Posts Tagged: geo

Journal — 1 Comment
17
Jun 10

Two Weeks In; Of Dog Food, Mobile Handsets and Finnish Doors

Two weeks into the Nokia and Ovi experience and I can finally pause and catch my breath. It’s been an intense two weeks and asking me what my impressions are of Nokia are akin to putting someone at the top of a very large, very steep and very fast roller coaster, watching them plummet down and then, before they’re even out of their seat, asking them to comment on what the scenery was like. So I won’t even try to comment on the scenery and will instead merely record the four things that have stuck in my mind.

I’ve been busy. I’ve been very busy. I’ve also been at home for all of two days in the last two weeks and whilst video chatting with my family over Skype is better than a plain old fashioned voice call it’s no substitute for being at home more; but things will settle down into a more manageable routine over the coming weeks. Being busy has meant that I’ve kept my head down and tried to assimilate all the new information with which I’m being bombarded, a fact that’s not gone unnoticed by Chris Osborne … “severe drop off in @vicchi’s bloggage and tweetage levels, means that maybe, just maybe, he is actually doing some work these days“. Quite.

Nokia gate5 GmbH

I learnt today that Ovi is Finnish for door, proving for once the adage that you learn something new every day.

At Yahoo! we used to talk about eating our own dog food a lot; thankfully meaning that a company should use the products that it makes rather than that the employees develop a predilection for Pedigree Chum. Although it took me the best part of the first week to notice, Nokia certainly eats its own dog food; apart from the ever present starfish style conferencing phones in meeting rooms, there’s no desk phones at all. None. But everyone has a mobile, and uses them a lot, either over the cellular network or hooked up to the internal VOIP system through the office wifi. Actually everyone seems to have more than one mobile handset, two, three and even four handsets doesn’t seem to be unusual.

I can haz new badge pleez?

In a previous role I seemed to spend a lot of my time talking about why location and all of the many geo facets it encompasses is important. Many was a meeting with a senior exec which started with the depressing question “so .. location … is it really important?“. Nokia gets location; there’s absolutely no doubt about that. The question is now how do we deliver real value and real market share with location … and that’s half the fun and half the challenge.

New Job. New City. New Desk. New Country

Written and posted from the Radisson Blu Hotel, Berlin, Germany (52.519426, 13.403229)
Journal — 3 Comments
10
May 10

Your Place Is Not My Place; The Perils of Disambiguation

We take the art of geographic lookup for granted these days; type a place name into a form on a web site or feed it into a web service API and hey presto! Most of the time you’ll be told whether or not the place name is valid or not and, in case there’s more than one place with the same name, either asked to choose which one you mean or be presented with the most likely place.

Most of the time … but not all of the time.

Which Way To The Town Centre?

The hey presto bit of the process seems at first glance to be relatively trivial but isn’t. Just ask anyone who’s had to implement a system that handles place names. Actually, the hey presto part is actually two discreet processes in their own right. First of all we need to identify a place, or whether indeed there’s a place at all; this is usually called geoidentification.

identify; verb; establish or indicate who or what (someone or something) is

This is the thing that determines that there is a place in “I’m in London today” but not in “I do love Yorkshire Pudding“.

Once a place has been identified, we need to work out if there’s more than one place of the same name (which is more than likely as we’re stunningly unimaginative where place names are concerned, duplicating and reusing the same name all over the world) and if so, which one. This is usually called geodisambiguation.

disambiguate; verb; remove uncertainty of meaning from (and ambiguous sentence, phrase or other linguistic unit)

Some places are pretty easy to disambiguate; as far as I know there’s only one Ouagadougou and that’s the capital of Burkina Faso. Some places should be easy to disambiguate, least at first sight; take London, that should be easy. It’s the capital of the United Kingdom. Well that’s true but it could also be the London in Ontario, or the one in Arkansas, in California, in Kentucky or any of the other 22 Londons that I’m aware of.

The gentle art of disambiguation is critical to the act of geocoding, geoparsing, geotagging and any of the other words the the location industry chooses to tack geo on as a prefix. Get disambiguation wrong and you fail on two counts.

Firstly, you’re showing your audience that you don’t know or don’t care about what they’re trying to tell you. Secondly, you allow your users the opportunity to specify the same place in a multitude of conflicting ways.

This is part of the problem of GeoBabel; your place is not my place.

