a suitable handheld device. Developments are suggesting more and more potential applications, often incorporating GPS for absolute position; orientation sensors to determine where the user is looking; and a rich database describing the natural or built environments. This view from Oxford Street in central London has been augmented with information about the street’s buildings and street furniture as well as directional information for the next required destination.

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Image: Shows potential use of augmented reality with an urban setting, Oxford Circus, Central London © Crown Copyright 2009.

www.gisprofessional.co.uk

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Issue No 34 June 2010

geo client guides although by no means exhaustive, provides a ‘heads-up’ awareness of how this will affect the property sector.

Several case studies are designed to show the impact of GI on a number of key areas of professional practice. Two of them are included in this review.

GI tackles fraud The Association of British Insurers

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RICS Client Guides RICS land group and RICS Geomatics have recently released a series of geo client guides.

These 6 page A5 format guides are designed for use by engineers, architects, planners and non specialist surveyors. They explain the sometimes opaque terminology behind many survey technologies and focus on subjects as diverse as: Map projections, scale factor, aerial imagery, calibration, heighting with GPS, marine surveying, laser scanning and many more. The full series is available to download from www.rics.org/ geomatics or available in hardcopy on request cmallet@rics.org.

Above: The home addresses of the passangers from the number 14 bus who had made a claim in red. The MIB identified that a large number of these claimants actually lived in an area that appeared to be better served by the number 19 bus. When questioned on this and other evidence, almost all the claimants withdrew their claim. © Crown Copyright 2009

on

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(ABI) estimates that fraud now costs the UK economy £14–20 billion per annum. Fraud analysts use database mining techniques to identify suspicious patterns, known as fraud indicators. GI can help identify certain fraud indicators and enable analysts to carry out spatial mining of databases to find and verify specific locations, addresses and businesses; as well as fraud ‘hot-spots’ and the proximity of, for example, claimants, witnesses and third parties.

In 2003, the Motor Insurers’ Bureau (MIB) used Ordnance Survey data to detect a large number of suspicious whiplash claims from a busy bus that had been involved in a staged accident with a car. A large number of the claimants were found to have been travelling on the bus in a direction bearing no relation to home addresses or stated destinations. This helped the MIB to establish that the claimants had prior knowledge of the ‘accident’ and had boarded that particular bus to participate in a mass whiplash scam. Subsequently 42 of the 43 claims were withdrawn or successfully rejected.

14th-16th June 2010, Chelsea Football Club, London

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Issue No 34 June 2010

open source

The above screenshot shows OpenStreetMap data overlaid with the Tree Preservation GIS information.

SURREY HEATH BOROUGH COUNCIL (SHBC) lives up to its name! All definitions of ‘heath land’ refer to open ground, open country and general openness. In Surrey Heath, this openness now extends to open source software and the OpenStreetMap dataset.

Perhaps all that is really needed is an open mind.

To begin with the council considered trees and tree preservation orders (TPOs). After looking at

Saunt and his team provided a slightly modified version of their iShareMaps platform as the “My Protected Trees” application accessible from Surrey Heath’s homepage (www.surreyheath.gov.uk). The central spatial warehouse is maintained on an Oracle 9i database server. Overnight batch jobs suck TPO spatial data out of Oracle and place it into the free PostgreSQL database (with PostGIS extensions).

Operations performed on the data include the generation of five metre buffers around the data to enable overhanging trees to be detected in any search.

The processed data is then output to a small MapInfo file for very fast interaction. iShare also connects to the local land and property server each night and extracts the property gazetteer. As many readers will understand, this data can get very messy when removed from its ‘home’ database. iShare “massages” this data in PostgreSQL to produce an address look-up web service for public use, presenting just a single address look-up box that will accept postcodes, street names or partial addresses.

Users are presented with a small map extract to confirm the identification of a property by showing the likely boundary superimposed on aerial imagery with the 5m buffer also displayed. Any TPOs will be flagged immediately and then a test for intersection

Surrey Heath is an Open Authority James Rutter details Surrey Heath Borough Council’s experience of open data, what it means for staff and citizens alike and touches on the likely upheavals to the GI community from OS Opendata and the data.gov.uk portal.

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. . .the generation of five metre buffers around the data to enable overhanging trees to be detected in any search.

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many examples of council websites, SHBC chose Astun Technology to provide the solution for publishing TPOs on its website, enabling the public to find the pertinent information easily. This is not a case of crudely transposing an internal GIS application for public use, but a considered approach to interfacing with people that may or may not be able to understand maps – if they just want a list of information or results, that is fine.

with any conservation areas is also performed. Use of the unique property reference number (UPRN) from the LLPG also enables the complete planning history for the property to be presented via a dynamic link from the council’s planning system. Reading these will ensure that any planning conditions are identified.

Massaging data First, it should be understood

• •

that trees are protected in at least three different ways – especially in an urban or suburban context.

There are tree preservation orders, planning conditions related to trees and possibly also conservation area protection. Bringing this information together is non-trivial. A property must be found and verified. Any TPO’s within that property then need identifying as well as whether or not the property is within a conservation area. Finally, the recent planning history of the property must be accessed to see if any conditions relate to trees.

Using SHBC’s tree protection experience and Astun’s knowledge of open source software, Mike

Customise and hybridise From this experience we learnt that open source software:

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Can be customised to provide great applications Is free (no ongoing licences after some up front development costs) Can outperform proprietary applications (easier to install, easier and more efficient to use) Can be hybridised with existing proprietary systems

The “My Protected Trees” application was ‘highly commended’ in the innovation and best practice category in the 2007 AGI awards, showing just what can be done with open source software.

In this case, the iSharemaps platform wraps up the following open source modules into a simple data integration/publishing platform:

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Issue No 34 June 2010

open source Right: Surrey Heath appears to be one of the few local government bodies to have collected information on most of its territory in OpenStreetMap.

Left: The iShareMaps mapping screen as seen on Surrey Heath Borough Council’s website.

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PostgreSQL-database server – PostGIS extensions ‘spatially enable’ the database.

