I will be attending the INSPIRE Data Specification Workshop on the 8th January 2009 in London. This is primarily a technical meeting that I hope will set out more details on the specifications around data & metadata. If anyone is attending and is interested in catching up over a coffee drop me a message. If you can not attend but would like me to try and find answers to specific issues or questions, feel free to leave comments.
Mark
Ian Broadbent, Strategic Industry Manager, Policing and Crime Analysis has produced a best practice guide to UK public crime mapping: Crime in Focus.
Ian has over 20 years in crime analysis with West Midlands, Staffordshire and latterly the Greater Manchester Police, Ian is well versed in the challenges and opportunities which public crime mapping presents. Crime in Focus presents an easily digestible guide to avoiding likely pitfalls in implementing a public facing crime map. Whilst focusing specifically on crime stats – the guide can equally be applied to online statistics and analysis.
There is some interesting comment from The Guardian that suggests that crime mapping should even go as far as live feeds and realtime information. This information should be exposed for other organisations to syndicate or mash.
The white paper can be freely downloaded here
I was thinking the other day that we haven’t put any recent shots of Connect up on the blog recently. We’ve spent a lot of time of late working on the administration side of things, and soon enough I’ll put up some screen shots of that. One of my engineers was recently showing how a user would alter the watermark in the application. I thought you may appreciate the output.
Here’s another couple of images for you as well,
Published on
December 8, 2008 in
Licence.
It seems recently there has been a lot of comment on user forums, blogs and even national newspapers around data ownership in the UK. As many UK organisations, but particularly government ones, obtain their data from the Ordnance Survey this isn’t a new thing. However the exchanges between a well known search engine and the Ordnance Survey over the past couple of months seem to have reached new heights – and restrictions. The whole topic is a moving target with each organisation regularly changing it’s position. Most recently Google updated it’s terms for the “free” API on 26th November, seemingly a little for the better. However there’s nothing to stop anyone from reversing any changes being made.
I often get asked my opinion on the subject and if it is “safe” to use such an API. I would dodge that question a little, there is no doubt that there is a time and a place for a fantastic service such as Google maps. However in the industry I always refer to one line: Data is King. As such if you value your data – and you should – be very very careful what you do with it. The issue of licence and data ownership is very serious and ignoring it could have severe consequences. I’ve noticed in talking with organisations it is the departments which don’t “own” or manage the data which seem more inclined to turn a blind eye to some terms and conditions which should be scrutinised.
As far as data ownership goes, that book still seems closed – if you created a data layer based on OS data, they own the XY. Google have stated that if you create on top of Google maps, then you own it, which sounds fantastic until you realise that they use TeleAtlas, who in turn get data from guess who?? and that one is still unanswered.
Please contact the Ordnance Survey for their official position
Google ‘free’ API licence can be found here: http://code.google.com/apis/maps/terms.html
I like the article as it hints at some of the new capabilities we can offer without going into too much technical detail. Also in my opinion phrases like “Customer Data Quality” & “Enterprise Content Management” nestle very comfortably with “Location Intelligence” & “Predictive Analytics”
