Everything happens in Sheffield - GIS Professional · Everything happens in Sheffield In the city of cutlery and Clegg, ... From the early husbandry of animals and rise of agriculture

NLPG’s exemplars rewarded

Data to knowledge: delivering transparency

EuroGeographics: the first ten years

Exploiting location information

AGI GeoCommunity’10: what they said

Inspired by Bentley

plus News | People | Products & Services | Books | GiSPro’s columnists

issue 37 : December 2010

Everything happens in Sheffield

. . . joining the geography jigsaw

F 28/11/2010 17:11 Page 1

our mission. . .to help grow the business for the whole

GIS community by providing an effective,reliable and timely medium for news,

information and comment.

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read on. . .

Front cover: The magnificent Cutlers Hall inSheffield was the venue for this year’s NLPG

and NSG Exemplar Awards. Full report onpage 26.

Next Issue: FEBRUARY 2011Copy dates Editorial: 17 January

Advertising: 21 January

p.5 Editorialp.6 Newsp.8 People

p.33 GiSPro Products & Servicesp.34 GIS Calendar & Subscriptionsp.35 GiSPro Classified

> GISPro’s STANDFASTS

> GISPro’s COLUMNSp.13 Adena Schutzberg – There are two crowd-sourcing models: which one will

win out, the aggregators or the contributors?

p.24 Eurofile – Do we really need scale in geodata, asks Robin Waters.

p.30 AGI Column – Chris Holcroft looks back on a significant year for AGI.

For details of how to subscribeto GiSPro, turn to page 34.

contentsIssue No 37 December 2010

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Wales addresses the issuesSharing practice and experience through the NLPG and local gazetteerswas the theme of “One Wales, one Voice” explains Carl Hancock.

Everything happens in SheffieldIn the city of cutlery and Clegg, the NLPG and NSG annual ExemplarAwards marked good practice and value for money.

Where will GIS lead local authorities?Conditions are perfect for local councils to deliver web services to theircitizens, argues PBBI’s Steve Deaville.

Book review: Map of a NationThe editor reviews Rachel Hewitt’s highly readable doctoral thesis onthe early history of Ordnance Survey.

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Exploiting location informationYou will need allies, metrics and an elevator pitch if you’re going toget your GI project accepted. Without that you could be toast!

AGI GeoCommunity’10Our team reports on the AGI’s big event for opportunities in achanging world and how GI (and hats) can make a difference.

Being inspired with BIMs and GISBentley Systems annual awards event attracted over 400 users, reportsRichard Groom. But how far is city modelling moving to GIS?

From data to knowledgeIn the new age of “free data” we must understand the relationshipbetween data, knowledge and transparency, says Peter Capell.

Ten years of EuroGeographicsDave Lovell and Patricia Sokacova make the case for this Europeanmapping and cadastral organisation.

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It’s geography, stupid!Geographers and GI specialists have long been familiar with the significance of location. It's whatwe're about; it's what we do. But does the rest of the world get it? Increasingly I think they do.Writing in the BBC's online magazine Professor Ian Morris of Stanford University made a cogent casefor location being the driving force behind the rise and fall of civilizations over the millennia.

From the early husbandry of animals and rise of agriculture in the Middle East to a predicted futurewhere we turn to North Africa and Australia for solar energy needs, geography is the driving force.But as climate changes or proud rulers fail to adapt to their peoples' needs, other civilizations ariseand displace them. The world is currently pondering on whether India or China will replace the US asthe driving motor in the world economy. Geography driven by climate change could be the decisivefactor.

Mapping and recording these things in detail, whether at the macro or micro level – currently,historically or for the future – is what we're about. Location matters: providing the tools and data tohelp people decide where it should be is our profession.

ESRI's Richard Waite talks of that "light bulb moment" when he briefed former minister Lord DigbyJones about GIS (see page 14 and our report on GeoCommunity'10) and the latter's amazement thatevery business wasn't using GIS. Many unsung GIS heroes struggle day in, day out to make the casefor the benefits of geoinformation in their organisations. We know that GI does not just make a dif-ference to people's lives; it can save money too. But the coming year will surely demand even moreintense efforts by GIS professionals to sustain and grow what they do amidst a climate of retrenchingbudget cuts, let alone make the case for new systems, upgrades and staff.