OGR tools – part of the GDAL library providing read/write conversion for vector datasets UMN MapServer provides images served by the system.

OpenLayers provides the user interface for mapping (used on “My Surrey Heath” below) TileCache pre-rendering of map tiles

The implementation of “My Protected Trees” has led to an excellent two-way relationship between the council and Astun Technology. For a limited investment, SHBC has received expert design and coding support without it having to get into any complex coding itself.

Contributing to OSM “My Surrey Heath” is a much larger web application that provides users with a raft of information related to individual properties and the interface has been enhanced with “slippy” maps. Integration with the existing Cadcorp GeognoSIS software is also two way – with the incumbent software applications now accessing the iShare address look-up web service.

Integration of iSharemaps with the Lagan CRM system has also been achieved so that contact centre staff can, for example, identify and digitise abandoned vehicle locations directly onto a MapServer window, which appears inside their CRM contact screen. The vehicle location is then written into a PostGIS database. If any subsequent calls are received about the same vehicle then the operator can see that it’s already been reported.

Environmental health officers clear the abandoned vehicle, close the CRM case and the incident is joining the geography jigsaw

removed from the display. However, the GIS team retains a permanent record of all abandoned vehicles, which is used to detect patterns and plan monitoring efforts. iShare is also used automatically to turn noise nuisance phone calls into mapping data. Because each contact is linked to a UPRN, iShare extracts this data, geocodes it, and produces a new GIS file every night. Future developments will include the use of the iShareMaps platform to begin automated publishing of information through GeoRSS, GeoJSON and KML feeds.

And now for the open data! SHBC became involved with the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project out of frustration at how Ordnance Survey’s licensing policy and practice seem to lag far behind current technology and user expectations. The more the council got involved, the more benefits were identified and Surrey Heath appears to be one of the few local government bodies to have collected information on most of its own territory in OSM and thereby to have achieved a good standing in the OSM community. This has included attending the

Surrey Heath: – background to an open authority Surrey Heath covers 36.5 square miles in north west Surrey with Camberley and Frimley as its main urban centres. The heathland supports five Sites of Special Scientific Interest as well as the famous Bisley shooting ranges. Historically, the heathland was the result of Neolithic overgrazing but now supports several famous nurseries and in 1635 Charles I issued a proclamation from Bagshot Park extending Royal Mail services to the general public.

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open source •

Provide custom code to other authorities needing to provide OSM in the British National Grid and in the OS OpenSpace® tile schema.

Updates from OSM are downloaded for the whole of the UK and pre-rendered at levels 0-7. For the tiles covering SHBC, the rendering extends to the more detailed levels 8-10. Previous versions of tiles are backed up. Anyone using the system for areas outside Surrey Heath boundaries will have the most detailed tiles rendered on-the-fly.

Growing system of tools The openness of OSM

Above: An example of results from the My Protected Trees application with a small map snippet.

annual State of the Map Conference and contributing a paper to last year’s meeting in Amsterdam. Currently, SHBC contributions to OSM include a complete street network; land use coverage; many points of interest; all schools; and some of the footpath network. Building footprints are now being digitised from 2009 aerial imagery – the licence includes full rights to use any derived data. All new street naming and numbering data is put into OpenStreetMap – even before it is delivered to Ordnance Survey or Royal Mail. An extract can be seen at http://bit.ly/cMlsyb.

Benefits of openness So why do we collect and

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The openness of OSM has enabled an ever growing ecosystem of tools for data creation, checking and use.

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digitise data already available (mostly) through the Mapping Services Agreement deal negotiated by the Local Government Association with Ordnance Survey and other data suppliers?

Arguably, the whole OSM project has helped bring pressure on the ‘authorities’, which has led to the recent opening up of many OS datasets under OS OpenData™ (ironic that an “open” brand should be trademarked?!). The derived data issue still remains to be resolved – though the recent government response to the consultation on Ordnance Survey suggests that it is at least recognised. The council also benefits from running its own internal tile server with help from Mapnik – which is used for rendering OSM itself.

With control of its own open source software and servers, as well as our OSM datasets, the council is able to: • • • • •

Benefit from a better tile server performance (even than OSM) Benefit from better security and protection from potential ‘vandalism’ Completely control our own information that may not be available publicly Provide our own data to the OSM community where appropriate Updates to OSM map tiles are almost instantaneous, unlike some other raster products

has enabled an ever growing ecosystem of tools for data creation, checking and use. SHBC will soon be serving OSM data to staff for field use. Some of this work uses professional grade GPS but most uses more affordable consumer grade kit. All the background reference mapping on the GPS receivers is now OSM and paper pre-gridded versions are being supplied to waste contractors using the excellent free service at http://maposmatic.org. This gives a conventional street map complete with automatically compiled indices. The 2006 Surrey County Air Survey has just been released to the public by Surrey Heath Borough, ITOWorld and eight other Surrey Districts, under the OpenDatabase License, for users of OSM to digitise and from which to derive data.

Use of open source software and data has led to significant advantages for Surrey Heath. The council has two excellent web services, one of which was highly commended by the AGI. It also has an excellent map creation and publishing system. Surrey Heath’s corporate website has been ranked in the top 20 most developed sites by SOCITM for 2009 – in no small part due to the open source software and open data achievements. The next focus will be on increased data publishing (using open source tools and microformats like GeoJSON and GeoRSS). . .why build complex web mapping tools when someone else can do it. . . just give them the data with which to work.

About the author James Rutter is currently the GIS Manager at Surrey Heath and has been for the last six years. He is also responsible for the property gazetteer and for the electronic document management systems that Surrey Heath is deploying.

Prior to that, he implemented corporate GIS at Elmbridge Borough Council whilst also running their tree preservation service and before that was arboricultural supervisor at Royal Horticultural Gardens Wisley.

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Issue No 34 June 2010

columnist adena

Adena Schutzberg is Principal of ABS Consulting Group Inc. and Executive Editor of Directions Magazine, www.directionsmag.com

schutzberg

CONSIDER THE LAST TIME you saw a static map.

