Spaced-OoooO-Out

UKMap makes ground

That's a horrible pun! But its true.Free Our Data have a nice summary roundup of news at UKMap, most notable of which is the acceptance by Land Registry of submissions using UKMap data. That is big news. And also a growing list of clients; as Charles Arthur notes "London councils and emergency services? That�s what I think you call an inroad into OS�s market, isn�t it?"

ESRI at YouTube

Well it had to come; funny none-the-less!

The Boneyard

This was just too cool not to blog: The Boneyard. Have a read of the story over at the BBC. Great stuff!

Tallest Eucalyptus tree mapped

Nice story over at GIS Development on mapping the world's tallest eucalyptus tree using LiDAR. OK, it's an ESRI plug, but a great example. And at just shy of 100m its damn big!

Bing Maps at TED

Great presentation by Blaise Agueray Arcas of Microsoft at TED recently. Its specifically about the augmented reality features of Bing maps, going from the traditional "panels", through to "slippy" maps and then the integration of crowd sourced information all overlain together and explorable searchable. It is smooth, exquisite and thoroughly compelling. He saves the best till last which was the full integration of Flickr photography, including imagery inside buildings, then on top of this he overlaid a live video feed for true real time augmented reality. Then go back outside, look up at the sky and get full details of the visible night-sky.

SRTM 10th Anniversary
Yes, believe it or not, SRTM is celebrating it's 10th anniversary. If there is perhaps one NASA mission that has had such a profound impact upon Earth Sciences (and certainly with respect to the number of days "in space") then this is it. Relatively high resolution topographic data of most of the planet's landmass, available for free, is a amazing achievement. ASPRS Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing had a special issue devoted to SRTM back in 2006 and the lead cover article (which is free) provides background to the mission. It truly amazing achievement based on this account.

Great ESRI graphics
The Mapping Center blog points to supporting materials for the ESRI Press book "Map Use". And rightly so; the Powerpoint slides are excellent and provide some really good illustrations of underpinning GIS concepts as well as some nice examples. Well worth leafing through, staff and students alike.

Your health depends on where you live
TED has recently released a talk by Bill Davenhall entitled "Your health depends on where you live". Presented at TEDMED, the talk provides a very simple exposition of "geo-medicine" (or more broadly epidemiology). In fact, when you watch it, it really espouses, first and foremost, the significance of geography and then the importance of GIS.

Infrared Photography
There's a nice summary article covering infrared photography over at the BBC. It's part of the celebrations of 100 years of infrared photography. If you read the article you'll see that infrared has been known about for at least a further 100 years, but getting photographic film/plates that were sensitive to these wavelengths was difficult. That occurred around 1910, with commercial film from 1930.

Zoomable Map
Check out the Zoomable Map which uses a clever set of folds to give the effect of zooming in from an overview map to a streetmap. I can see this taking off for alot of city maps, so thought I would order the London one. Its not cheap but a really nice idea. I hope it takes off.

Trouble and strife with OS data
I recently had a map submitted to the Journal of Maps that made good use of Mastermap data. Although not an extensive amount was used, it is primarily based upon it so I suggested he check out the JISC-OS license with particular reference to my post on what this means for PDF based maps. He has described his experiences:

Trouble and strife with OS data

My map was created using terrain analysis of a Digital Elevation Model generated from airborne LiDAR data. In order to provide some context to the main feature of my map I used Ordnance Survey Mastermap data for features such as roads, railways, rivers and general land use. On reviewing my map the editor at the Journal of Maps suggested I should check whether the use of this data falls within the current OS licensing agreement. I discovered that my map was in breach of this agreement on a number of levels. Not only did my map include prohibited vector data, but the total number of pixels per image was over double that of the maximum set by OS at 1,048,576. I went through the pain staking process of trying to reduce the overall size of the images in my map so that they fell within the agreement terms, but the effect of rasterising the vector data resulted in a severe impact on the overall quality of the layers. It was at this point I decided it would be best not to use any OS data in my map.

Instead, I created my own layers by digitising the most important features (major road and rail routes, urban areas, and rivers) from airborne imagery collected for the study site. In this instance I was fortunate to have this data available, as other sources of imagery, such as Google Earth, are liable to have poor spatial accuracy. One vector layer which I could not digitise using the airborne imagery was an outline of the UK, used to identify the location of the study site. To overcome this I downloaded a UK coastline line shapefile from Open Street Map (available at Cloudmade). In fact the data available here also includes road and administrative boundary features that may be useful to other users.

The lessons learnt here are that the restrictions imposed by OS effectively make their data unusable in map making for publication.

Australia is BIG
For antipodean colleagues, yes Australia is BIG. A map always puts it in to perspective!