So far, so theoretical, but let’s look at a concrete example of this. A few weeks back I added my Twitter account to the Twitter directory site wefollow.com. The first thing you’re asked to do is to supply your location, or to “Type Your City” as wefollow.com phrases it. So I type London and the site starts to attempt to disambiguate on the fly; so do I mean “London, United Kingdom” or “London, Ontario“? But wait, what about the other options?

wefollow.com - London geo disambiguation fail #1

Which “London” is the one tagged by 436 people but with no indication of which country? What’s the difference between “London, United Kingdom“, “London,UK” and “London England“. Space and punctuation, or the lack of it, is obviously important to wefollow.com here. So let’s try and give the system some help and start to type United Kingdom …

wefollow.com - London geo disambiguation fail #2

Oh dear. The “London, United Kingdom” still shows up but because I’ve put a space in there I don’t get offered “London,UK” anymore but I do get offered the London in the lesser known country of “Uunited Kingdom” and also “London, Ub2“, which one assumes is the UB2 postal code which specifies the London suburb of Southall.

Your place is not my place.

To be fair, I’m not singling wefollow.com out for attack here; this is just one of many examples of sites who try to use geographic lookup but end up making life difficult for their users (but which London do I pick?) and for themselves (now, how many users in London in the UK do we have?). I’d happily offer to help them; if only I could find any contact information anywhere on the site …

Photo Credits: foilman on Flickr.
Written and posted from the Yahoo! London office (51.5141985, -0.1292006)
Journal — Comments Off
4
May 10

Retiring The Theory of Stuff; But First, A Corollary

It’s time to put the Theory of Stuff out to pasture. It’s had a good life. It’s appeared in 5 of my talk decks (or so Spotlight tells me), in 3 of my blog posts and continues to generate hits on my blog (or so my analytics tells me).

When I tell people I’m going to talk about my theory, a Mexican wave of shoulder slumping passes through the room, coupled with a prolonged sigh from an audience who’ve just resigned themselves to a slow painful death over the coming minutes. Luckily things perk up when my introductory slide of Anne Elk (Miss) and her Theory appears but even so, it’s time to quit whilst you’re ahead.

You may well ask, Chris, what *is* my theory?

But before I do …

One of the great thing’s about O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 conference is the vast number of people you meet who just fizz with ideas and intelligence in this somewhat nebulous space that we call location, place or geo. One such person is Sally Applin; she owns the domain sally.com so that’s got her off to a good start. After Where 2.0 she pointed me to her own theory that voyeurism and narcissism sell software.

People like to look at themselves and at other people. If they can do it at the same time–then the application will succeed! Look at Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace, Skype–basically any software that allows for both looking at others and self viewing, self reading, self posting etc…will sell. We’re on the chimp ladder. We like to compare ourselves and compete.

If you generalise software out to the slightly more generic terms ofservice or product; you’ll see that Sally’s theory complements the Theory of Stuff quite nicely and even provides an exemplar of those businesses and ventures that prove the theory.

Korean unisex toilet?

This is especially interesting when you look at the success (to date at least) of ventures in the social space, such as Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare. What else are these is not an online way of saying “look at me, here I am, this is what I’m doing” and in doing so generating a vast sea of highly localised and personalised data into the bargain?

Photo Credits: wili_hybrid on Flickr.
Written and posted from the Yahoo! London office (51.5141985, -0.1292006)
Journal — Comments Off
18
Apr 10

(Geo) Chicken and Egg (The Problem with Press Releases)

There’s a danger in looking at too many press releases; you can easily come to think that the view of the world that these pieces of writing portray are a fair and accurate representation of the real world.

Thus both myself and the ever readable James Fee were vastly amused to see Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch refer to CloudMade’s OpenStreetMap.

Many people describe CloudMade’s OpenStreetMap project as “Wikipedia for maps,” and they aren’t far off. The project allows anyone to add and edit map data around the globe, and the project is now a viable open and free source of mapping data for third party developers.

Now is probably a good point to mention that CloudMade was founded (by OpenStreetMap founder Steve Coast amongst others) in 2007 and OpenStreetMap launched in 2004. Geo chicken … meet Geo egg.

Chicken Egg

I look forward to reading about other TechCrunch exclusives including the discovery of RedHat’s Linux and British Airway’s airplanes.