Where was it? In the printed newspaper showing the locations of incidents from the crime blotter? In a storefront illustrating plans for the new park across the street? Or was it a poster presented at a GIS event? It’s very unlikely you saw it on a web page, be it a newspaper’s web page or a city planning web page. The interactive map is slowly and quietly pushing the static map into the background for most uses and I’m beginning to regret that.

I suspect it’s roughly around the time when static JPF versions of AutoCAD or ArcInfo maps started to disappear from the Web when the energy put into studying, practicing and participating in the production of truly elegant static maps began to wane. Slowly but surely, the focus became creating interactive maps where the viewer controlled the

you could bring your paper map for a critique by experienced cartographers at several conferences. I think it’s significant that now the “part that needs improvement” is identified as the user interface or experience over the map itself.

Tossed in to a pile of data My final concern is that interactive Web maps are turning into search platforms rather than story telling tools. There’s nothing wrong with, and I think users benefit from, using map-based tools to find the value of a property, or the nearest drug store, or where the Alps are. But that function is in many ways just another “Google Search”. The static thematic maps, the ones that tell stories, guide you through “the data”. The cartographer has determined the story has value and wants to share it with the viewer.

Have we lost the map? No one can turn back the tide of technology data and symbology of the map, at least to some degree. There was not necessarily a single product (or “story”) envisioned by a cartographer. Instead, the map had more than one purpose because in essence it was more than one map. It was whatever map the user felt was needed and could be “made” within the limitations of the interface and data.

Content versus interactivity One of my concerns

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. . . the developer and the user may spend too much time playing with the various tools and buttons and not get the point. . .

with all this interacting is that our interactive maps may be putting interactivity before content or “story.” This happens with PowerPoint, too. Many folks (still) spend more time on the bells and whistles of that or other presentation programs than on honing in on what they truly want to say. In the case of an interactive map, the developer and the user may spend too much time playing with the various tools and buttons and not get the point (or “story”).

A good static map, or perhaps a series of them, with some study (and no pushing of buttons) may better guide the user to that key information.

A second concern, and I’m far from the first to describe this situation, relates to basic effective cartography. With the focus on the interactivity of the application, the core map design may suffer. A GIS practitioner I met recently offers workshops and short sessions that do not critique the core cartography, but the Web interfaces. Not so long ago

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joining the geography jigsaw

Today, a good many of the thematic interactive maps are not story based, but are rather explorationbased. The user is tossed into a pile of data, query and visualisation tools and left to fend for him or herself. It’s a very different experience.

One area of cartography that should be wildly popular on the Web, and the one I feel like I’m seeing less and less, is animated maps. These typically show change over time. They are not static but they often have limited, if any, interaction. The cartographer/developer has laid out the story for you to watch. If anything you may be able to control how “fast” the story goes or jump back in time or replay a segment.

One positive change I do see occurring: more and more developers of “does everything” interactive maps are realising such jackknife (does everything!) apps not only fail to tell stories but also can be so complex as to be unusable by less experienced website visitors. Instead, developers are opting to build a series of tiny focused apps (akin to a series of static maps!) to share one story at a time.

I know we are only heading forward with interactive maps and neither I, nor anyone else, can turn back time or technology. But I do think consideration of the formidable static map with its defined story can only enhance Web mapping and Web GIS effectiveness in the months and years to come.

www.gisprofessional.co.uk

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but we need to be careful not to lose sight of the “story” of maps under this wave of interactivity, argues Adena Schutzberg.

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Issue No 34 June 2010

eurofile SPRINGTIME IN PARIS! Two visits in two weeks – once by car and Eurotunnel for pleasure and the other by Eurostar on business. Who needs airport security queues anyway? But exchange rates still affect any sort of travelling from this sceptred isle – with mixed effects. On the one hand an interim payment on a current contract in Euros was made when the pound was at its highest point for months; on the other hand holiday cash is always a gamble unless mother in law is paying to be taken to her Parisienne roots.

At least the holiday trip was in spring weather; the business trip found Paris at 8°C with rain and a wind chill factor to boot!

hour but that doesn’t allow for passengers trying to remember routes from 40 years ago when they didn’t drive anyway!

Maps of Europe have been on the front pages recently – covered in ash clouds. It is interesting to see how they have rapidly become more sophisticated with better resolution for the dangerous areas and how the logic of more integration of European air space has become paramount. It is difficult to feel sorry for some airlines and their loudmouthed owners, but the reality of the situation is brought closer to home when a neighbour goes to New York for a week and

The rise of Eneropa?

Our correspondent constantly seeks clarity on the big issues of the day: mapping and language. One European body has come up with a radical new set of names for regions and countries while others settle for the polyglot’s Globish.

My European client suggested that the exchange rate issue could be solved by the UK voting to join the Euro – on current trends there might soon be a vacancy if Greece is driven out! Talking of driving – Calais to Paris by car is of course straightforward on the toll roads but navigating Paris is interesting – even with a satnav. No doubt any self-respecting system would warn against driving in the Paris rush

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Right: Eneropa, by the Office of Metropolitan Architecture for the European Climate Foundation (and acknowledgements surely to Harry Beck of London Underground fame).

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comes home after three – with his cat left to those of us freezing back in England.

More countries to join EC? Another map of Europe appeared in The Observer newspaper on May 9th. The Map of Eneropa has been drawn by the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (www.oma.eu) for the European Climate Foundation, which aims to show how a pan European energy policy could dramatically reduce carbon emissions and still supply us with sustainable electricity.

The map suggests the best areas for different types of energy generation and gives them catchy (?) names.

UK finds itself split between the ‘Isles of Winds’ and ‘Tidal States’ while the holiday destinations in the Mediterranean all find themselves in ‘Solaria’. My Hungarian friends are in ‘Enhanced Geothermalia’ while the Czech Republic (when will they call themselves Czechia?), Slovakia and a large chunk of Poland find themselves in the ‘CCSR’ (Carbon Capture and Storage Republic)!

