edparsons.com

As someone points out in the comments of this Free Our Data post, the definition of the Ordnance Survey’s public task was clearly written by the OS, I would suggest maybe even Vanessa Lawrence herself.

But if you were the CEO of a large commercial organisation would you not want to write your own mission statement ? Of course you would, but in most public companies this would be done with reference to your shareholders and discussed by your executive board with the input of your industry experienced chairman, well at least in theory anyway.

The problem here is the lack of knowledgeable oversight of the activities of the OS, the public task of the OS was defined by the OS because nobody else within government was either qualified or interested to do so, things are certainly beginning to change post the Power of Information report, but still the underlying value of geospatial information; and it’s huge potential if made more accessible, remains hidden behind bureaucratic processes.

Perhaps the mythical UK Location Strategy might suggest a way forward, I wonder who wrote that…

Written and submitted from the Iberia Lounge, Madrid Airport, using its 802.11 network.

So the results are in for the Android Developer Challenge and is amazing to see how many of the nearly fifty winning entiries can be described as some form of LBS application.

As we have always thought location is a key component to the mobile applications of the future.

The example here eco2go, is an application for tracking your carbon footprint.

Take a look at the winners yourself, I can’t wait to get hold of my android phone and try some of these out..

Written and submitted from the Melia Barajas Hotel, Madrid, using its free 802.11 network.

Just watched the John Hanke, Jack Dangermond session from Where 2.0 using Seero, think Qik with maps. Actually worked really well, along with the IRC channel you get a good idea of what is happening.

As to the presentation, there is great benefit clearly from combining the strengths of ESRI tools is terms of geospatial data creation, management and analysis with Google expertise in organising and publishing information. From the “fat end” of the long tail, the ability to expose “professional” GIS data is vital for the ongoing development of the Geoweb.

Some good comments from Jack at the end in answer to a question from the floor, making this possible technically does not mean that it will be any easier from an operational perspective for some organisations to publish their data.

There is still much work to be done to solve that issue, especially here in Europe.

UPDATE : You can also follow Where 2.0 from a distance via Mulitmaps’ John McKerrell, who his doing an excellent job live-blogging at http://blog.johnmckerrell.com/.

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

Yahoo have released the initial version of their Yahoo! Internet Location Platform an API to access a database of place ID’s known as WOEID (Where on Earth ID’s).

In the UK we are familiar with the concept of location identifiers from the OS Mastermap TOID, which it fair to say is still to really achieve much traction. Key to success for these type of systems is their openness, something which perhaps not surprisingly, is not a major feature of TOID’s

For example try to find the TOID and location of Buckingham Palace and you will struggle unless you have licensed the very expensive Mastermap database for London, on the other hand the following http get request;

http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/places.q(’buckingham%20palace’)

returns

22474234Point of InterestBuckingham PalaceUnited KingdomEnglandGreater LondonLondonSW1A 151.500919-0.1413651.500469-0.1420951.501369-0.14063

A nice hierarchical representation of the place of interest and its absolute location !

This could be a neat way of providing a little more structure around the geotag clouds currently multiplying, resulting in the location of popular features such as Buckingham Place becoming clusters of points.

I think this is a great start, it will be interesting to see how the APi develops with the addition of some verbs, /add for example.

Written and Submitted from the Google Office, London. (yes I’m not a where 2.0 this year, I’m saving my energy for this weekends wherecamp, and Google I/O)