Big boys UAVs: RQ-4 Global Hawk
A nice article over at Wired on the diversion of US military UAVs to Haiti to provide reconnaissance imagery for the relief effort. Demonstrates how the miltary are trying to get some good PR whilst also making a genuinely useful contribution. If you haven't come across military UAVs then take a look at the RQ-4 Global Hawk; makes somewhat of a mockery of the kites I use and even some of the more security centric products. Just take a look at some of the specs:

Length: 13.54 m
Wingspan: 35.41 m
Height: 4.62 m
Gross weight: 10,387 kg
Cruise speed: 650 km/h
Endurance: 36 hours
Service ceiling: 19,812 m

It can survey up to 100,000 square kilometer of terrain a day and carries SAR VNIR instruments on board. A serious bit of kit, but then they cost $35M each. Not sure a NERC grant would stretch to one of these!

Gentle Introduction to GIS
GIS Lounge have a good summary of a Gentle Introduction to GIS, a PDF manual and accompanying datasets for use with QGIS. Sponsored by the Department of Land Affairs, Eastern Cape, South Africa, it covers the main introductory conceptual areas and provides examples. Its not going to win any writing awards, but it is nice and succinct. In that sense it complements the book from MapAction which covers somewhat similar ground for MapWindow.

With my educational hat back on, it will be interesting to see how schools around the world start picking up on these resources. Certainly in the UK the market is wide open with schools starting to look at software. Both QGIS and MapWindow could fill this introductory niche very nicely.

Students have 10 minute attention span
Students only have '10-minute attention span' - it's a great headline from the BBC and the first part of the copy reads: "University students have average attention spans of just 10 minutes and many miss lectures because of the need for part-time jobs, research suggests." Actually, the 10-minute attention span is a pretty well known phenomena; John Medina outlines this in Brain Rules (amongst other things) and discusses how he structures 1 hour lectures in to 15 minutes blocks to leverage attention spans. So not so much a real headline as a storm in a teacup.

Very small world map
A world map with a difference - this one is only 40 microns (that's about the same as the wavelength of thermal infra-red light) in in size! This one is done using CMOS fabrication tools and put on a chip. Nice :)

Importance of Geography
Nice article over at The Economist espousing the importance of Geography (with a big "g") and it's centrality to everything important that is going on in the world. Of course, I would at to that that GIS underpins a very large part of the data collection, analysis and presentation of much of what goes on in geography.

Snow covered UK
It's already been flagged up on the BBC, but a Terra MODIS image captured a nearly cloud free, almost totally snow covered, UK yesterday. It's quite simply stunning and is available from the MODIS Rapid Response System which provides near real-time access to MODIS imagery on Aqua and Terra. This particular image is the highest resolution (250m pixels) version and is available with a worldfile meaning it can be loaded straight in to a GIS.

Surface Roughness of Topography: A Multi-Scale Analysis of Landform Elements in Midland Valley, Scotland
C.H. Grohman, M.J. Smith and C. Riccomini
Proceedings of Geomorphometry, 140-148
In this paper we briefly review a selection of measures of surface roughness, with specific application to grid based digital elevation models (DEMs). A selection were assessed for the behaviour of roughness at different spatial scales and dataset resolutions using moving-window and raster algebra steps to a test area in the Midland Valley, Scotland.

Map-OSM-atic
Great automated service for creating a town plan and index over at MapOSMatic using OpenStreetMap data. The site developed out of Hackfest2009 and is based upon the entire worldwide OSM data using the default OSM stylesheet. A really useful service. If your map doesn't already exist (and there currently doesn't appear to be a search engine for existing plans) then you can define a bounding box around your town of interest and queue it for processing. The queue is currently around 200 maps which seems to take about 24 hours to process, but of course it depends upon the complexity of the jobs. Outputs are PNG, PDF and SVG.

�99 Netbook
Yes it looks to be true, a netbook that costs �99. The specs are fairly minimal, but at this price who cares!! Interestingly it comes loaded with Windows CE 6.0. The specs have more in common with a mobile phone than a netbook, which is probably why CE has been used. It'll be interesting to see if anyone gets Linux working on it, particularly as the 7" screen and keyboard make it a very usable specification.

ResearcherID Labs
In a recent editorial at the Journal of Maps I touched upon citation listing of journals and the importance to authors in terms of citation metrics. Thomson-Reuters provide some interesting info on citation analysis, whilst citation services such as Web of Knowledge and Scopus provide journal level information to assess journal performance including the often quoted impact factor.

Thomson-Reuters have "flipped" this idea on it's head to provide author level information through ResearcherID. This free service provides a "virtual CV" of published articles showing the number of citations each has received. It also displays citation metrics including the h-index.

