Gary Gale

Posts about tomtom

A Bipolar Attitude To Aerial And Satellite Imagery Plus Maps Fear, Uncertainty And Doubt

will they, won't they" replacement for the current Google Maps app on iOS seems to be spilling over from the usual tech media into mainstream news.

Firstly, the UK's Daily Telegraph, a "quality broadsheet" seems to have just discovered that today's digital maps also have satellite imagery. It's not entirely clear how this is news, let alone current news. Navteq has had satellite imagery as part of its' maps since the mid 1980's and Google has also included satellite imagery in Google Maps since the mid 2000's. But linked to Apple's recent acquisition of 3D imagery specialists C3, we're told to anticipate a "private fleet of aeroplanes equipped with military standard cameras to produce 3D maps so accurate they could film people in their homes through skylights". The middle market tabloid Daily Mail has also picked up on this story, running with the headline "Spies in the sky that no one will regulate".

Maps and map imagery seem to be back in the news. Google's recent map update and immense speculation about Apple's "will they, won't they" replacement for the current Google Maps app on iOS seems to be spilling over from the usual tech media into mainstream news.

Firstly, the UK's Daily Telegraph, a "quality broadsheet" seems to have just discovered that today's digital maps also have satellite imagery. It's not entirely clear how this is news, let alone current news. Navteq has had satellite imagery as part of its' maps since the mid 1980's and Google has also included satellite imagery in Google Maps since the mid 2000's. But linked to Apple's recent acquisition of 3D imagery specialists C3, we're told to anticipate a "private fleet of aeroplanes equipped with military standard cameras to produce 3D maps so accurate they could film people in their homes through skylights". The middle market tabloid Daily Mail has also picked up on this story, running with the headline "Spies in the sky that no one will regulate".

Yet only in January of this year, the Daily Mail published a series of extremely detailed aerial images under the headline "A nosey parker's dream; Stunning aerial photographs show what's going on in the world's back gardens". Apart from the slightly sensationalistic "nosey parker" reference, this six month old article seems to positively luxuriate in the high altitude photography. As Google's Ed Parsons pithily points out, this is another case of "editorial integrity by the Daily Mail".

Meanwhile, digital mapping provider TomTom, who acquired Tele Atlas in 2008 has produced what's often described as a FUD piece (fear, uncertainty and doubt) on digital map data produced by OpenStreepMap. The article starts off well

"The concept of open source mapping is a very exciting one. As various technologies become more accessible, volunteer mappers can collect information and collaborate to produce shared maps. They’re cheap to make, licensing is often free or very low-cost, and users benefit from the knowledge of a large community of updaters."

So far, so good. OSM has been gaining a lot of traction and attention over recent months as Nestoria, Apple (for iPhoto on the iPad), Wikipedia and Foursquare all adopted OSM maps to power their spatial visualisations. But not, it's worth noting, to power turn-by-turn navigation applications. But according to TomTom, all is not well with this.

Despite the positives, recent studies have highlighted some major drawbacks of open source mapping, specifically with regard to safety, accuracy and reliability. In one particular instance, a leading open source map was compared against a professional TomTom map, and shown to have a third less residential road coverage and 16% less basic map attributes such as street names. Worse still, it blended pedestrian and car map geometry, and included 'a high number of fields and forest trails' classified as roads.

Interestingly, this view from TomTom clashes somewhat with a 2011 study comparing TomTom and OpenStreetMap in Germany which concluded that

"With a relative completeness comparison between the OSM database and TomTom's commercial dataset, we proved that OSM provides 27% more data within Germany with regard to the total street network and route information for pedestrians."

So why highlight the difference between OSM and TomTom data now? As TechDirt notes in its' commentary on this topic

"The fact that TomTom has chosen to highlight this current deficiency in OpenStreetMap shows two things. First, that it is watching the open source alternative very closely, and secondly, that it is sufficiently worried by what it sees to start sowing some FUD in people's minds. But as history has shown with both open source server software and open source encyclopaedias, once vendors of proprietary systems adopt such a tactic against up-and-coming free rivals, it's a clear sign that it's already too late to do anything about it, and that their days of undisputed dominance are numbered."

Whether that's a fair and accurate summary of this remains to be seen, but what this does prove it that just as I've been saying for the last two years that there is no one single authoriative source of Place data and there probably never will, so there is no one single authoriative map and likewise, there probably never will.

Without meaning to trivialise the adoption of OSM by Wikipedia, Foursquare et al, these maps are what might be termed map wallpaper; great for showing geographical and geospatial context for information. The high level of accuracy and internal data attributes needed to produce a turn-by-turn navigation system simply isn't needed here. Which makes TomTom's evaluation of OSM all the more puzzling.

The Changing Face of UK Geo Data ... But Changing With a Bang or a Whimper?

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.

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

The (Geo) Data Dichotomy Dilemma

FreeOurData.org.uk and other pleas, before the Internet itself, things used to be so much simpler for geo data. You were either an end user and accessed the data as a map or you were a GIS Professional and accessed the data via a (frequently very expensive and very specialised) Geographical Information System. But now we have geo data, lots of geo data, some of it free, some of it far from free, both in terms of usage and cost and a fundamental problem has replaced the paucity of data.