Provocation is intended, though exactly what is meant by putting Paris in ‘Vrania’ I know not. The Balkanisation of the former joining the geography jigsaw

Issue No 34 June 2010

eurofile Yugoslavia is instantly solved by uniting the successor countries under the name â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Biomassburgâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;.

â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Wall Street Englishâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; (sic) on the Paris Metro.

Brazen criminal act Not enough meat in this English or Globish? Will such a redrawing of boundaries have any effect on language? Readers of this column will know of my use of Eurish for the official language of the EU (typified by that lovely word â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;subsidiarityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;) but the answer may lie further afield. In the same paper there was an article on the rise of globish (pronounced globe-ish lest it sound too crude). This is a very simplified form of Shakespeareâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s tongue with only 1500 words.

The word was coined by a Frenchman Jean Paul Nerriere and is popularised in two (French language) books. Monoglots from the windy isles might prefer to read Robert McCrumâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s tome â&#x20AC;&#x153;Globish: how the English Language became the Worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Languageâ&#x20AC;? from which the article was extracted. Anyone used to business travel, package tours or â&#x20AC;&#x201C; increasingly â&#x20AC;&#x201C; various social network websites, will recognise globish and will understand it even if my editor would shoot me for using it.

Jean Paul should have the last word â&#x20AC;&#x201C; â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;if you want to read Shakespeare or Harry Potter, learn English. If you want to do business learn Globishâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;.

However, I note that there are plenty of adverts for

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io n t i d

Eurofile? Well how about a bit of copyright fraud?

GfK GeoMarketing (www.gfk-geomarketing.com) is offering a reward of 10,000 euros for information leading to a conviction â&#x20AC;&#x201C; for fraud or theft â&#x20AC;&#x201C; of as yet unidentified person or persons who fraudulently gained access to the companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s CRESTA maps â&#x20AC;&#x201C; designed for use by insurance companies. The recently completed maps cover Germany, China, Japan, Mexico and Australia. The data was accessed from somewhere in Greater London according to Wolfram Scholz, CEO of GfK GeoMarketing. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;This brazen criminal act will not be tolerated by GfK GeoMarketing,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; he says. â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Our datasets are protected by intellectual property rights and copyright regulations â&#x20AC;&#x201C; any reselling or purchasing of the data violates our rights. . . our maps have special cartographic features and attributes that can be used to trace their originâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;.

The involvement of legal authorities and thirdparty experts ensures that any affected company will not be in breach of copyright and licence regulations by providing the data.

Do let us know if you claim the reward!

Robin Waters is an independent consultant who has worked extensively in several European countries and who has a keen interest in EU's INSPIRE Directive and its implementation.

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Issue No 34 June 2010

Enterprise GIS Google’s

GEE that this version is also appropriate for situations when users are away from their desks and need to access an organisation’s geospatial data. Data collected in the field can also be transferred to the primary system when network connectivity is available.

Most things are possible from your Earth server including mobile applications.

THE LONDON BOROUGH of Islington became cool as the home of New Labour in the 1990s. Now, with that venture most probably consigned to a computer chipped wheelie bin, the Borough has become the first UK local authority to take the cool new Google Earth Enterprise (GEE) and develop its own private ‘globe’. And in another sign of these softer sharing times Islington are hosting a globe for the Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead – now that sounds like another bit of social climbing!

Google invited many industry folk to their UK launch of GEE in London in April. This was my first venture into a Google office or to a Google event and it was, as you might perhaps expect, low key, competent and very interesting.

Google does seem to get its market research right more often than not and I think they are on to a winner here.

Alabama bound Typical in-house – and presumably secure – users include the CIA (for which the Keyhole precursor to Google Earth was developed) and the state of Alabama. The latter claim that it only took three days to set up for their existing datasets; their biggest problem was getting permission to use datasets from certain departments within the state government. Now where have we heard that before?

Alabama has its own imagery, transportation networks and other GI. It was also mentioned, in passing, that GCHQ in Cheltenham have a GEE installation.

Lousiana is developing a public facing globe – like Islington – and all of these public administrations see the potential both internally and externally of using GEE or the Google Maps interface, which is now probably the most familiar on the planet. However they do not see them as replacing their heavy duty GIS platforms for data management or analysis. They do see them as providing the user interface and, with the portable globes, a very easy data collection tool.

In the UK, Infoterra are the first GEE partner in the UK and this provides them with the opportunity to provide a hosted solution if users do not want to run their own servers.

GEE whizz? The world’s favourite search engine developer is moving into serious business applications, reports Robin Waters. How will the GIS heavies respond?

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. . . their biggest problem was getting permission to use datasets from certain departments within the state government.

www.gisprofessional.co.uk

Google Earth Enterprise costs money – from about £25k per annum upwards but provides the software for a complete ‘out of the box’ solution to providing in-house and/or public facing maps for any geographic information that you care to throw at it. It apparently ‘ingests’ any common GIS and mapping data formats and is claimed to be very easy to set up.

Customers, like Islington, build globes with their own data on their own servers that can be accessed with the same fast, easy-to-use technology, as Google Earth or Google Maps. The basic version will allow 300 concurrent users with a 1000 in total. And this requires no on-line connection to the outside world.

So an enterprise keeps its own data completely private – it is not indexed by Google.

However, it is possible at any time to put that internal data (or a subset of it) onto the internet and mash it up with the normal public Google Earth maps and images. It is also now possible for portable versions to be installed on laptops and, even if they default to an intranet connection, for them to be operated by employees completely off-line with all relevant local spatial data available – mini globes! Google suggests

Projection objection remains So what does the future hold? The obvious question is, can Ordnance Survey (or anyone else) use GEE for the national geoportal being developed for the UK Location Programme? Well, the inevitable licensing questions came up at the launch but there were no definitive answers. There may still be a derived data issue and there is still a question mark about OS attitudes to any of its own data being ‘indexed’ by Google. There is also – at least for the largest scale mapping – a question of the approximations built into Google’s projection – it is pretty basic though perfectly adequate probably up to a scale of 1:25k or possibly even 1:10k.

