Posts about wikipedia

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.

Neogeography Is Dead (According To Wikipedia At Least)

will the battle never end? The latter is a term used to refer to the combining of online mapping with data, incorporating classic cartography and GIS and exposed via Web 2.0 style mashups. The former is a term with dual meanings; one referring to the study of past and ancient geography and one being a pejorative to refer to the opposite and inverse of neogeography.

Good News

Both terms have their own entries on Wikipedia ... at least they used to. Towards the end of September 2010 the neogeography entry on Wikipedia was deleted with the justification ...

Ahh ... paleogeography and neogeography; will the battle never end? The latter is a term used to refer to the combining of online mapping with data, incorporating classic cartography and GIS and exposed via Web 2.0 style mashups. The former is a term with dual meanings; one referring to the study of past and ancient geography and one being a pejorative to refer to the opposite and inverse of neogeography.

Good News

Both terms have their own entries on Wikipedia ... at least they used to. Towards the end of September 2010 the neogeography entry on Wikipedia was deleted with the justification ...

'(it) isn't even clear about what the term means. Not exactly a neologism (it's apparently been used by various people - it doesn't take much creativity to add "neo-" to a word), but a poorly defined term that has not gained general acceptance'

... while the paleogeography entry was revised to remove any mentions of the term being neogeography's antonym.

Within the location industry the term neogeography has certainly gained general acceptance, from Di-Ann Eisnor (ex of Platial and now at Waze) being credited with first coining the phrase, to Andrew Turner's book on the subject being published by O'Reilly in 2006.

Introduction to Neogeography cover

Maybe we need a new term in place of neogeography, one free from the pejorative comparisons between the new and the old ways of doing things? Web Mapping has been suggested, on Wikipedia, but to me that seems too focused on the map at the expense of the other innovative uses of geographic data which have little or no map associated with them.

For now though, neogeography may be dead on Wikipedia but the tools and techniques the term describes are very much alive and well, even if they lack a convenient, one size fits all, label. Photo Credits: Pascal and Andrew Turner on Flickr.

Placebook ... Facebook "Places" In The Wild

After much teasing and tantalising, one of the long rumoured Facebook location features is out in the wild in the form of place community pages. They vary in scale from a hamlet in Spain ...

... through to New York City.

It's clever though not particularly sophisticated at this stage; a simple exposure of Wikia's underlying geo metadata and it probably took very little effort to implement. Facebook appear to treat places as people, hence the exhortation to connect with the place.

For now there's very little additional geo element present though what is there is probably enough to get people to connect with and like local community places or places they already feel a connection with, their home town, neighbourhood, honeymoon spot and so on. That alone should yield valuable demographic and (geo)targetable information.

This is pretty much a classic case of  picking low hanging fruit for Facebook and a far better exemplar of a place than the somewhat clumsy rebranding of Google's small business listings as places, though the browse places page seems to suggest otherwise as it's very POI heavy.

It will be facinating to track how this feature of Facebook develops and matures.