Photo Credits: The Eggplant on Flickr.
Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)
Journal — Comments Off
21
Mar 10

Geo on the Horizon at Horizon Geo

Last Friday I ventured north to Nottingham, along with Ed Parsons, Steven Feldman and Muki Haklay to attend the one day Supporting the Contextual Footprint event run by the Horizon Digital Economy Research institute at the University of Nottingham. Along the way I discovered a manner of tracking my journey that I’d hadn’t previously considered, but that’s covered in a previous blog post.

The focus of the Horizon event was to discuss the infrastructure needed to support location in its role as a key context and to identify any research theme that came out of the discussions; a classic case of the ill defined and fuzzy interface between the commercial world and that of academia.

The day was split into three thematic tracks:

  • The Location Challenge
    • What are the challenges specific to the capture and management of location data?
    • What is the state-of-the-art in the technologies available to store, query and present location data?
    • How do we understand location in context, especially in real-time, on the move?
  • Whose Data Is It Anyway?
    • What data should be considered “personal”?
    • Should I “own” data about me, such as where I am, my home electricity usage, my bank transactions?
    • How can users be enabled and encouraged to manage this data?
    • What technologies are available to do this?
    • How, when and by whom should “personal” data be exploited?
    • What checks and balances should be in place to protect all stakeholders, including both citizens and service innovators?
  • Can Crowds Be Authoritative?
    • Crowd sourcing is a powerful technique for data collection enabled by modern handheld devices, but how far can user-contributed data be trusted?
    • What are the processes required in order to meld crowd-sourced data with existing, authoritative, datasets?
    • What are the legal implications of generating, combining and using such user-generated datasets?
    • For example, what environmental details could citizen sensors collect?
    • How might this change our understanding of the live state of the world?

Take A Little Time With Me

Continue reading →

Journal — 3 Comments
16
Mar 10

WhereCamp EU – The Geo Unconference Experience for 180 People

51° 31′ 36.8364″ N, 0° 7′ 44.0466″ W

Entering the longitude and latitude above into one of the many online mapping sites on the web will  show you the St. Pancras branch of wallacespace, close to London’s Euston and Kings Cross St. Pancras rail termini and seems a fitting and apt way to write a blog post about WhereCamp EU, the first geo unconference to be held in the United Kingdom and in Europe.

WhereCamp is traditionally held in California’s Silicon Valley after the Where 2.0 conference and is based on the BarCamp unconference ethic to be a counterpoint to the expensive and corporate outlook of Where 2.0. Last year, both myself and Chris Osborne were at both Where 2.0 and WhereCamp and both came up with the idea of “wouldn’t it be great to bring WhereCamp to Europe?”

Tyler Bell, myself and Aaron Cope

Just under a year of planning, organising and wheedling cash out of sponsors, Chris and myself, with the support of the rest of the organising team, welcomed 180 people to Europe’s first WhereCamp.

I was both proud and privileged to kick start things off with an introduction to how WhereCamp EU came to be, explaining to the slightly bemused but thoroughly enthusiastic audience just what an unconference is and how it all worked.

I’d decided that a good way to introduce the event would be to define where, unconference and WhereCamp EU:

  • where – the question asked by people when they try and work out how much it will cost to get to Where 2.0 and WhereCamp in Silicon Valley.
  • unconference – a conference without all the things you hate about conferences, such as massive corporate involvement, sales pitches and formality
  • WhereCamp EU – a two day, free unconference about all things geo, place and location

I then handed over to Chris who totally upstaged me with a gorgeous visualisation of how OpenStreetMap mapped Central London, courtesy of his day job with ITO.

The key to WhereCamp EU, just like any other unconference is “the wall“, which is where the days of the conference are marked off in half an hour slots. An unconference is a user or participant driven conference; if you want to see what’s going on, you check out the wall, if you want to participate, you grab a PostIt note, write your name and the talk title down, find a free slot on the wall and make sure you turn up on time. Participation is usually a brief talk followed by a, sometimes passionate, Q&A session, but it can also be an open forum discussion, a demonstration or some good old fashioned hacking.

The Wall

Unconferences are common in the US, where the concept originated, but less so in Europe, so the organising team made sure that we seeded the wall with initial talks to get things started and to show people how it worked. Our initial fears that the wall would remain empty were quickly quashed as a sea of yellow PostIts took over the wall, fuelled by a melee of talk proposers, anxious to get their talk into a free slot, and participants who wanted to see what the next session was all about.

