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 ...

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)

Posted via email from Gary's Posterous

This is not the blog post I set out to write. The one I set out to write was about Flickr, about machine-tags, about noticings and about transport data feeds. I had it all mapped out in my head during one of those wide awake in the middle of the night and your mind's buzzing moments. But as I started to research the blog post that I had set out to write, it mutated. So with the caveat that I'm well aware that I'm making a sweeping generalisation whilst simultaneously doing a large disservice to a lots of specialist UK data providers ... Until recently, if you wanted a source of geo data in the UK you had three choices.

Choice One. Go with one of the big global players, who primarily specialise in the personal navigation market. You could go with the chaps with the blue and white mapping cars, Navteq, who were acquired by Nokia in December 2007. Or your could go with the chaps with the orange and white mapping cars, TeleAtlas, who were acquired by TomTom in July 2008. The pros? Great global coverage, maybe lacking slightly outside of the traditional US heartland. The cons? It comes at a price and with a whole set of derived data and associated licensing restrictions. Choice Two. Go with OpenStreetMap, the freely available, user generated, maintained and contributed wiki-map of the world. Launched in 2004 and contributed to and supported by invididuals, and by companies such as AND and Yahoo! OpenStreetMap is the antithesis of proprietary licensed geo data and offers an open licensed data set downloadable at a variety of granularities. The pros? Ever expanding coverage and freely and openly available. The cons? Dependent upon the OSM community and with limited coverage outside of urban areas when compared with competitors. Choice Three. Go with The Ordnance Survey, the UK's national mapping agency, which covers the country in totality at more levels, representations and data forms than most people would ever need. The pros? Amazing coverage with resolution down to a few metres. The cons? One of the most restrictive data licensing regimes, claiming ownership of derived data and with often heavy handed enforcement.But then, to clumsily paraphrase a certain 70's album ... and then there were five.Choice Four. Go with The Ordnance Survey. Yes, you read that right. Earlier this month the UK Government announced that many of the Ordnance Survey's data products were to be made available as open data and for free download. Whilst it's not the complete opening that the Guardian's Free Our Data campaign has been, err, campaining for, it's a start. It's taken a while but as ex-OS and Google Geo Technologist Ed Parsons put it "Now why was that so difficult"? Choice Five. Go with UKMap. This new UK geo data source, built from scratch the old fashioned, man on the street with pen, paper and GPS way, first surfaced early this year, launched at the British Computer Society in July 2009 and was at the Society of Cartographers Summer School in September 2009. Whilst not free, not open and not even with total UK coverage, UKMap is the first major player in the UK geo data market since OpenStreetMap launched in 2004.So here's the questions that have yet to be answered. Who does UKMap threaten? Is it a challenge to The Ordnance Survey's lucrative government, local authority, surveying and emergency service market. Will UKMap open up some of their data to challenge OpenStreetMap's position as the geo data source of choice for the geoweb developer community in the UK? Or will UKMap, The OS and OSM form an uneasy alliance for UK geo data? As 2009 comes to a close it's too early to say but 2010 will allow each of these valuable data sources to reposition and prove themselves as the geo data market grows and reacts to change. Posted via email from Gary's Posterous