More recently they have add (in a similar vein to Google) a "labs" area showcasing newer developments. Given that they want "you" to purchase access to Web of Knowledge, there is only so much information they want to present. That said they have generated data on two primary areas: the Citing Network and the Collaboration Network. This makes sense and is actually quite interesting. You can view the authors network of collaboration and then the networks created by those that cite them.

USB Modes
I'm the proud owner of a new Sandisk Sansa View, an mp4 player in the style of an Apple Nano, but without the Apple baggage that goes with it (and some might say, without the style). The specs target most of the things I was after: mp3 playback, mp4 playback, long battery life (~35 hours), microSD expansion, FM radio and audio recording. There are a range of memory sizes up to 32Gb, but with microSD expansion its more flexible; I plumped for the 16Gb version. The firmware hasn't been updated for over a year now and the player is being discounted, so it looks like it's being replaced.

Overall the View is a good player, albeit with a few minor niggles the primary one being that it is quite picky about the mp4s it plays. It supposedly supports mp4, h264, xvid, wmv9 etc etc. None of my xvids would play and none of the trancoding I did with either ffmpeg or mencoder worked. After much digging Any Video Converter worked flawlessly out of the box. It is actually only a front-end for ffmpeg and mencoder, however it does some extra muxing which I can only assume generates a more "compliant" mp4. Anyway, the result is good and the playback excellent.

The other "quirk" is really a feature. The View can operate in either MTP or MSC modes. The former is dedicated for transferring media files, but requires at least WMP10 to be installed on Windows. The latter shows the device as a ordinary hard disk drive and allows storage of any files. Both can be used with Windows Explorer to manually transfer files. With the View, using MTP automatically updates the internal media files database which speeds start-up considerably particularly with large numbers of files. When there is a microSD card installed this is automatically scanned at startup-to check for any changes.

A couple of nice final points: the View can record from FM radio and (with the appropriate cable) can output to a TV. The latter means it can operate as a simple media player which could be useful.

Plummeting winter temperatures mapped
Nice example of environmental monitoring over at NASA, this time using MODIS Land Surface Temperature to compared temperatures in Europe this winter (11-18 December) with the 2000-2008 average. The UK is a little cooler than "normal"; the real problem areas are Russia, Scandinavia and Poland, with parts up to 20C colder than previous years.

Consultation on release of OS data
As reported by FoD and Mapperz, DCLG have begun the consultation concerning the release of OS data. There is an accompanying impact assessment. Well worth leafing through both.

Happy Birthday NASA Terra
NASAs Terra is now 10!! Launched to much fanfare in 1999, of interest to Earth scientists it carries MODIS (wide swath, medium resolution, super spectral) and ASTER. The latter also being super spectral, but high resolution (upto 15m) and also stereoscopic. Note the earlier post on the recently released global DEM product. An extremely successful mission and the celebration pages show some fantastic examples of environmental change.

Patched FireFox RSS Editor
RSS Editor is a great extension for Firefox that adds functionality to allow you to edit (doh!) RSS files. It supports both local and remote file editing (although not over SSL) and is brilliant for simple RSS tasks. At both the Centre for GIS and CEESR I have implemented a simple news aggregator on the front page that formats news feeds from RSS. This is one of the easiest ways of getting a news feed on a website.

Unfortunately RSS Editor was only updated to early alpha versions of version 3.x and currently doesn't work. If you read the feedback on the extension's page you'll see someone has fixed the code (in rssio.js) to get it working; this is in the form of a patch file which I couldn't get to work on Windows. However I have fixed the bug manually and made it available here. Enjoy!

Open Topography Portal Expanded
As reported by lidar news, the Open Topography Portal is to be expanded following a grant from the NSF. The OTP provide a valuable service, albeit somewhat small at the moment. However growing interest in point clouds and DEMs are driving interest and so its excellent to see further investment like this.

Low Cost LiDAR
Lidar news have a nice article on low cost 2D LiDAR. Well worth looking at the OXTS webpage and related videos. This clearly demonstrates how young the mobile LiDAR (and for that matter static LiDAR) area is so expect to see big strides to making it more cost effective.

ERDAS goes where ESRI fears to tread
Slashdot reported earlier this year on the FOSS4G web server benchmarking. The big news was that ESRI were taking part, but then pulled out. The hope was to get both ESRI and MapGuide in to the frame to see how they did. With the recently announced ERDAS 2010 released, Chris Tweedie over at ERDAS took it upon himself to run some benchmarks (also reported in Slashdot). The results certainly look impressive (up to twice as fast as Mapserver) which I guess is why they were happy to put the product forward. ESRIs silence is deafening....

DMC 22m Multiispectral Data Available
Slashgeo report on the availability of 22m multispectral data from DMC via the UK-DMC2 and Deimos-1 satellites. Good to see this constellation is proving successful and improving; a great advert for the new British Space Agency!

