Woefully out of date now, here’s a quick run down on the OSGIS 2011 conference, 3rd in that series, held at the University of Nottingham Centre for Geospatial Sciences in Nottingham over the 21st and 22nd of June.

The 21st was a day of workshops, under the banner of Interoperability and the OGC. My new colleague, Matt, and I did a workshop on using Ordnance Survey Open Data and Mastermap with Mapserver and PostgreSQL, using the OSGeo Live DVD. You can see a slightly edited version of the workshop below, or on slideshare. I have to admit that most of the kudos must go to Matt for creating some super scripts to make the initial data processing *much* easier, and to some of my other colleagues for their efforts in styling the data once it’s in Mapserver. The scripts and a small subset of the open data are available here- you’ll have to supply your own Mastermap!

Day Two was all about the talks- and I was impressed by the standard. The focus of OSGIS has always leant slightly towards the academic, so the stand-out talks for me were the ones that demonstrated that you can do real spatial analysis with open source GIS. There were also some very good papers on mapping in the developing world. Two of my ex-colleagues from Oxford Archaeology also did a joint paper showing how the use of open source software has progressed there- that was really good to see- it was nice to know that the baton had been passed on when I left! I gave people an introduction to the OSGeo:UK local chapter, which is also available on Slideshare here, and we had the chapter AGM. It’s extremely gratifying to see the numbers of people willing to hear about, and get involved with, the local chapter. I was going back through the reports I’d given in previous years, and the numbers of people signed up to our mailing list steadily creep up, year on year- we’re now well over the 100 people mark! (BTW, if you’re interested, our website is here).

All in all it was a really good couple of days. Next year the conference will be running from the 4th to the 5th of September, so for anyone that can’t make FOSS4G and wants to give OSGIS a try, now’s your chance!

A short case study into flexibility, collaboration, and why open source software is so damned cool:

At my new place of employment, we’re doing a lot of work with Ordnance Survey Mastermap data, so one of my colleagues built a quick python wrapper around the ogr2ogr script to easily pop the data into postgresql, or shape file, or whatever support format you like. This is now available on Github (caveat- it doesn’t do change-only updates yet- we’ll keep you posted on that). After a chance comment on the OSGeo:UK mailing list, our friends at Faunalia, who do great things with Quantum GIS, ported the code into a QGIS plugin.

So- in the space of one week, QGIS gained itself a Mastermap loader, through a simple bit of collaboration. Nice work guys! (Nothing to do with me, I was on holiday). Can you get that sort of flexibility, rapidity and collaboration with (insert your favourite proprietary package here)? I doubt it…

So, we Brits are getting all excited because the Prime Minister gave a big speech about how Britain is going to be all fab,  broadbandy, and “totally, like Web 2.0, man”  soon. And all this data is going to be given away- look here’s some of it now. We’re all going to have instant access to Government services, free Ordnance Survey data, and a shiny Institute of Web Science to stick all the bits together.

Now, of course it’s a total coincidence that this is a nice positive announcement, and there’s to be an election shortly, for which we don’t yet know the date. Let’s not go there, since this is not a political blog. Let’s also not contrast this with the Digital Economy Bill, fast-tracking it’s way through parliament on somewhat dodgy grounds as we speak, that threatens to take a lot of this nice shiny stuff away if you’re so much as caught within a mile of an mp3 that you didn’t buy from ITunes. Let’s not talk about carrots and sticks, or nice cops and nasty cops or other such comparisons.

Instead, let’s concentrate on the data.  They will, on April 1st, release “a substantial package of information held by ordnance survey freely available to the public, without restrictions on re-use”. The consultation only finished 5 days ago! How can they possibly have had time to analyse the consultation responses yet? Personally, while I look forward to the release of the data, and it is a massive win for the Free Our Data campaign, I would prefer that they gave the consultation responses some respect by analysing them in detail, or at least pretended to read them properly.  I told someone off for assuming that the decision had already been made, and that the consultation was a waste of time, but perhaps they were right.

The rest of it, I quite like, though I’m yet to see a Government IT project really work properly. We’ve got (amongst other things):

• “core reference datasets that contain the precise names and co-ordinates of all 350 thousand bus stops, railway stations and airports in Britain”
• “an inventory of all non-personal datasets held by departments and arms-length bodies – a “domesday book” for the 21st century”
• “information on each set of data including its size, source, format, content, timeliness, cost and quality”

All sounds good. I could get excited by this, but I just want to wait and see what happens, shall we, and not take our eye off the other balls?

So 10 days ago now, the UK Government announced that they would be freeing up some Ordnance Survey data as part of a “drive to improve transparency”. You can read reactions to this all over the geospatial blogs (see Mapperz excellent round-up), some ambivalent, others mostly positive.

