Quick, take a look at this map. There's something wrong with it. It's a map of the coast of West Africa dating from 1839. Compared with modern maps, a few things have changed. Senegambia was the French controlled Senegal and the British controlled Gambia, Soudan is today's Sudan and Upper Guinea is part of today's Guinea. But that's not what's wrong with this map. Take a closer look.
In 2014 I made some GeoHipster predictions for the then coming year for the geo industry. As far as crystal ball gazing is concerned I didn't think I did too badly, though some people disagreed. This year GeoHipster has done it again and I've made some more predictions. The whole list of predictions is online and it's well worth reading.
This is what the crystal globe divulged once I'd dusted it off.
At the beginning of 2013 Google launched Google Maps Engine Lite, a simpler and easier to use version of their commercial Maps Engine, which was designed as a successor to Google's My Maps feature. In essence, My Maps and GME were web based, simplified GIS tools, allowing a user to create maps with overlays of their own data. Call it GIS for people who don't know about GIS if you will. Maybe GME never got the traction Google hoped for but they have now announced that GME will be shutting down in a year's time. What happens next for GME users and what alternatives are there? Who will benefit from the demise of GME?
There's 3 likely contenders to the throne of the GIS-lite approach of GME; ArcGIS Online, CartoDB and MapBox via their new Turf product.
There’s much irony here, given that GME was originally positioned as a web savvy alternative to traditional GIS platforms. Both Esri and Mapbox will need a significant advertising push and awareness campaign to attract GME emigres. CartoDB on the other hand is positioning itself as the official successor to GME with the launch of CartoDB for Google Maps Platform, apparently developed in conjunction with Google.
In January of 2014, Atanas Entchev from GeoHipster asked me to make some predictions about where the maps, location and geo industry would go during the course of the year. That year has now passed, so I think it's time to revisit those predictions and see how inaccurate my crystal ball gazing really was.
I don't grow my own organic vertices. Nor do I use gluten-free technology. At least not that I'm aware. But I have been known to geocode by hand, in small batches and I do follow the @geohipster Twitter account. According to a new map put together by Ralph Straumann, that's enough to make me a #geohipster.
Who am I to argue with a map?
It's a simple and neat affair. All followers of the @geohipster Twitter account with a location in their profile have that location geocoded and then shown on a map.
Of course, not everyone has a location that can be successfully geocoded. Either that or a lot of people really do live on Null Island. These seems to be the only way to explain the cluster of people allegedly located somewhere off of the coast of North West Africa, South of Ghana and West of Equatorial Guinea, which just so happens to coincide with where you'll find latitude 0 and longitude 0.
Thankfully, whatever geocoder Ralph is using works properly and places me in the Teddington that's a suburb of South West London and not the Teddington that's near Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire.
Which makes me happy and also seems to makes me a Geo-hipster. Nothing in the vaguely defined and nebulous industry that is the geo industry should surprise me anymore.
It's been a while since I've written one of these posts, in fact it's been almost a year. A lot has happened since December of 2013, when I wrote "Who knows precisely where 2014 will take me?". To be more precise, this is where 2014 took me ...
Firstly if you've been paying attention, you'll have noticed that my blogging and tweeting frequencies have dropped right off. Put it this way, someone's been paying attention.
Emerging from the embrace of the large corporate mapping organisation that used to be Ovi Maps, dallied briefly with the name Nokia Maps and ended up calling itself HERE Maps, I found myself in the complete antithesis of a corporate. I joined Ed and Javier at Lokku, in the trendy part of London known as Clerkenwell, with possibly the best job title I've ever had; I was Lokku's Geotechnologist in Residence. I've known Ed and Javier for a good number of years and have watched them grow Nestoria and reinvigorate and rejuvenate London's #geomob meetup. I knew this was going to be a very different experience.
On my first day in the Lokku office, Ed thrust a piece of paper into my hand, saying "here's your email login credentials, the wifi password and how to access the wiki; your induction is now complete" ... and it was. So what does a resident geotechnologist actually do? The first and foremost task was to sort out Lokku's lack of an espresso machine and to run a tech talk, briefing the rest of the team on how to make the hot, caffienated beverage that the geo industry relies on. See? I told you this wasn't going to be your everyday corporate existence.
Armed with a fresh, hot espresso I took a look at the technology that Lokku and Nestoria had put in place. My hunch was that to make Nestoria work well across the countries they served, the Lokku crew had solved one of industry's key puzzles, namely how to geocode address listings well in countries that don't really take the need for unique addresses that seriously. My hunch was good and I came up with a series of recommendations to the Lokku board on what they should do next, this included the concept of what Ed later termed as a meta-geocoder.
A meta-geocoder does the same as the geocoders that the larger geo companies have; a single geocoding interface with multiple geocoders hidden behind, each one doing what it does well, be that country specific geocoding, or language specific geocoding or some other speciality. With the help of the incredibly smart Marc Tobias Metten, one of the few people I know who can get a global Nominatim instance up and running, we built what's now become the OpenCage Geocoder.