LEOWorks
I recently came across LeoWorks an educational remote sensing package that is free for use in teaching. Developed by ESA and the Romanian Space Agency (yes they have one and obviously for a considerably longer time than the UK!) its not going to win any cutting edge awards but it is a very capable piece of software. It surprises me that there are no reasonable open source remote sensing packages (unlike GIS), but there you go..... anyway, it appears to be developed in IDL (which would make sense) and offers the following features (amongst many):

-image information/historgram
-split, combine, rotate, mirror, raster math
-stretching, histogram equalization
-convolution filtering
-supervised/unsupervised classification
-PCA
-georeferencing
-NDVI
-scatter plots

As you can see, surprisingly capable and certainly pretty much everything you would want to cover in an introductory module. And, to boot, it appears to run fine from a USB stick.

Christmas Every Year?
I'm sure this is a result of "middle age grouch" syndrome hitting me, but the whole "Christmas thing" seems to get bigger, earlier and glitzier each year. How refreshing to see this petition to number 10. Shame its lapsed as I would have voted!!!!

Open Source Graphics
I regularly end up doign all sorts of quick graphics edits. I have been a long time fan of Pain Shop Pro and still run v8. Its since been acquired by Corel and newer versions are considerably bloated. v8 is powerful and exceptionally capable which is great. But when I'm on the move I want to use other packages to do the grunt for me. GIMP is a long time, and powerful, favourite of many users. I personally don't get on with it so rarely end up using. My pick are the following:

1. Fotografix - extremely lightweight but very powerful. Layers, masking, levels, fills, gradients etc etc, Very good for touching up all sorts of graphics and photos.
2. XnView - fantastic general toolbox. Thumbnail image viewer, converter and manipulator. Lightning fast to boot.
3. IrfanView - grand daddy of open source image software. Real Swiss Army knife and well worth having knocking about.
4. Inkscape - Illustrator-esque open source product. Still at alpha/beta stage but it is very promising. Well worth keeping an eye on.
5. Dia - short for Diagrammer, this is great for things like flow charts, network diagrams etc.

A Practical Guide to Geostatistical Mapping
Tomislav Hengl has just published an open-access book on geostatistical mapping. The PDF is freely available with the printed version very modestly priced. The website links to datasets with the analysis performed in R, ILWIS and SAGA, whilst the book itself comes out of the courses he teaches at ITC. Well worth a look.

UK Space Agency
Great news this week with the announcement that the UK is set to have a space agency and hopefully begin to capitalise on its rapidly increasing expertise in this area. Spaceman has a good blog entry on this and the BNSC's linked Space Exploration Review is well worth downloading and leafing through.

USB3 is here
PCPro have published some results of the first USB3 devices to hit the market. Motherboards with USB3 ports are yet to arrive so you have to make do with PCI Express cards, but they're cheap at under �30. Clearly this will be a boon to external HDDs, portable media, external monitors etc etc and data transfer rates appear to be 2-4 times faster. As previous posts show, I use a portable HDD wherever possible for storing data and running apps, so USB3 is a big deal. I'll be on the look out for a USB3 drive caddy ASAP!

Postcode data release proposal
The BBC reports today that the government is planning to release postcode data early next year. This is good news as postcodes underpin so much dynamic geospatial datasets. Their commercialisation has been wrong from the outset when you have public services such as the Royal Mail and OS trying to make as much money out of data ostensibly provided by local government (but with value added). It would appear that a short consultation process across all organisations due to release data will be begin. Early next year will prove an interesting time as we see what is released and then how it is made use of.

Education under Labour
Mike Baker again has a nice reflective piece on the ONS report of education under Labour over the last 12 years (I can't find the right ONS report though). And, as ever, it depends what measure you use to define "success". In this instance its "productivity", that is comparing the increase in inputs to the increase in outputs. In this instance the ratio has remained static meaning there has been no gain in productivity, but there have been overall increases in both inputs and outputs. And it is the latter that is most important with it being increasingly likely that as standards improve each incremental increase in outputs requires more substantial inputs. Or, to put it another way, once you have a reasonable education system it becomes increasingly more expensive to gain marginal improvements.8

For Sale board up at Ordnance Survey
I suspect this is one of many rumours doing the rounds at the moment, but what with the government announcing that (much) OS data will be given away gratis and the recent murmurs about slashing public spending in the next budget as a result of Gordon's massive spending spree (including Robert Peston's rather humorous, if alarming, warning of an impending "stubble"), it should come as no surprise that there will be some slimming down ion government. Last week The Guardian reported on moves to reduce the number of Quangos and sell off various agencies, with OS included in the list. Who knows what will happen and will an election in the off-ing how this will change. You've also got to ask yourself how attractive OS will be after the announcement that they are now giving data away. It gives the wags plenty to speculate on though!