Me, I’m with the ambivalent crowd. On one level, assuming it’s actually useful datasets made available, and assuming we get to use them how we’d like to (using it in our internal GIS, for example), it will be great, and my colleagues will find their jobs considerably easier. However, like a lot of things the UK Government has done recently, this was handled badly (the lack of Ordnance Survey input into the original announcement,  speaks volumes). If it’s not going to be done willingly, will we see the same quality? The same commitment to survey the rural areas? Presumably, the cost of the remaining datasets will go up to cover the projected loss of revenue (whatever that is), so a lot of small businesses could end up in a worse situation than they are now- with expensive data that they can’t afford, or free data that’s not fit for purpose because it’s not complete or recently updated. Like Peter Batty, I don’t want our data brought in line with that of the US, as it’s currently much better!

I’m glad there has been a change, as I broadly support the Free Our Data campaign, and have done since it started, but I wanted it to be well thought through and planned for, and not a snap decision to try and win some votes. How naive of me…

I’m also concerned, like Peter Batty, about the affect on OpenStreetMap. I’ve been an enthusiastic convert to the benefits of OSM, since hearing of Muki Haklay’s completeness studies, and with seeing some of the beautiful maps and really cool innovations that it has spawned recently. At conferences in the UK this year OSM felt like the juggernaut it was impossible to ignore, and why would you want to?  OSM is now a valuable part of the UK geospatial ecosystem and I would hate to see that change.

You might have seen this post last week about how the Ordnance Survey once again saved the universe from un-approved uses of “their” data, by blocking an incredibly useful application that overlays Ordnance Survey mapping over Google Earth. You might have seen this post about it too. You might even have written to the Ordnance Survey to complain about it.

However, unless, like me, you had these posts tagged in your feed reader ready to write something about them, you might not have realised that the Ordnance Survey have (sort of) relented.  I say “sort of”, because apparently there’s still an issue between the terms of Google Earth’s license and that of the Ordnance Survey, but at least Gavin gets his API key back again.

Power to the people!

Time for another round-up…

• The Ordnance Survey have revised the terms and conditions of using their OpenSpaces mapping API (via Mapperz), which is a step in the right direction, since they now allow adverts on your site. There’s still a daily limit to the number of views/address lookups that you can do too. However, there are a couple of points that need mentioning/clarifying… firstly there’s a strange condition that you can’t use this for “internal business administration”. Not sure what that really means, but I assume it’s so you don’t stick it behind a firewall and stop OS counting your number of page views or something. Furthermore, there’s nothing obvious on the site about whether you need a license to use the data still, in which case it’s still a show-stopper. I’ve emailed them for clarification about that, so watch this space…
• Tyler Mitchell has an article in Direction Magazine about “Reassuring End Users of Open Source“.  I’m uneasy about the term “Reassuring”, as it has slightly negative connotations (“don’t worry!”, “worry, who said anything about worrying?”), but the article is well worth a read with some useful comments on the advantage of open source for businesses and the role of OSGeo.
• No doubt everyone already knows about the OpenGeo Architecture White Paper. Personally I think it’s another good paper to have around and quote from (or steal slides from) when trying to convince people that using open source geospatial software  is a more flexible and all round sensible approach to your geospatial stack.
• OStatic have an article about Open Source software at NASA. Not so much geospatial stuff going on there, but it’s good to see the top two reasons why NASA go for Open Source:

To increase NASA software quality via community peer review

To accelerate software development via community contributions

It’s good to see “quality” as an argument for choosing Open Source, rather than “saving money”!

Via the Guardian’s Free Our Data Blog, but with remarkably little fanfare elsewhere- the UK Government have released their new strategy for the Ordnance Survey. The results have the potential to be really good, but might also be a bit of a damp squib. The big concession is an extended OS OpenSpace service:

It will provide greater access to free use of a number of Ordnance Survey products from 1:10,000 scale through to 1:1 million scale. It will also include official boundaries information.

This is good news, though not as forward thinking as I’d like, unless the terms and conditions for the use of Open Space change dramatically. In my dreams, they are going to release their mapping via WMS- after all it would save them having to ship out all those update cds every year…

The new pricing strucure for full data access will be out in October, apparently. I’m not holding my breath for any nice friendly educational-charity fee structures though, since the whole document seems to assume you’re either an individual (read hobbyist) or a commercial company, and the trouble with educational charities is that we don’t really fit into a sensible box like that.

What’s nice though, is that the whole document is available online as a commentable document. Not sure how much notice will be taken of feedback, but it’s a start!

I started off this week with the intention of resurrecting and upgrading a demo openlayers map of all our sites, that had been stuck in a sorry corner of our corporate website being neglected. This tied in with moving the map to a different server, upgrading all the components, and generally giving it a shave and a haircut (it is male, that’s for certain). For those people interested in our wms and wfs data- these will be online again soon, I promise.