When you're in a small organisation you have to roll your sleeves up and be prepared to get your hands dirty. Need a website? You end up writing it yourself. Need code samples and scripting language wrapper? Write them yourself too. Need to launch a product? You end up writing a talk, getting yourself to an applicable conference, in this case State of the Map EU, and launch it yourself.
In the six months I spent at Lokku, Ed, myself and MTM brought an entire geocoding API from the roughest of concept notes to something that's up and running and is, to paraphrase Aaron Straup Cope, a real thing and it's a thing that I'm very proud of. I also became one of the select group known as the Lokku Alumni, and that meant I got another map to add to the collection.
My stint at Lokku ended in July of this year and overnight I transformed myself from being a resident geotechnologist to being an uncivil servant and taking on the role of Head of APIs for the oldest mapping agency in the world, the UK's Ordnance Survey. In doing so, I also struck out into the murky waters of consulting and, together with Alison, founded Malstow Geospatial. The story of how Malstow got its name is the subject for another blog post entirely.
So for now, I've swapped getting on a plane to Berlin on a weekly basis and taking the train and Tube to Clerkenwell on a daily basis and instead joined the daily diaspora out of London and down the Southampton, where the Ministry of Maps makes its home.
I've spent the last 4 months working out best how to bring the Ordnance Survey's maps to the internet and the internet to the OS. Much is happening and I've found myself an amazing team of geotechnologists and cartographers. As soon as there's something to show for our endeavours, you'll probably read about it here first.
"Who knows where 2014 will take me?" It's been one heck of a ride and a whole lot of fun and hard work combined. Now let's see what happens in 2015 ...
Not all Geographic Information conferences are created equal. A great proof point for this is IRLOGI, the Irish Association for Geographic Information. Today I've been in Dublin at their annual GIS Ireland 2014 conference, which is in its 19th year. I'd been invited to give one of the opening keynotes; who could resist such an invitation?
Held in the hidden conference centre that nestles unassumingly under the Chartered Accountants of Ireland's offices, GIS Ireland ticked all the boxes. The conference team had obviously worked hard to ensure that there was a wide range of topics being discussed and managed to avoid the "same people, same talks, same topics" trap that some conferences fall into. The coffee was hot and plentiful and the wifi (almost) stayed up and running all the time.
The starting point for the talk I have was an article called Today's Mapping Industry Really Does Need To Please All People, All The Time, which I'd written for GPS Business News in September. As there was an article length limit, I couldn't go into the detail I think this topic merited, but a conference talk is a different beast. This is what that article morphed into. This is B2*.
One of the great things about the combination of maps, geo, location and London is that roughly once a month there's some kind of meetup happening in the city on these themes. One of the longer running players in this space is the Geospatial Specialist Group of the British Computer Society which is being relaunched and reinvigorated as the Location Information SG. Earlier this week I gave a talk, but what to talk about?
It didn't take too long to come up with a suitable theme. In my current day job, consulting with open data specialists Lokku, I come across the benefits and the challenges in using open data on almost a daily basis. One of the earliest lessons is that nothing is simple and nothing is straightforwards when you bring licensing into a field and open data is no exception.
In English, null means nothing, nil, empty or void. In computing, null is a special value for nothing, an empty value. In geography, null tends to be what you get when you've been unable to geocode a place or an address and haven't checked the geocoder's response. What you end up with is a pair of coordinates of 0 degrees longitude and 0 degrees latitude, a point somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, south of Ghana and west of Gabon. It's here that you'll also find Null Island, if you look hard enough.
The website for the Republic of Null Island (like no place on earth) says this about the island's location ...
The Republic of Null Island is one of the smallest and least-visited nations on Earth. Situated where the Prime Meridian crosses the Equator, Null Island sits 1600 kilometres off the western coast of Africa.
... but Null Island is an in joke created by Nate Kelso and Tom Patterson as part of the Natural Earth data set in January 2011.
I like maps. Even if you've never read posts on this site, the name "Mostly Maps" should probably be a giveaway. What you may not know is that I don't really like musicals. Now granted I've seen Rent and Spamalot, but that's because Alison and I were in New York and the former was recommended by one of my best friends and for the latter I'm a massive Python fan. Maps and musicals aren't something that go together. But that may be about to change.
Cast your mind back to the dawn of history, before mobile phones were smart and when GPS was just an Australian rugby club, which is sometime in the very early 2000's. If you lived in London, your essential navigation guide wasn't a maps app, but a copy of the A-Z as the Geographer's A-Z Street Atlas was better known. This was the map you carried around London rather than a mapping app on your phone. I still have several editions on the bookshelf at home, each one being bought when its predecessor got so dog eared as to be unusable or just started falling apart.
