When I’m not being a project manager, I’m studying (slowly) for a degree in Earth Sciences at Birkbeck College. It’s a hobby, but at the back of my mind I wonder if I could ever use it professionally. That curiousity led me to the first meeting of the British Computer Society’s Geospatial Special Interest Group last night, where the speaker was Ed Parsons, CTO of the Ordnance Survey.

As a geology student, and occasional countryside walker, I love the Ordnance Survey. Those incredibly detailed maps showing every pub and post office in the country are fascinating, and the methods by which the data are collected and stored are of professional interest as well. A surveyor mapping an area of the countryside does so with an accuracy of 1cm, using a combination of GPS and terrestrial stations which correct for the vagueries of signals passing through the atmosphere. This is backed up by aerial mapping, taken using a 106MPixel camera, which gathers almost a terabyte of data on every 2 hour flight. All this makes my Canon Ixus and ‘the pub must be around here somewhere’ approach to navigation feel rather inadequate.

Perhaps more interesting to everyone else is the use to which these data can be put. Many of us are familiar with in-car navigation systems, the notion that the police can find you if you dial 999 from your mobile, as indeed can the taxi company from 0800 654321, or even your mother (if you’re a small person with the appropriate service). All these services are useful but, Ed Parsons tells us, are limited by the way that location is treated as an add-on to the network service and its portal, rather than embedded lower down the stack, perhaps in the network service itself. This idea of giving a device a ‘sense of place’ and using that to ‘push’ information related to the location, opens up a wide range of possibilities for future systems, from the simple idea of your Google home-page automatically showing the weather in the place in which your laptop has connected to the internet, to guided tours through your mobile phone that give instructions on where to walk and more or less detail about what you’re seeing, as you wish.

Unfortunately one of the major obstacles to expanding the use of geographic information in mainstream systems in the United Kingdom is the requirement put on the Ordnance Survey to return a profit to the Treasury. This is very different from the situation in, say, the United States, and is one reason why extremely cheap or advertising paid consumer services are rare here and more common there, as the Guardian has been pointing out in recent weeks. Mr Parsons is a civil servant, and so could scarcely comment on this topic, except to mention an attempt to create ‘open source’ data by a group of enthusiasts, but it is a serious limitation. This wealth of data which has been built up over the last 200 years, is surely public property, and funding the revenue stream of the OS would cost little more than a drop in the ocean of, say, the NHS budget overrun. It may even turn out to be revenue positive, if innovation increased taxable sales, profits and earnings.

Links to follow up:
Google Earth - a free version, and a very cheap enhanced version, of a tool which is becoming one of the most popular geographical information systems around

Mapping Hacks, by Schuler, Gibson and Walsh – a book recommended by the speaker