While I now have a site up again, pretty much ready to go bar the shouting, I’ve had an interesting time playing with some new toys in the process, so here’s a quick run-down:

• Mapfish and GeoadminSuite: A funky framework for widgetising openlayers. Geoadminsuite connects mapserver, openlayers and mapfish to manage data and create really nice mapfish applications. Way cool. Progress so far- it’s all up and running, though GeoadminSuite had teething troubles that have hopefully been sorted in the latest svn release.
• Openlayers: OK, so I’m just catching up with the latest release after ducking out for a while to do “real work”, but I have to say I like the new(er) features. It was nice to be able to do popups without needing to re-write the code for every version of every flavour of browser. That’s not openlayers’ fault of course, just issues with “standards” for things like DOM, which I don’t claim to understand.
• Openstreetmap WMS data from Wheregroup: Comes in free and paid-for flavours though details on pricing and terms of service for the commercial version were sketchy on a first skim of the website. This could be really handy to use as background mapping data for web maps, although there are issues of completeness (as always) and it probably needs running through our own mapserver to sort out the styling. This is definitely a goer- I just need to figure out which of the 50 or so layers they publish are really necessary and at what scale. And some kind of completeness metric, so we know how reliable the data is for a given area…
• Openstreetmap shapefiles from Cloudmade: A reduced dataset for the UK, with less layers. This might be a better option for us to use as we can control the styling better at the source. As a cheat, I’m going to load it all up in Quantum GIS, style it there, and use the mapserver export plugin to quickly build my map file.
• Mapnik: One of my colleagues would very much like us to create our own openstreetmap wms server, and use mapnik. I’d love to, as the cartography is really good, but after diving into it today, I have to say I think I need some hand holding before I can actually make it serve maps. We’ll see…

Also rans:

• Ordnance Survey have changed the licensing for their OpenSpace product: You still need a license to use their data, but you can download the development kit from sourceforge. The license has also been changed to have more “clarity” in terms of the ownership of derived data. It would be churlish to suggest that this has anything to do with the “Show Us a Better Way” mess up, wouldn’t it? The problem is, you still need to pay for the background data, so we’re back up to points 2 and 3 above…
• Amazon launches public datasets: This, in my limited experience, seems to be a duplication of ideas that are already out there. That’s fine when it’s software, and you want to stomp all over your rivals, but wouldn’t it have been nice for them to give their support to an existing data repository?

Things to play with next:

• Openaerialmap: Also has a wms service…

I mentioned a while back the cool competition that the government here in the UK were running, called “Show Us a Better Way“. The idea was that people could submit ideas for mashups with public information. Well, the contest appears to have been a great success- it closed at the end of September and the winners were announced earlier this month (no, my entry didn’t win, sob).

Not unsuprisingly, the winning entries all had a geospatial component to them, but their future is already in doubt due to some over-zealous big-stick-waving from dear old Ordnance Survey. In short, the OS are saying that no data derived from their products can be displayed on Google Maps, due to incompatibilities between their own Contractors license and that of Google. It’s OK though, because they can use OpenSpaces, OS’s own mapping product,  although that is not for high-volume use, and the OS will own any data that you plot on it. As Charles Arthur comments- the OS seem to be operating the opposite of a GPL license- everything they touch, they own.

For those that already don’t think this is all a bit ridiculous and, well, crappy, here’s the rub: the Show Us a Better Way competition was part-funded by the Department for Communities and Local Government, who the (publicly funded OS) have to report to!

So, this better way that they are supposed to be showing us, is already mired in complications and ridiculous licensing issues. Looks like we’ll have to crowd-source it then, as long as we promise never to read an atlas or look at another map again, just in case…

I’m just back from the AGi Geocommunity 2008 conference in Stratford-upon-Avon. A very enjoyable time was had by all I think! I would have posted from the conference itself, but the hotel wifi wasn’t keen on playing with my linux laptop.

I’ll talk more in other posts about the actual presentations, but this is just some of my general thoughts about the conference.

My overall thought was that the AGI got it right with this event. I went into it with some reservations, partly because I was talking about open source at a conference full of software vendors, and partly  because I am pretty new to the AGI and didn’t know what to expect.

From talking to people throughout the event, as well as the entertainment that they put on, I really did feel that they were trying to get a sense of community, breaking down barriers between vendors and users. I also felt that if open source gis software is to become more widely used, it needs to engage with that community on a professional level, rather than scratch around on the edges, or out and out refusing to come to the party.

I got to chat with a lot of people from proprietary software companies, and from the Ordnance Survey, all of whom were actually really interested in engaging with open source, and open access to data.  Again, more on the specifics later. It was suggested at one point that the concepts of open standards and open source are totally separate, and therefore to make the open source case better it is important not to mix the two, and I have been thinking about this ever since. From the perspective of Oxford Archaeology’s desire to adopt an “open ethos”, the two concepts are inextricably linked, but I do see that in some cases this might not be true. The standards people might not always want to be linked with open source because they need to engage with the proprietary people too. Something to think about as we continue to promote open source GIS within the UK.

On that note, I spoke to a few people about the idea of setting up a special interest group (SIG) for open source software within the AGI, and about arranging an OSGeo/AGI SIG conference within the UK next year some time. Both these points will need some expansion so I’ll leave it at that for now…