My initial talk in the main room was on Location, LB(M)S, Hype, Stealth and Stuff and provided a series initial thinking points around the LBMS hype, around gathering stealth data and on how my Theory of Stuff validates the success and failure of location based ventures.

Yet again I was upstaged by the (err) creative and passionate talk titles which appeared on the wall.

The Problems With Metadata

After a totally exhausting day we retired to a local bar for geo-beers, courtesy of one of our sponsors, and to review the day. I wasn’t able to make the second day of the unconference due to family commitments but my sources tell me it was an equal success.

High points for me were standing in front of a room full of people at the kick off session, a lot of whom had travelled a significant distance to be there; watching the ladies toilets being used furtively by the men; seeing the youngest participant in a conference I’ve even seen (3 months) and watching Hal Bertram from ITO produce jaw droppingly gorgeous data visualisations.

Out of all the things I’ve done in the geo industry, being involved with putting WhereCamp EU together has got to be a personal and professional high. It would be good to do it all over again next year wouldn’t it … ?

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)
Journal — 1 Comment
15
Mar 10

Deep In The Twitter (Developers) Nest

The last week has been crammed with planning for and finally realising the first WhereCamp unconference to be held in Europe. More of that later but before WhereCamp EU, there was the London Twitter Developer’s DevNest.

Angus Fox, one of the organisers of the DevNest, had first got in touch with me last year after the launch of the Yahoo! Placemaker web platform that allows recognition of place references in unstructured text. Placemaker plus Twitter status feeds seemed an ideal candidate for a mashup and Angus was keen to get me to talk to his hard-core Twitter and social media literate developer audience.

Twitter Developer Nest

Then in November 2009 Twitter announced their use of WOEIDs, the language neutral geographic identifiers that underpin Placemaker and the other Yahoo! Geo Technologies platforms, in their new Trends API. Naturally all of the Geo group at Yahoo! were excited, verging on ecstatic, at this. But getting our respective schedules in synch with each other wasn’t the easiest of things and 2009 came to a close without getting a firm date in the diary.

2010 arrived and Twitter launched their Trends API and exposed WOEIDs to the world and Angus got in touch again and we both put the seventh DevNest in our respective schedules.

Come the evening of Wednesday March 10th and I made my way to the Sun Microsystem’s Customer Briefing Center, just north of London Bridge where I was joined by Ewan MacLeod, the straight talking and highly entertaining and informing editor of Mobile Industry Review,  Paul Kinlan, Developer Programmes Engineer at Google and a plentiful supply of beer and pizza.

Ewan went first and you knew he was tapping into a rich vein of mobile geekery when a slide of his tee shirt drew such loud chuckles and guffaws from the audience, myself included.

That's a Shit Phone

Ewan’s deck is on SlideShare.net here and it speaks for itself even without an accompanying video; I strongly urge you to browse through his deck for some fascinating stats on mobile phone usage, breakdown and penetration and for the low down on exactly how much impact the iPhone is, and more importantly, isn’t making.

I was up next and gave a talk on (Almost) Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Geo (with WOEIDs), which attempted to give this tech savvy audience a background on what geocoding, reverse geocoding and geoparsing are, why this isn’t a trivial task, what WOEIDs are and why they’re important for geo and for deriving meaning from content, such as Twitter status updates.

My deck accompanying the talk is above and there’s also a (slightly shakey) video to accompany it as well.

Closing the talks was Google’s Paul Kinlan who gave us the low down on Google’s Buzz and showed that the adage of never work with children, animals and live demos still has life it in.

Accompanied throughout by beer and pizza courtesy of the event’s sponsors, the Twitter DevNest was thoroughly enjoyable, a bit of a revelation in places and showed that Twitter has a deep and very enthusiastic developer following.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)
Journal — 1 Comment
28
Jan 10

What Happens When Geography and Innovation Collide

It’s taken a while but the consultation into opening up the Ordnance Survey’s United Kingdom mapping and geographic data is out and is no doubt being debated, looked at, discussed, pulled apart and opined on. Whilst every Ordnance Survey employee I’ve ever spoken to is utterly in favour of this move there’s still continued resistance to openness, though the gap between the two extremes of FreeOurData and the UK Government’s Cabinet Office is closing and closing fast. Of course, it doesn’t help when the Ordnance Survey asserts rights over the crime maps produced by London’s Metropolitan Police either.