The overall impress was GEE-Whizz! Although I am reliably informed that neither Yahoo or Microsoft are likely to compete directly, we are already seeing a response from ESRI in the form of their latest release and from PBBI (Pitney Bowes Business Insight) who have announced a cloud based data solution. So the future will be interesting even if it isn’t (all) Google. “Do no evil” may still be the Google motto but that doesn’t mean it won’t damage your business plan!

joining the geography jigsaw

Issue No 34 June 2010

non-intrusive monitoring

Trainee yachtsmen will eventually go solo for the first time, a nervous moment. But geocasting can help keep a non-intrusive eye on their progress.

Image: courtesy of Pelican Racing.

PELICAN RACING IS A company that offers RYA training courses for yachtsmen and women, from beginner through to championship grade.

They also charter boats to those who want to do their own thing or who want to take part in races, but without the expense of owning a yacht.

Whilst undergoing training, the instructor is on board and able to make sure everyone keeps safe. But eventually students complete their training and they’re ready to go solo for the first time. It’s a nervous moment for all but, as Ash Holmes explains, Pelican Racing has solved the problem by using Geocasting. They use it to keep an eye on their probationer yachtsmen and provide effective help when it is needed. It is an obvious application for vulnerable new yachtsmen but it would be a mistake to think that the technology is just for probationers. It’s a non-intrusive, sensible precaution available to everyone.

functions. Phil uses Microsoft Silverlight for this purpose because he says the integrated developer tools are way ahead of the competition. He has written the system backend and has standard user interfaces that can be adapted according to customer needs.

The system supports secure closed user groups, can be used for live GPS-only tracking without video and supports geofencing. In the yachting application an alarm can sound when the boat leaves a predefined area, or conversely if it goes too close to an area that it should avoid.

Apps beyond lone-working Phil is a man full of enthusiasm for a technology that has found applications in areas that he never originally imagined.

Lone-worker and employee tracking are perhaps two of the more obvious uses. For health and safety, the video could be really useful if, for example, the loneworker were unfortunate enough to be attacked whilst on duty. Other applications include reconnaissance observations along a route and social networking so you can let friends know what you are

Geocasting: a non-intrusive monitoring system Off the shelf components The concept is simple. The

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Lone-worker and employee tracking are perhaps two of the more obvious uses.

yachtsman carries a GPS-enabled mobile phone with video capability that uses the Windows Mobile operating system. The phone is loaded with the Geocasting front end that sends GPS positions and video imagery to the client server back at base. Here, the track of the yacht is plotted against a background of Bing Maps and the video can be displayed in near real-time in a window.

Pelican Racing can keep an eye on their whole fleet from one laptop – and that can be mobile too.

Not only is the technology great for non-intrusive health and safety but also all data is archived and available to playback later, so yachtsmen can review their performance when they’re back on dry land. The company also has a website so that you can broadcast your experiences as they happen. It’s a great way for people to follow the progress of yacht races online.

Unlike other tracking systems, Geocasting uses off-the-shelf hardware and the user can choose the hardware to suit his purpose. Clearly for yachttracking it is important that the hardware should be waterproof, so Pelican Racing uses high end mobile phones, but other applications could make use of standard phones from the high street.

Developing with Silverlight Geocasting is the brainchild of Phil Bishop of Inca X. He has developed the software to receive data from the mobile units, mash it with Bing Maps and add a number of other useful

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joining the geography jigsaw

doing. It need not operate in real time as the record and playback facility is suitable for many purposes, for example pipeline inspection.

Dano DeBroux is Director, Disruptive Business Technologies at the US Office of Naval Research (ONR).

He effuses ideas for Geocasting. How about fastening a mobile unit to the uniform of each soldier in a unit that is out on an operation? That way, the folks at command and control know where each member of the unit is at all times and the video is an efficient way to see what’s happening on the ground. The software can also track groups as well as individuals.

Geocasting can be used for physical security of personnel and equipment, for monitoring movement of sensitive material being transported along a route, using fixed and mobile sensors. The technology could also be invaluable during humanitarian disaster relief operations as a means of co-ordinating deployment of NGOs, local law enforcement and first responders and for sharing and analysing the information that they gather.

Dano sees the primary advantage of Geocasting as its use of standard hardware. If a mobile breaks, he can get a replacement easily and without breaking the bank. Running costs are also low – typically £1 per day for a mobile unit.

For further information visit: www.incax.co.uk, www.pelican-racing.co.uk, www.silverlight.net and www.bing.com/maps.

www.gisprofessional.co.uk

GiSProfessional

From yachting to reconnaissance to social networking, geocasting is a simple, non-intrusive technology that can be adapted according to your needs, reports Richard Groom.

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Issue No 34 June 2010

AGI column THIS MONTH’S AGI COLUMN draws on just a few of our many recent activities to promote the use of geographic information.

AGI Director and CEO Chris Holcroft takes the stand at GeoCommunity09.

Post Ordnance Survey Consultation AGI, like many other organisations and stakeholders, participated in submitting a response to the recent Ordnance Survey consultation. Additionally, we wrote a letter to the former prime minister, Gordon Brown, on the 19th March 2010 to raise some of the concerns AGI had about possible developments surrounding Ordnance Survey digital data.

Subsequently, on 6th April, the then CLG minister, Ian Austin, wrote to the AGI director. The minister thanked AGI for its letter and for its ‘comprehensive and considered’ response to the Ordnance Survey Consultation, adding: ‘It raised a number of pertinent points which have been helpful in thinking about the future for geographic information from Ordnance Survey’.

bodies on issues of GI in the marine and coastal zone.

IMarEST is the leading international membership organisation for marine professionals.

A relationship had been building through cooperation for some time and the tremendous importance of GI and GIS to legislation such as the Marine Bill (which, amongst many other things, addresses the connection between marine and terrestrial planning for the first time) and the newly created Marine Management Organisation, meant that this link became a natural next-step.

AGI is planning a Marine and Coastal Zone event with IMarEST later in 2010.