Everyone wants free, open, high quality geo data and no one wants to pay for it. But it's not quite that simple. The recent acquisitions of Tele Atlas and Navteq, the two big global geo data providers, by TomTom and Nokia respectively show the inherent value in owning data. But owning the data isn't enough any more as the market for licensing the data is a shrinking one, despite the phenomenal growth of the satnav market, both in car and on mobile handsets. Why is the market shrinking? Because no one wants to pay for it, at least directly. TomTom, primarily a hardware vendor, are differentiating into the software and data market,  seems to be concentrating on the PND usage of the data, although we've yet to see how the outlay necessary to acquire Tele Atlas coupled with the overall economic downturn will effect their overall 2009 earnings. Their Q1 2009 report somewhat dryly notes that "market conditions were challenging" and that "we are making clear progress with the transformation of Tele Atlas into a focused business to business digital content and services production company". There may be other aspirations at play here but for now at least, the company is keeping quiet.

Before Web 2.0, before mashups, before FreeOurData.org.uk and other pleas, before the Internet itself, things used to be so much simpler for geo data. You were either an end user and accessed the data as a map or you were a GIS Professional and accessed the data via a (frequently very expensive and very specialised) Geographical Information System. But now we have geo data, lots of geo data, some of it free, some of it far from free, both in terms of usage and cost and a fundamental problem has replaced the paucity of data.

Everyone wants free, open, high quality geo data and no one wants to pay for it. But it's not quite that simple. The recent acquisitions of Tele Atlas and Navteq, the two big global geo data providers, by TomTom and Nokia respectively show the inherent value in owning data. But owning the data isn't enough any more as the market for licensing the data is a shrinking one, despite the phenomenal growth of the satnav market, both in car and on mobile handsets. Why is the market shrinking? Because no one wants to pay for it, at least directly. TomTom, primarily a hardware vendor, are differentiating into the software and data market,  seems to be concentrating on the PND usage of the data, although we've yet to see how the outlay necessary to acquire Tele Atlas coupled with the overall economic downturn will effect their overall 2009 earnings. Their Q1 2009 report somewhat dryly notes that "market conditions were challenging" and that "we are making clear progress with the transformation of Tele Atlas into a focused business to business digital content and services production company". There may be other aspirations at play here but for now at least, the company is keeping quiet.

Nokia, also primarily a hardware vendor in the form of mobile and cellular handsets, are also moving away from their roots and into a wider market, hopefully in an attempt to stop the encroachment of upstarts such as HTC, Apple and RIM into Nokia's traditionally strong smartphone heartland. Again, Nokia has yet to make a public play into this arena but all the composite elements are in place to enable this to happen. Taking the opposite route, Google, which started off as a software player are now moving to being a player in the data market by gathering high quality geo and mapping data under the smokescreen of gathering Street View. This has allowed them to gather sufficient data to supplant Tele Atlas as a data provider, at least in the Continental United States. All three companies are either making or have the prospect of making determined plays in the location space but all three of them have ways of leveraging the value inherent in their data. Google has their unique users, their search index and a vast amount of advertising inventory; TomTom their satnav customers; Nokia their handset customers, albeit one level removed with the Mobile Network Operators as an uneasy partner and intermediary. So what of the open data providers? It's important to remember here that open doesn't always mean free, it means the ability to create derived works and to use the data in ways that the originator may not have immediately foreseen. True, a lot of open data is free, but even then it's the Free Software Foundation's definition of the word. "Free (software) is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer." The poster child of open geo data is OpenStreetMap, the "free editable map of the world". Founded in 2004 by Steve Coast, OSM has enjoyed phenomenal growth in users and in contributions of data that can be used anywhere and by anyone and which espouses the values of free as in speech and as in beer. As with all community or crowd sourced collaborative projects, OSM's challenge is to sustain that growth and once complete coverage of a region is reached, in keeping that coverage fresh, current and valid. We'll leave aside that fact that complete coverage is an extremely subjective concept and means many things to many people. Traditionally strongest in urban regions, one of OSM's other key challenges is to match the expectations of their user community who consume that data rather than those who create it. Both internationalisation of the data and expansion out of the urban conurbations will potentially prove challenging in the years to come. That's not to say OSM isn't a significant player in this space and the quality of the data, though varying and in some places duplicated, is for the majority of use cases, good enough. This was backed up by research undertaken by Muki Haklay of UCL which answered the perennial question of "how good is OSM data" with a pithy "good enough". Attempts to capitalise on and monetize the success and data corpus of OSM through the Venture Capital funded Cloudmade have yet to deliver on the promise and with the exception of a set of APIs, Cloudmade has announced the loss of their OpenStreetMap Community Ambassadors and the closure of their London office. All of which lends credence to the fact that simply owning the data isn't enough. So how to solve the dichotomy of geo data? Everyone wants it but no one's willing to pay for it with the exception of the big players, the Googles, the Yahoos and the Microsofts of the world and control of the proprietary data sources has centralised into TomTom and Nokia, both of whom are well placed to capitalise on their data assets but who haven't yet delivered on that promise. Maybe the answer is twofold. Firstly develop an open attribution model whereby the provenance of an atom of data can be tagged and preserved; this would remove a lot of the prohibitions on creating derived works at the original data provenance could still be maintained. Secondly allow limited usage of proprietary data at varying levels of granularity, accuracy and currency, thus creating a freemium model for the data and stimulate developer involvement in donating data to the community as a whole. It's too early to see whether this will come to pass or whether an already tight hold on the data will become tighter still.

Posted via email from Gary's Posterous