But baby steps, as my friends in the United States often say. One such step is GeoVation, a Wikiword style merging of geography and innovation.

Last year I was approached by the organisers of the GeoVation challenge to be a judge in an endeavour that  ”allows innovative thinkers and geographic data to come together for social, environmental and economic benefit through the use of geography”. It looked like an Ordnance Survey public relations exercise to provide a seed fund to encourage entrepreneurs to use Ordnance Survey data.
But the organisers had good credentials, I knew most of them and respected them and so I actually read the small print. Yes, GeoVation was funded and supported by the Ordnance Survey. Yes, the seed fund pot, some £20K, came from the Ordnance Survey. But using Ordnance Survey data was not obligatory, mandatory or even strongly encouraged. I heard the phrases “what about GeoNames” and “what about OpenStreetMap” enough to accept the offer and become a GeoVation judge. Not everyone thought this was a good idea or saw beyond the Ordnance Survey involvement. It wasn’t just me either, I was joined by Steve Coast the founder of crowd-source mapping project, OpenStreetMap; James Alexander, CEO of Green Thing, the online service that encourages people to lead greener lives; James Cutler, CEO of eMapSite, the incredibly tall Peter ter Haar from the OS and we were helped by chairperson Steven Feldman.
There were a lot of submissions and ideas to look through. 380 people signed up, 170 ideas were submitted and almost 70 ventures were formally proposed to be entered into the award. We had some reading to do.
Let’s briefly mention the venture submissions for a moment. They varied. Oh how they varied. It’s unfortunate to say that a 15 minute video submission, a one page submission which doesn’t actually tell you what the venture is and a 20 page submission which still doesn’t tell you what the venture is are unlikely to engage the attention of the judges. But in the end we came up with a shortlist of 9 ventures and descended on the Ondaatje Theatre in London’s Royal Geographical Society for the final showcase. Each venture had 4 minutes to pitch their idea to the judges, followed by brief questions from the judges and from the audience. It doesn’t sound easy and it wasn’t, but each pitch put their heart and soul into it. After all the pitches were over, the judges retired to a back room for plenty of coffee and some animated voting and discussions. After 45 minutes we emerged, blinking, into the light, still friends and still talking to each other.
In first place and walking away with £10K were MaxiMap, a large scale education floor map of the British Isles which helps children understand the geography of where they live.
In second place, accompanied by a fetching gorilla suit, and loping away with £7K were Mission: Explore London, a team of geography addicted teachers, designers and artists who wanted to help children explore the city.
And in third place with £3K was London Blue Plaque Search, dedicated to making the iconic GLC/GLA/LCC/English Heritage blue plaques open to everyone.
After almost 6 months of meeting, discussing, debating and geopontificating GeoVation was finally over. At least for 2010. The challenge and awards will be returning in 2011 with even less Ordnance Survey involvement, though hopefully they’ll still contribute towards the seed fund. And as I seem to be quoted as saying in several places …
“One of the judges, Gary Gale, Director of Engineering for Yahoo! Geo Technologies, said: ‘The standard of entries was fantastic and the scope of them far-reaching and varied. Each of the finalists can and should be proud of getting to the finals and being able to showcase their geo-vision. But in the end, the judges decided that MaxiMap was the one idea that could make the most impact and had the greatest potential.’”
… and I can’t really sum it up better than that.
Photo credit: pomphorhynchus on Flickr
Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)
Journal — 18 Comments
19
Jan 10

Is it Great Britain, the United Kingdom, the British Isles or what exactly?

In February 2009 I wrote a post for the Yahoo! Geo Technologies blog about how people outside of the United Kingdom are sometimes confused by the vagaries of how to correctly write street addresses in the UK and if the United Kingdom is a country and if England is a country then how can England be part of the United Kingdom. Some pointed comments to the original post ensued from the likes of Ed Parsons from Google and Andrew Larcombe from the British Computer Society’s Geospatial Specialist Group.

And so almost a year later I went back and started to research exactly how the United Kingdom, Great Britain and the British Isles are actually put together. It was an educational journey because, even with being born and bred in London, it turned out that even I didn’t fully understand this subject. So I tried to codify it with a variation on The Great British Venn Diagram, which looks something like this:

Let’s start with the easy bit. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are constituent countries at an administrative level; they’re shown in yellow on the diagram above.