Fortunately there is a vibrant and active geocommunity at hand to help and support GIS professionalsthat need to argue the case. We at GiSPro intend to play our part during the coming year bypublishing a series of case studies that show the benefits, whether financial or social, of GIS. In themeantime, please read carefully our report of the AGI's recent seminar on exploiting location infor-mation (begins page 10). You will find plenty of useful hints there from elevator pitches, to makingallies and the significance of understanding financial models.

The AGI awards dinner at the end of November confirmed the readiness of the geocommunity to stepup. While corporate support for the event was down individual member support replaced it, reflect-ing the value that people place on membership of the association.

With this seasonal issue of GiSPro, you will find a yearplanner. I hope it will be useful in mapping theyear ahead. There should be enough room to mark up the principle landmarks in the year. We havealready put a few in for you! If you would like extra copies for colleagues please call this office andwe should be able to help. Finally but importantly, a big "Thank You" to the companies who havesponsored both the yearplanner and this publication during 2010. Without their generosity and com-mitment to the industry there would be a poorer and less informed geocommunity.

It only remains for me to wish all readers a peaceful holiday season and happy new year, and in thewords of the late Irish comic Dave Allen, 'May your god go with you'.

Stephen Booth, editor

welcometo the December issue of GIS Professional. . .

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vibrant andactive geocom-munity at handto help and sup-port GIS profes-

sionals thatneed to argue

the case.

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joining the geography jigsaw

from the editorIssue No 37 December 2010

Grow your own foodTwo winners have emerged fromOrdnance Survey’s GeoVation Campand will now have a chance to win ashare of £25,000 to help make theirideas a reality. Challenged to answer"How can Britain feed itself?", thefive shortlisted entrants pitched tojudges Liz Ratcliffe of OrdnanceSurvey, Eloise Dey of Sustain, JamesCutler from eMapsite, Nick Snelgarof Future Farms and were chaired byRoland Harwood, co-founder of theopen innovation consultancy,100%Open. The first winning idea isCity Farms, the brainchild of PeterBoyce who wants to use shopsselling local produce as hubs toteach people how to grow their ownfood. The second idea came fromLouise Campbell; her Food Nationsmartphone app uses OS OpenDataand the Geomium social locationplatform to encourage a closerrelationship between consumers andthe people who grow their food. Thewinning ideas now go forward to ashowcase in May.

The second challenge in theInnovation Awards programme "Howcan we improve transport inBritain?", is still open to submissions

and has recently received anadditional £150,000 in funding tohelp winning entrants develop theirideas.

Licensing change welcomeLandmark Information Group haswelcomed changes in the OrdnanceSurvey licensing agreement as apositive step forward towards a morecompetitive industry. In effect since18 November, the licensing revisionswill specifically impact the current OSdensity and price models so partnerscan sell large areas of mapping atcompetitive prices. According toemapsite, the overhaul in the waythe mapping agency's data isdistributed through partners hasprovided more flexibility in how itcan deliver its added value datamanagement tools. 'The restructuringmeans we can for the first time offerour licensing and projectmanagement tools while sellingdirectly at Ordnance Survey prices,'says James Cutler, emapsite CEO.

Location underused?Four in five (82 per cent) businessesthink the ideal future manager hasan equal understanding of both

business and technology, accordingto a survey by ESRI UK. The survey of200 business leaders across thepublic and private sectors showedthat despite most firms (95 per cent)saying that location is important totheir success, only one in five (18 percent) use key technologies like GISacross the whole business.

'Studying geography andlearning how to utilise geographicinformation gives new employeesmany of the key skills that businessesare crying out for,' says RichardWaite, managing director. 'As anindustry it's our job to encouragemore people to take up a geography-based career so that businesses andsociety as a whole can benefit'.

1Spatial soldInvestment group IQ Holdings hasacquired the entire issued sharecapital of 1Spatial Group Ltd. Thename of the company has now bechanged to 1Spatial Holdings plcbut will continue to operate andtrade as 1Spatial Group. Pursuantto the Alternative InvestmentMarket (AIM) rules for companies,the acquisition constituted a reversetakeover and was subject toshareholder approval.