AGI Foresight Study This significant report was edited by three independent consultants (and AGI members) Andrew Coote, Steven Feldman and Robin McLaren.

Over the past year, the AGI has been exploring the future of the geospatial industry in the UK in the first public foresight project of this kind. Entitled The

Promoting the use of GI AGI Director and CEO Chris Holcroft reports on recent activities and future opportunities for promoting GI, plus AGI’s upcoming GeoCommunity10 is well on its way to another successful year.

Significantly, he then added: ‘ While the Government’s response to the consultation has been published, work is continuing on a number of areas and AGI’s experience and reach within the market will be valuable inputs into that work. I would therefore like to take up your helpful offer of assistance outlined in your letter. I believe my officials have already been in touch to take this forward and I look forward to hearing about the results’.

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Many government organisations already employ GIS to deliver better services for the customer at less cost.

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Accordingly, AGI met with officials from the Shareholder Executive (part of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills) who had been driving the original consultation. Formed in 2003, the Shareholder Executive covers 28 government owned businesses and is involved with issues including objectives, governance, strategy, performance monitoring, board appointments and remuneration, as well as corporate finance advice.

In a useful discussion both about the consultation and future interests, such as core reference geographies, pricing and licencing, and addressing, it was agreed that AGI would have a valuable ongoing role in providing advice and feedback from the perspectives of the wider geographic community.

AGI & IMarEST sign a MoU AGI and the Institute of Marine Engineering, Science & Technology recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to facilitate close cooperation between the respective

Geospatial Industry in 2015, it has a medium-term horizon of five years hence.

In seeking diverse points of view, the study invited almost 40 industry opinion formers to contribute Expert Papers in their particular field, covering data and technology, vertical market sectors and policy drivers. This was also accompanied by a questionnaire to sound out broader views and a Foresight workshop.

This is an extremely useful document for all with an interest or involvement in GI. It can be located, along with many of the Expert Papers at www.agi.org.uk/foresight.

Local Public Services SIG Event & Local Government Association (LGA) seminar Share to Save: How GI can equip the public sector to do more with less “Joined-up government” is a phrase we have not heard for a while. But with the emphasis now firmly on saving taxpayer cash, it could be making a comeback. The Total Place pilots have demonstrated that a whole area approach to public services can lead to better services at less cost. Now though, the challenge for everyone in the public sector is to save money by joining-up local public services, staff and buildings.

Geography and GIS are fundamental to understanding place. Many government organisations already employ GIS to deliver better services for the customer at less cost. The seminar on 29 June at the LGA Conference Centre, London will concentrate on three key elements:

joining the geography jigsaw

Issue No 34 June 2010

AGI column • •

Efficiency savings through shared services /partnership working Successful case studies of proven savings through the use of GI Value of GI intelligence in public service provision

The seminar will provide an excellent opportunity for participants from the Local Government, Health and Emergency Planning sectors to discuss best practice, learn from peer organisations and see where opportunities exist to do more geospatially with less.

For details and bookings see the upcoming AGI events section at www.agi.org.uk.

AGI

GeoCommunity ‘10 Sponsorship and exhibition opportunities at the UK’s largest and most comprehensive, independent location and geographic information conference are being snapped up.

Already more than two thirds of the available opportunities are sold and AGI expects to sell out as in the previous three years in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Organisations already committed to the showcase exhibition include: ESRI (UK) and Ordnance Survey as Platinum sponsors; Microsoft, GetMapping and Postcode Anywhere as Gold sponsors; and Oracle, Navteq, Snowflake Software, Cadcorp, Pitney Bowes Business Insight, Star-Apic, Infoterra and

UNIGIS as Silver or educational sponsors.

This year’s event, held between 28 and 30 September, will focus on the diverse use of location to deliver operational efficiency savings, identifying and delivering excellence through the use of geographic information and measuring the positive affect spatial technology, data and insight can bring.

We have now received an excellent response to the recently closed call for papers. More than double the number of papers needed for the multi stream programme were submitted for consideration – many of a very high standard. All abstracts will now be considered by the organising committee and the full conference programme will be published in June.

Speakers already signed up for the AGI GeoCommunity ’10 conference programme include the acclaimed speaker Andrew Hudson-Smith from the University College London’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) who will give a plenary presentation and Mike Segal, Chairman and SRO of the UK Location Programme. Keynote presentations from senior executives of ESRI (UK) and Ordnance Survey will also be included in the final programme. More speakers and content will be announced in the run-up to the event.

Limited numbers of Early Bird places are available and offer great savings. See: www.agigeocommunity.com.

The AGI exists to “maximise the use of geographic information (GI) for the benefit of the citizen, good governance and commerce”.

Details of membership are available from info@agi.org.uk or by calling: +44 (0)20 7036 0430

Availa ble from

PV Publications Ltd, 2B North Road, Stevenage, Hertfordshire SG1 4AT Call 01438 352617 or vis it www.pvpubs.com

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products & services

Issue No 34 June 2010

Map service from OpenData More map is a new large scale national mapping content service launched by Infoterra. The company has developed vector extraction algorithms to produce buildings and other vectors from OS OpenData. With the content categorised by type and application, the service allows users to: map with buildings, roads, boundaries and names; model with terrain, vegetation and building height information; magnify with visualisation and verification imagery; and manage with added interpretation, intelligence and statistics. ‘We have initially processed building and road vectors for the whole of Leicestershire county. We are making a sample available in order to obtain feedback from our customers ahead of processing all of Great Britain. We estimate that GB coverage and updates could routinely be processed over a period of five days,’ says Andy Wells, Infoterra’s director of government services. Image: Contains Ordnance Survey data © crown copyright & database right 2010 - Imagery © Infoterra Ltd & Bluesky 2010.

Surveying with Uno

supports real-time data collection from SBAS, such as the European wide area geostationary satellite EGNOS, for differential corrections with 5 Hz update rate and an accuracy of less than 0.4 m. The GNSS handhelds can also be used with total stations and other Viva GNSS RTK sensors.

settle boundary disputes should be in the distant past, but they’re still here with us to this day. Now Postcode Anywhere has built-in reliable, useful ways to access and manipulate the data, users can deal with these kinds of issues by clicking a mouse or typing out a few postcodes,’ says Richard Geary, chief architect.