Great Britain, so named as to distinguish itself from Brittany, is a geographic island which comprises the countries of England, Scotland and Wales.

The United Kingdom is a sovereign state, shown in red, which comprises England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Ireland, also a geographic island, contains the administrative country of Northern Ireland and the sovereign state of the Republic of Ireland or Eire.

So far so good, but what about the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands? Both of these are not part of the United Kingdom, instead they are both Crown Dependencies, shown in purple, and are part of a federacy with the United Kingdom. And a federacy? That’s a type of government where one or more of the member administrative units have more independence than the majority of the member administrative units.

Finally, there’s everything else; those remnants of the British Empire scattered across the globe which enjoy the slightly nondescript appellation of British Overseas Territories (or British Dependent Territories prior to 2002 or Crown Colonies prior to 1981).

To be more precise, these are parts of the British Empire that did not gain independence and that the United Kingdom asserts sovereignty over.  They take in Anguilla, Bermuda, British Antarctic Territory, British Indian Ocean Territory, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Montserrat, Pitcairn Islands, St Helena, Ascension Island and Tristan da Cunha, the Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekalia and the Turks and Caicos Islands.

Written and posted from the Kempinski Hotel Bristol in Berlin (52.5052405, 13.3280218)

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

Journal — Comments Off
11
Dec 09

Geographic and Transport Data; a Tale of Capricousness, Whimsy and Downright Insanity

The industry I work in thrives on data; we consume loads of the stuff and in turn we generate petabytes of it. I’m talking about data in general, not the geographic, mapping or place data that I usually write about.

But the longer I work in the Internet industry the more convinced I become that, as an industry, we need to get our act together. How else to explain the bizarre, rapidly changing and capricious nature of how we gain access to, use, pay, don’t pay and disseminate data?

We’re socially conditioned to assume that free does not equate to good, hence the adage “there’s no such thing as a free lunch“. So stuff that costs is good and stuff that’s free isn’t. But normal rules don’t apply here.

Let’s take geographic data; I’m on home ground here so this should be relatively straightforward.

The proprietary data vendors, Navteq, TeleAtlas and others, charge for their data and limit what you can and can’t do with it. OpenStreetMap on the other hand charges nothing for its’ data and only places limits on the data to protect the data by way of the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license.

So naturally the data you pay for should be good and the data you don’t pay for should be … less than good. Naturally.

Except OpenStreetMap data isn’t less than good. UCL’s Muki Haklay summed this up neatly as “How good is OpenStreetMap? Good enough” at the OpenStreetMap conference in Amsterdam this year. Conversely, the proprietary data vendors don’t always get it right. One data vendor, who will remain anonymous, shipped a release of data with wildly incorrect centroids, the lat/long coordinate which represents the nominal centre of a place, which meant that amongst others, Covent Garden ended up being centred on Holborn Underground Station.

This isn’t an isolated incident.

On the one hand, the City of Vancouver in British Columbia makes its data, all of its data, free and open. On the other hand, the City of Tempe in Arizona decides to charge a “fair approximation of market value” for its data, which as James Fee recently discovered means that you’ll need to cough up $100,000 to use it commercially.

In San Francisco, BART, the Bay Area Rapid Transit, makes their data which includes train times freely available and taking a refreshingly prosaic approach to accessibility and licensing.

Getting an API key: Psyche: you don’t need one. We’re opting for “open” without a lot of strings attached. Just follow our simple License Agreement, give our customers good information and don’t hog resources. If that doesn’t work for you, we can certainly manage usage with keys and write more terms and conditions. But who wants that?

Here in the UK TFL, Transport for London, give you some data for free but not the train times and for overground trains the Association of Train Operating Companies (pdf link) value this data at a staggering £27,430 per year

And elsewhere in the world, other operators are closing down people who want to use this data, in New York, in Berlin, in New South Wales and we can’t really seem to work out who owns the data and whether there’s intellectual property being infringed or a public service being undertaken.

… and don’t even talk about the British postal code data was closed, was then going to be opened up but now isn’t. Apparently.

With all the data we consume and emit, we spend a lot of time and effort evangelising APIs and web services that use it. But as an industry we really need to start to act clearly and consistently in order to be taken seriously and in order for the Internet industry to realise the potential that we all think it’s capable of.

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

← Older Entries