Cutting address problems‘Key systems, from council tax tothe electoral register rely on theNLPG,’ says Tony Black, operationsdirector at Intelligent Addressing.‘You can be sure that if new housesare receiving council tax statementsand refuse collections, they will beincluded in the NLPG’. So pressreports that the information used byemergency services do not includenew housing estates should soonbe a thing of the past as policeforces and fire and rescue servicesmake greater use of the NLPG. Formore on the NLPG and theExemplar Awrds, turn to page 26.

Value of GI revealedPutting the National Land andProperty Gazetteer (NLPG) at theheart of council service delivery inEngland and Wales can savebetween £15m and £24m, a recent

report has revealed. The value ofgeospatial information to localpublic service delivery in Englandand Wales, published by the LocalGovernment Group, seeks toexamine the economic impact ofthe use of geospatial informationupon service delivery. The adoptionof GI resulted in an increase in GDPof approximately £320m higher in2008-9 than if geospatialinformation hadn’t been adopted.The report suggests that this couldrise to £560m by 2014-5. The fullreport can be accessed from www.consultingwhere.com/reports.html.

Call for papersThe British Cartographic SocietyAnnual Symposium 2011 will be heldat Shrigley Hall Hotel and CountryClub, Macclesfield from 8-10 June2011. The theme for the conferenceis “The power of the image” and willfocus on how to deliver the correctmessage and enhance understandingof data. The event includes aneducational conference stream andexhibition as well as hosting theannual awards ceremony. The call forpapers is open to members and non-members of the BCS and the closingdate for submissions is 14 January2011. More atwww.cartography.org.uk/events.

CONTRACTS & PROJECTS

Open source laboratoryThe Open Source GeospatialFoundation (OSGeo) and the Centrefor Geospatial Science (CGS),University of Nottingham havesigned a memorandum ofunderstanding for the establishmentof an Open Source Geospatial Lab(OSGL) and to develop collaborationopportunities for academia, industryand government organisations inopen source GIS software and datain the UK. The MOU provides forthe establishment of a researchlaboratory for supportingdevelopment of open-sourcegeospatial software technologies,training and expertise. It alsoprovides provision of internshipopportunities for high quality

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Mapping service for schools

A new online mapping service aims to support the teaching of geographyat all levels in schools across Great Britain. The "Digimap for Schools"service provides schools with easy access to Ordnance Survey's digitalmapping for the whole of Great Britain. Baroness Joan Hanham CBE,parliamentary under secretary of state for Communities and LocalGovernment (CLG) launched the service in November with Dr VanessaLawrence CB, director general and chief executive of Ordnance Survey.

students. The first phase ofinternships are now released atwww.nottingham.ac.uk/cgs/news/internships.aspx.

Bucks goes for Response Buckinghamshire Fire and RescueService has procured GGP Responsesoftware to facilitate the integrationof the National Land & PropertyGazetteer within the service’smobilisation software. Longer-termplans include accessing the gazetteerdata from mobile data terminals onfire appliances and the integration ofthe NLPG to join up disparatedepartmental databases. Alsoincluded within the package fromGGP is an OGC compliant GIS thatprovides tools for editing, plottingand maintaining the geographiclocations of properties and streets.

Building “inspired”communities1Spatial, RSW Geomatics and RobWalker Consultancy have completed aproject to provide technical guidancefor anyone transforming data into theINSPIRE schemas. Sponsored by theEC Joint Research Council (JRC), theguidance includes comprehensivedocumentation, a prototype webservice - demonstrated at last June'sINSPIRE conference in Krakow - and avideo in three languages. Currenttools and standards were reviewedbut found lacking. The conclusions arethat implementations should be basedon open standards; should be vendorneutral and interoperable; based onrigorous internationally provenstandards; and capable of effectiveand automatic operation. Part of theprototype is now being incorporatedinto the Humboldt open sourcesoftware - as an extension to theAlignment editor (HALE) to provideRule Interchange Format (RIF) output.RIF has recently been accepted as aW3C standard.