Web service for ITN layer A

The Viva Uno handheld GNSS system for centimetre surveying aims to address the need for large scale data collection within utilities, agriculture and road infrastructure. Leica’s system uses the company’s onboard software, SmartWorx Viva, and is equipped with an integrated L1 GPS/GLONASS receiver and antenna. The device allows raw data to be logged at 5 Hz for post-processing with an accuracy of 10mm + 2 ppm. The device also

new range of web-based services is designed to help local authorities make the most of the Integrated Transport Network (ITN) layer data, part of OS MasterMap. Postcode Anywhere’s service aims to allow users to tap into the data they are entitled to use under the mapping services agreement in an easier, more cost-effective way. Possible applications range from planning transportation routes to calculating or redefining catchment areas such as school bus pass entitlement. ‘By making use of this kind of technology, government can start to realise the value of these datasets. . . The days of taking a wooden trundle-wheel to

NSG conversion service A Customised vector mapping OS VectorMap District is now available for developers to download, order on disc and view via Ordnance Survey’s free mapping portal, OpenData. The new dataset has been specifically designed for use online and has been released as an “alpha” product, so it will be developed over time in line with user feedback. District is best viewed at scales from 1:15,000 to 1:35,000 and is available in both raster and vector formats; the latter offering developers the chance to come up with their own styles to meet specific needs. ‘There are 38 different types of features, all of which can be

New F!ND tool The online mapping website, F!ND, has launched a service that enables users to order Land Registry documents via a map interface. Designed for commercial organisations, the system works by using maps instead of exact addresses to determine land ownership. The facility allows users to select a map location, zoom into the area of interest – without an exact address – and then highlight a search area. The site then displays title registers and title plans, which can then be ordered. For properties with no postal address or unknown ownership, F!ND has pared down the order process for search of the index map requests (SIM). In one go, users can define a search area directly on an OS map and instantly send it to Land Registry.

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www.gisprofessional.co.uk

customised and altered. If you want to highlight the roads, urban areas, change their colours or remove them completely, you can,’ says Rob Gower, technical product manager.

‘We wanted to make it as flexible as possible whilst even the ‘raster’ version has a clean and clear design’.

new “conversion” service has been developed for users of the National Street Gazetteer who are unable to import the latest format of the NSG. Since 6 April 2010, the NSG is only being published in data transfer format (DTF) 7.1 to be compliant with the British Standard for the representation of a street. The service provided by NSG national custodian, Intelligent Addressing, gives clients access to the converted data through an ftp site on the day that the gazetteer is published.

New long-range scanning system Designed for aircraft and helicopter operation, the Harrier 68i aerial imaging and laser scanning system is ideal for long-range corridor, project and wide-area mapping.

Trimble’s system extends the laser scanner’s typical operating altitude to 1,600 metres above ground level. The system incorporates a wide-angle laser scanner with a 266 KHz effective measurement rate to colect high point density from the ground. Features include: LMS-Q680i airborne laser scanner; a 60 megapixel metric camera; Applanix POSTrack system providing GNSS-aided inertial direct georeferencing and flight joining the geography jigsaw

management; operator and pilot displays with real-time monitoring of system status, imagery and laser scanner data; computer; data storage and backup system; and optional pilot-only operation.

Centralising information The latest version of GGP Systems’ GIS allows centralised “datastores” to be employed. The company aims to enable local authorities that deliver a range of services but are struggling to reduce spending to cut out data duplication and with it the administrative resources required to maintain multiple datasets. The GIS software can store complex layers of mapped information in an international standard format defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). Being able to directly read from and write to spatial databases means information can be effectively shared between departments and other organisations, eliminating isolated data silos.

Suite for emergency services The SAFEcommand suite integrates core data management, mobile and emergency response products to increase operational effectiveness and service delivery for both blue light and homeland security organisations. The product suite was launched by Infoterra to address the challenges faced by public safety and emergency organisations such as the police, fire and rescue services and ambulance fleets. The suite aims to improve access to incident information, response times and the real-time location of resources. A central system for data consolidation and management also helps the delivery of critical operational response information to mobile resources.

SinglePoint for local authorities The SinglePoint service enables local authorities that currently hold numerous, disparate address databases to have all departments access their local land and property gazetteers via web services. The service from Aligned Assets was joining the geography jigsaw

products & services originally designed for the British Transport Police to give them subsecond access to the records of the National Land and Property Gazetteer but is now available throughout the public sector. Cardiff Council is using the service to give corporate access to the full NLPG. Matthew Seymour, senior gazetteer officer, says: ‘SinglePoint has three main benefits – firstly it compiles the entire NLPG into one, single database. Secondly it easily receives change-only updates from the National Hub, which means all departments have new address data far quicker than previously from suppliers. Thirdly, the web services mean that our corporate ICT team can very quickly create links into new systems using approved ICT standards’.

BRIEFS Erdas’ Apollo 2010, version 10.1, now supports Microsoft SQL Server in Apollo Essentials – SDI, Advantage and Professional. The company has also released Apollo Feature Interoperability, extending the native vector support by adding additional CAD and GIS formats and tools. Another release from the company is LPS eATE: a module for generating high-resolution terrain information from stereo imagery, enabling users to model their worlds with point clouds from imagery.

A new service lets individuals and businesses order and download extracts of OS OpenData products.

Launched by emapsite, the service can be found at www.free-osmaps.com.

Trimble has released new standard storage format (SSF) and data dictionary file (DDF) data format extensions for the FME spatial ETL (extract, transform, and load) product from Safe Software. These extensions enable mapping and GIS professionals to move GNSS field data collected on the company’s handhelds and processed through its GPS Pathfinder Office software to over 225 formats supported by the FME software platform.