Interoperability for bluelight serviceA team led by Lockheed Martin UK isclose to completing the CommonGeospatial Tool Set (CGTS) researchproject that will enable military, blue

light services and other public sectorbodies to co-operate more effectivelyin times of emergency. Team SPARTAwas awarded a 29-month contract in2008 by the UK Ministry of Defenceto consider ways of delivering acoherent geospatial enablingcapability, improving interoperabilitybetween defence, security andemergency services by enabling themto create and share geospatiallyreferenced information across arange of platforms and networks. Theaim is to provide technical evidenceand de-risk activity to supportpossible future developments in thisarea. The team also includes Esri UK,Envitia, Actica Consulting Ltd, HelyxSIS Ltd, Pitney Bowes BusinessInsight, ERDAS and Luciad.

Integrating dataSurrey Heath Borough Council aimsto enhance the efficiency of localservices with new software thatsimplifies access to councilinformation. The GGP NGz gazetteermanagement software from GGPSystems will help the councilintegrate its centralised propertydatabase with front and back officesystems such as council tax, theelectoral register and CRM software.

Running the OlympicnetworkThe National Street Gazetteer (NSG)is being used in the planning forthe Olympic Route Network (ORN)and Paralympic Route Network(PRN). The ORN/PRN is thedefinitive list of designatedtransport routes for the running ofthe London 2012 Olympic andParalympic Games. The ORN/PRNhas been incorporated into the NSGin order to minimise any disruptionto the network in the lead up to,during and after the games.

. . .in brief

Tunbridge Wells Borough Councilhas deployed the Contractor Portaldata sharing system from DottedEyes to provide automated dataaccess to contractors, partners andinternal planning staff.

The Open Geospatial Consortiumand the Integrated JusticeInformation Systems (IJIS) Institutehave signed a memorandum ofunderstanding to work together oninformation sharing andinteroperability for public safety,justice and homeland security.

Housing association, Newport CityHomes, has selected Cadcorp's SISMap Editor, SIS Map Modeller andGeognoSIS software for itscorporate GIS.

The GeoConcept GIS fromMapMechanics has been used byHutchison Ports UK, the developerof the PARIS container transportplanning system, to streamline thesystem's ability to calculate journeytimes and distances in real-time.

A new corporate system has gonelive at the Northern Ireland Waterauthority, which is based onInnogistic’s Cartology.NET web GISsoftware. The new system willprovide real-time intranet access tothe corporate asset register andthe authority’s geospatialwarehouse based on Oracle 10g.The National Aeronautics and SpaceAdministration (NASA) has signed

an enterprise licence agreementwith Esri, making ArcGIS softwaretools available for unlimited use byauthorised NASA employees andcontractors.

Software developers, Shoothill,have created a Windows Azure-based interactive site for the UNHigh Commission for Refugees tohighlight the plight of refugees. Acoloured “heatmap” allows users tosee the locations of each camp,internally displaced people,returnees and asylum seekers, plusUNHCR office locations.

Esri has announced a partnershipwith Ushahidi, a non-profitorganisation, to improve thecollection and use of crowd-sourcedinformation during large-scaleemergencies. The organisationallows local observers to submitreports to its web platform usingmobile phones or the Internetduring a crisis. The GIS company isproviding software, services andtraining to support the platform.

BRIEFSWith the approach of the London2012 Olympics, Ordnance Survey istasked by the Olympic Delivery


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Leicestershire Fire and Rescue Service will be using OS MasterMap ImageryLayer in its command support vehicles to support major incidents, enablingthe FRS team to have up-to-date imagery in emergency situations. ‘We hadconsidered other ways of accessing imagery for the county, but it is morereliable for the emergency services to have the data stored on board ourcommand support vehicles,’ says Jenny Kirby, ICT project coordinator. ‘Thecurrency and the coverage of the Leicestershire area were the key factorsfor us choosing Ordnance Survey – OS MasterMap Imagery Layer will play akey role in supporting our activities’.


Imagery foremergencies

Authority to provide a definitivesource of site conditions. VanessaLawrence, director general andchief executive of OS, will be givinga strategic update on the Olympic2012 project at Defence GeospatialIntelligence 2011 on 25 January.

Placr, a location-based servicescompany and spin out from CityUniversity, has announced the publicbeta release of tube-radar: a LondonUnderground monitoring site(http://placr.mobi/). The service showshow the trains have run in recenthistory, allowing you to comparecurrent running with the norm. Italso shows the service pattern andfrequency from the last 24 hours in aradar diagram. More at:http://placr.co.uk/blog/2010/11/introducing-tube-radar/.

Could you find the fastest route forSanta’s Christmas deliveries? That’sthe challenge being issued by

Postcode Anywhere, with £250 ofAmazon vouchers for whoever canplan the quickest real-world route.Take up the challenge atwww.postcodeanywhere.com/santa.The competition closes at midnighton 17 December.

The programme committee for theGeoComputation conference (20–22July, 2011 at University CollegeLondon, UK) has opened the call forshort papers. More at:http://standard.cege.ucl.ac.uk/workshops/Geocomputation/ Thesubmission deadline is 28 Jan 2011.

Under an agreement betweenBluesky and Getmapping, theoriginal Millennium Map images willnow be available fromwww.oldaerialphotos.com Datingfrom 1999-01, 120,000 images coverEngland & Wales, and parts ofScotland at a resolution of 25cmwith some cities at up to 10cm.

PEOPLE

Walker joins Astun

Matt Walker has joined AstunTechnology as a geospatialtechnologist and will be responsiblefor enterprise deployment of thecompany’s web-based GIS, dataintegration and publishing productsto local authorities. Walker hasspent most of his career to dateworking for Dotted Eyes where hebecame technical director.

Promotions and recruits! Ralph Coleman has joined Bluesky’sboard of directors as sales director.


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He joined the company in 2000after graduating from SheffieldHallam University with a degree inurban and regional geography.Simon Tidmarsh also joins the boardas operations director and will beresponsible for the day-to-dayrunning of the organisation. Inaddition, Ashley Gordon has beenpromoted internally to the positionof research and development analystand Debbie Smith, who graduatedfrom Cardiff University with adegree in marine geography, joinsas sales executive from Navteq.

Debbie Smith and Ralph Coleman

BACK IN THE SUMMER GiSPro visitedESRI UK’s Aylesbury base to talkabout recent developments from theGIS giant. We had a close-up demo ofArcGIS10, which ESRI regards as“revolutionary rather thanevolutionary”. Why? Because throughArcGIS.com (check it out), it marks afirst step towards a “software as aservice” model – a cloud hostedsolution. It also offers improvedsharing and interconnection between

users through field apps including onefor the iPhone. ‘A pleasure to marketit’ was how ESRI UK’s Natalie Jenkinssummed up.

But perhaps the most interestingaspect ESRI briefed us about was therapid growth of their DeveloperHub.Now ArcGIS has for some whileprovided a good applicationdevelopment environment fordelivering users’ own solutions.ArcGIS10 and the DeveloperHub takes

this a step further by providing a rapidapplication development environment.Launched just over a year ago at AGIGeoCommunity’09 and linked toinitiatives like OS’s GeoVation awardsand Microsoft’s Bing Mashupchallenge, there is now a communityof over 4,500 registered developers inthe UK and is already the biggest hiton ESRI UK’s website.

As the name suggests, theDeveloperHub is an online resourcefor ArcGIS developers, providingaccess to key development tools,information and news to help themget the most out of the ArcGISDeveloper Platform, which isstandards-based, well documented,includes a wealth of online resourcesand is supported by a large worldwidecommunity of active developers.

The aim is therefore to engagewith users and to better respond totheir needs by providing a websitewhere they can get the latest GISdeveloper information. ESRI sees this

as providing users with benefits suchas making available some of theirown developers’ tools that helpreduce the amount of coding neededto solve particular geospatialproblems as well as offering theiropen architecture that already allowsfor a high degree of customization.Also available to developers issupport for a variety of deploymentmethods for ArcGIS includingdesktop, server, mobile and web.There are sample applications tooand “Site Starters” to help with morerapid implementation.

Many developers attended theESR UK annual conference earlierthis year and experienced “ignite”sessions where they could shareexperience and knowledge ofArcGIS apps and APIs.

• The next ESRI UK user conferencewill be in London, 16-17 May 2011.For more go tohttp://www.esriuk.com/developerhub/


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The latest initiative from ESRI UK to engage with its endusers has proved highly popular. The key to unlockingcontent has been the latest version of ArcGIS.

Hubs, developers and ArcGIS10

of the OGC’s sensor web enablement(SWE) standards. He also co-founded52°North, an open source softwarecompany which has developed theprimary open source software for SWEservices.