Interact with the cloud

MapInfo Professional v10.5 offers new methods for sharing maps across the enterprise. With the latest version of Pitney Bowes Business Insight’s application, users can more fully interact with the cloud, with facilities to publish maps to and access data from the cloud. Users can publish maps to the cloud using the application in conjunction with the company’s MapInfo Stratus software-as-a-service (SaaS) for spatial location-based data and services. The product also includes: integration with Bing Maps; increased support for industry standards such as the OGC catalogue services web interface; and support for GeoPDF, which allows organisations to publish both coordinate data and tabular information to a PDF file.

Optech’s Lidar Mapping Suite v1.0 is a new software package for its airborne laser terrain mapper (ALTM) clients. A new lidar optical rectification capability maximises lidar accuracies over large project areas in a production environment.

The Risk Data Suite for the insurance industry is designed to assist underwriting decisions, improve risk awareness and monitor exposure.

The suite from Pitney Bowes Business Insight combines geospatial datasets and historical information on perils, like flooding, subsidence, crime and arson, with the ability to analyse data via the company’s MapInfo Professional location intelligence and mapping software.

Avenza’s MAPublisher 8.3 for Adobe Illustrator has new features that include: compatibility with Illustrator CS5; new line plotter function to create polylines by entering coordinates or the distance and bearing values between points; and user interface and performance enhancements to improve usability.

Intermap Technologies’ new TerrainOnDemand web services portal is an Open Geospatial Consortium compliant platform that supports the acquisition and delivery of its NEXTMap database and new online geospatial services. The company has also announced a web-based application that produces NEXTMap Online Terrain Profiles (OTPs) for microwave link planning. The application supports microwave tower placement and network expansion by delivering terrain profiles. The OTP web portal can be accessed at http://mlp.TerrainOnDemand.com.

Blue Marble Geographics’ Geographic Tracker 4.0 application for MapInfo Professional 10.5 includes expanded support for Garmin, Magellan, Trimble and other GPS units. It also allows users to calculate an offset from the location of the GPS during collection. The GPS application supports streaming live GPS position data, playback of recorded GPS log files and transfer of spatial data both to and from various GPS units. www.gisprofessional.co.uk

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Issue No 34 June 2010

calendar

| seminars | conferences | exhibitions | courses | events | workshops | symposiums | We welcome advance details of conferences, seminars, exhibitions and other events which are likely to be of interest to the GIS community. Please mention the name of the event, venue, date and point of contact for further information and send to Hayley Tear, GISPro, 2B North Road, Stevenage, Herts SG1 4AT Fax: +44 (0)1438 351989, e-mail: hayley@pvpubs.demon.co.uk

JUNE 2010 The British Cartographic Society Annual Symposium – Talking with Maps 9-11 June, VILLAGE Nottingham, Brailsford Way, Nottingham, UK.

JULY 2010 The Geoinformatics Forum Salzburg (GI_Forum) 6-9 July, Salzburg, Austria.

More information: www.gi-forum.org

More information: www.cartography.org.uk Location Roadshow 2010 10 June, Manchester, UK.

ESRI Survey & Engineering GIS Summit 10-13 July, San Diego, CA, USA.

More information: www.esri.com/events/survey/index.html

More information: http://calendar.agi.org.uk Smart Utility 2010 14-16 June, Chelsea FC, London, UK.

More information: Email, enquire@iqpc.co.uk or www.smartutilityevent.com 3rd International Conference on Cartography and GIS 15-20 June, Nessebar, Black Sea, Bulgaria.

More information: Email, cartography@abv.bg or www.cartography-gis.com Location Roadshow 2010 17 June, London, UK.

More information: http://calendar.agi.org.uk "Deriving business value from geospatial standards" – Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Business Session 17 June, NOAA Silver Spring offices, Maryland, USA.

More information: http://portal.opengeospatial.org/public_ogc/register/100617business.php

ESRI International User Conference 12-16 July, San Diego, CA, USA.

More information: www.esri.com/events/uc/index.html AUGUST 2010 International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) Technical Commission VIII Symposium 9-12 August, Kyoto, Japan. More information: www.isprscom8.org Intergraph 2010 International Users’ Conference 30 August - 2 September, ARIA Resort, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA.

More information: www.intergraph2010.com SEPTEMBER 2010 RSPSoc 2010 - The Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry Society Annual Conference with Irish Earth Observation Symposium – Visualising the World: From the Sea-Bed to the Cloud-Tops 1-3 September, University College Cork, Ireland.

More information: www.rspsoc2010.org The Second Open Source GIS UK Conference 21-22 June, University of Nottingham, UK.

More information: www.opensourcegis.org.uk

Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art Finishes 19 September, PACCAR Gallery, British Library.

More information: www.bl.uk/whatson/exhibitions/magnificentmaps/index.html The International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) Commission V Symposium – Close range image measurement techniques 22-24 June, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.

More information: Email, isprs_sec@hotmail.com or www.isprs-newcastle2010.org INSPIRE Conference 2010 22-25 June, Krakow, Poland.

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More information: http://inspire.jrc.ec.europa.eu/events/conferences/inspire_2010/index.cfm

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Progress and prospects for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing in a changing world – Ian Dowman Retirement Symposium 28 June, Lecture Theatre LT1, University College London (UCL) Cruciform Building, UK.

More information: Email, David Sen Wong ucfsswo@cege.ucl.ac.uk www.gisprofessional.co.uk

AGI GeoCommunity’10 – Opportunities in a Changing World 28-30 September, Stratford-Upon-Avon, UK.

More information: www.agigeocommunity.com Geospatial Defence & Intelligence APAC 2010 28-30 September, Millenium Hotel, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

More information: www.geospatialdefenceasia.com OCTOBER 2010 INTERGEO 2010 5-7 October, Cologne, Germany.

More information: www.intergeo.de/en/englisch/index.php Everything Happens Somewhere 2010 – NLPG NSG annual conference and exhibition 20 October, Cutlers' Hall, Church Street Sheffield S1 1HG.

More information: Email, Gayle Gander ggander@intelligent-addressing.co.uk joining the geography jigsaw

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