Promotion for Roberts

Pitney Bowes Business Insight hasannounced the promotion of GaryRoberts to executive vice president,Europe, Middle East and Africa(EMEA). Having been with PBBI forjust under three years, Roberts waspreviously managing director, UK &Ireland and regional director ofNorthern Europe.

Communications handoverAndy Bray has now completed thehandover of his communicationsmanager role on the UK LocationProgramme to David Buck. Buckmoves into the role full-time fromwithin Defra. Bray’s role on UKLP wasas a part time assignment to Defraand he now aims to fill his time withprojects spanning both private andpublic sector – some big some small– at any given time. One such publicsector role is as chair of thecommunications group for the DigitalNational Framework (DNF) – aninitiative led by Ordnance Survey.

Gardels awardIngo Simonis is the 12th winner ofthe OGC’s Gardels’ medal.Co-founderand principal of the InternationalGeospatial Services Institute (iGSI),Simonis has been an active participantin the OGC technical committee since2001 and has been a key player in thedesign, development and promotion

Issue No 37 December 2010


Taking as histheme, ‘Neverwaste a good

crisis’. . .

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THERE IS LITTLE DOUBT that within only a year or sowe will be looking at a very different public sectorlandscape. The cuts precipitated by the ComprehensiveSpending Review will have begun to work their waythrough both local and central government. These are

worrying times for those promoting GI technologies.Worse perhaps for those specialist teams anddepartments that may face redundancy or closure.They will need to fight their corners with cast iron factsto prove the economic benefits of GI. The AGI’s recentseminar on Location Economics at the RoyalGeographical Society was therefore timely. It was a dayof useful insights, best practice case studies andsharing experiences and learning.

A time traveller from the 18th century, familiarwith the Board of Longitude, might think that bynow we had managed to achieve invisibility. Alas, thenew Government’s Transparency Board is only aboutopen data standards. Chaired by a cabinet minister,it numbers amongst its members several of the greatand the good from our digital age. Explaining itswork and the Government’s agenda, Charlie Villar,took the theme of “more for less”. There willcertainly be less in the future. The Government hasan £81bn deficit and the coalition partners aredetermined to eliminate it by 2015.

Villar is director of the Shareholder Executive, thebody that oversees 28 businesses owned by HMGlike the Post Office or Ordnance Survey (OSGB). Hetold us the Government is keen to ‘rebalance UK’sdigital knowledge economy’. The challenge is to givepeople access to information when the track recordof IT projects has been one of overspend and under

delivery. There is also a policy to encourage rapidchange at OSGB through support for initiatives likeOpenSpace, GeoVation and the Public SectorMapping Agreement.

The move now is towards a more evolutionarymodel, Villar explained, where the boundaries will notchange. The benefits of GI are being widely promoted;now you have to work out how to use it to getmaximum benefit. ‘We should build on the OSM modelby opening public sector information and services thatwill facilitate projects like the rolling census.

How do you value geospatial information? Howdo you evaluate the economic benefits? What effectdoes GIS have on the bottom line? These arechallenging questions that several contributors havetried to answer in recent issues of GiSPro.

A day without GI? Some aspects of the benefits ofgeospatial are easy to point to. In the US, NASA hasbeen getting people to think about “a day withoutspace”. Earth observation satellites, navigation andpositioning are obvious but less so are high accuracy,timing and synchronisation.

Alan Smart is an economics consultant fromAustralia where his work has focused on trying tofind answers to these questions through usingtechniques such as “general equilibrium modelling”.Taking as his theme, ‘Never waste a good crisis’, heargues strongly that you can quantify the benefits ofgeospatial but it requires a systematic approach.

GIS is an enabling technology with a widefootprint and the business case may vary dependingon the industry. With government you have to lookbeyond the department to the wider economic,social and environmental benefits as well as perhapshigher tax returns for the state.

Alan showed a graph where value grows at eachstage from data capture through to businessintegration. He argues that increasing productivitydoesn’t necessarily lead to redundancies but where itdoes it can lead to better jobs. The Internet hascertainly increased productivity for government butthen it has no competition.

Alan’s company, ACIL Tasman, has analysed theaffect of geospatial on improving productivity over arange of industry sectors in Australia and New Zealand.Some of the figures are startling. A 5% increase inproductivity for the New Zealand forestry industry. Inthe UK, he estimates GDP was £323m higher inEngland & Wales in 2009 as a result of geospatial. Hereckons the average annualised cost-to-benefit ratio

Exploiting location information With the hunt on for moresavings in the public sector, GI can help. But the case has to be made carefully. You may

need allies, metrics and without an elevator you could be toast. But whatever you say,don’t mention GI, explains editor Stephen Booth.

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location economics exploiting information


Alan Smart showedhow value grows as

adoption increases(above) but use general

equilibrium modelling.

...cost -to-benefit ratio. . .

for geospatial inlocal

government isthat for every£1 spent thereare savings of

£2.50.

“

“


(Note: bean counters will be impressed withphrases like this) for geospatial in localgovernment is that for every £1 spent there aresavings of £2.50. He has even recordedmeasurable improvements for the retail sector.

Getting your business case acceptedhowever is another matter. Andrew Coote arguesthat it doesn’t have to be difficult but you mustprove the link to the bottom line. For help indoing this for the public sector, he referred us to theTreasury’s Green Book, a guide for appraising proposals.

Getting the right people on your side isimportant too. ‘Find out a few facts about CEOs’ wasCoote’s advice. ‘What are their red flags?’ Remembertoo that most CEOs last only three years on averageso long projects can often fail. Focus what you’resaying in the CEO’s language by intercepting theagenda. Where there is a channel shift or change inprocess, such as moving people to using the web,the business case can be made through showing thesavings, for example, in phone calls.

Infraction is not a word in common use amongstthe geospatial community.But if you’re trying to makethe business case for thatnew GIS in the public sector,it is worth understanding.Literally it means a violationor infringement of a law.Defra for instance is chargedwith delivering the EC’sINSPIRE directive becausefailure will mean financialpenalties. Money spent nowmay save a fine later.

A novel example of abusiness case from Coote wasbased on a colleague’s disputewith his wife over the bestway of making toast: grillversus the toaster. If you put avalue on stress-free living with your partner or perhapsare willing to pay a premium for quality, then you canmake a perfectly valid business case. For me however,it’s still the grill every time!

He concluded by stating the measurementprinciples for a business case: decompose theproblem; plagiarise; compile; minimise; and usestandard techniques. He also reminded us ofdeveloping that famed elevator pitch, where youhave just a couple of minutes to make the case tothe CEO on his way up to the top floor.

What are they looking for? Further advice on howto grab the attention of the decision makers came fromJonathan Marshall, GIS manager at British Waterways.‘It is important to identify what they’re looking for. Is itregulatory compliance, efficiencies, improved cost orprofit?’ Having done that, ‘Find an ally’ was his advice.

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You need a sponsor, someone who doesn’t needconvincing and is on your side. ‘You must be clearabout risks and show how they can be managed’, headvised, ‘but include those that come from notproceeding with a project’. Marshall also recommendsyou use whatever financial method your organisationuses to evaluate the project and, of course, give a clearrecommendation that your board can back.

With some organisations and individuals thereremains a myth thatgeospatial can’t be measuredbecause of the intangibles.ESRI’s Dr Keith Wishartdisagrees. His view is thatmeasuring intangibles is notso much a problem to beovercome as an opportunityto be seized. He commendsHow to Measure Anything:Finding the Value ofIntangibles in Business byDouglas W Hubbard.

Measurement is aboutreducing uncertainty, yetintangibles remain –relationships, human capital,structural capital, even cash.Cash an intangible? He

borrowed a £20 note from a (gullible?) member ofthe audience. The paper note is intrinsically just apromise he explained; it is worth next to nothing.Whilst he’d been holding it, it had probably declinedfurther in value. He returned it to a relieved ChrisHolcroft who hastily stuffed it back in his wallet.

A recent case study undertaken by Wishart found£4m savings per annum through geographic analysisand resident profiling for the London Borough ofHammersmith & Fulham to deliver new services moreprecisely. The Birmingham Total Place pilot focuseson a ‘whole area’ approach to provide better publicservices at less cost through measuring outcomes. Sofar savings of £100m have been identified across theNHS, Criminal Justice system and in social securitybenefits. The system allows evaluation of scenarioslike closing a community centre that may bringincreased police and social services costs. ‘So, show


If anyone doubts the need for wellresearched and argued business casesfor IT projects, pause and reflect onwhat the leaders are saying:

“IT decision makers do not have muchtrust in the vendor supplied metrics. Theyneed to see customized & detailed metricsfor the specific solution offered” observesErnst & Young. Business analysts Gartnersay, “Increasing pressure is on technologydirectors to prove the link between ITinvestment & the company’s bottom line”.Even the big technology sellers like HP getit: “It is no longer the glamour oftechnology but the return on it that isdriving customers.”

Get the elevator pitchright or you could be

toast!


location economics: exploiting information


. . .whichincludes analgorithm

enabling themto predict with99% accuracy

the time of daya crime took

place.

“

“

me your intangibles’, Wishart concluded.

That’s how you do it Introducing a series of cost-saving case studies, Gesche Schmid of the LocalGovernment Group said the focus had shifted fromshowing what GI can do to how it can improve servicesthrough greater efficiencies and by opening up data.Typical examples are: East Sussex’s online fault reportingservice that ensures faults go to the right agency; ahighway inventory system in Islington relying on Googlemaps and StreetView that has increased productivity by200%.; in Newport, savings of £57k per annum havebeen found by using the NLPG. If the NLPG’s gazetteeraddressing system were applied to the whole of Walesthe savings could be £3m a year. Clearly a fan of theNLPG, Schmid told us that number could be £60m if allof the UK’s public sector used the system.

Professor Paul Foley is director of Tech4i2, whichdoes “evidence based policy making and decisionmaking”. He is an advocate of local informationsystems as a way of providing performancemonitoring of local councils. So far only 19% ofBritain’s 388 local authorities have such systems, yettogether with GI they form the basis for presentinginformation for activities as diverse as lottery grants.Foley’s message was, ‘ask people what they’re usingit for and how could it be better’.

An excellent example of how local councils canpartner with each other to set up otherwise expensivesystems and reach tangible benefits was presented byMark Mohun of the North East Efficiency andImprovement Partnership. He explained howRouteSmart was being used by ten authorities,covering three million households, to better schedulerefuse collection services and resources. He was quickto add that it was about ‘making bin men work moreefficiently – not more quickly’.

RouteSmart is an extension of ArcGIS that tracksvehicles and provides useful analytics. It uses OS TIN layermapping and the NLPG to manage 270 vehicles spreadover the ten authorities. It takes in data about roads andstreets, bins and the weight of rubbish to be collectedand has saved fuel and reduced vehicle numbers.

‘We’ve got all the maps we need!’ Each sectorhas its own particular challenges. Donald McGarrieof Sigma Seven says the utilities sector is driven bythe Regulator; they are technophobes; offer a low-tech service; and their notion of location is

universally misunderstood. Decisions are hard tocome by too. The challenges are surmounting aculture and mindset where location projects are ahard sell and funding even harder.

McGarrie showed a case study around mobilemapping for Scottish Power where initial responseswere ‘we’ve got all the maps we need, thank you!’The trick was to show how the project could addrevenue, such as extending the network to newlocations. This is chargeable and the Regulatorrequires that quotes are delivered within five days.The advice from the IT department was, ‘you need amobile map’. The solution is based around a tabletPC which the estimator can take into the field andrecord the key information pricing it up immediately.Result? Happier customers (complaints dropped from200/month to 10), productivity up by over 50% (5estimates a day against 2 a day before), satisfiedemployees, improved safety and reduced auditing.

Concluding, McGarrie emphasised that thebusiness case must be clear and unambiguous,benefits must be understandable and only have onesthat change something.

The police have been big users of GI for a whilenow and it’s not difficult to see why. Nevertheless, toget maximum benefit you need an intranet systemwith accurate mapping, constantly updated crimeplotting and the ability to incorporate as muchinformation and data from other sources as possible.DI Garry Williams from the South Yorkshire &Humberside force told us about their latest system,which includes an algorithm enabling them to predictwith 99% accuracy the time of day a crime took place.

The system includes lots of information about localareas from the census, CCTV and other sources, thusenabling analysts to write reports in a few minutes thatpreviously could take hours. The system has thepotential to incorporate many more datasets in thefuture. There are many benefits such as reducing thenumber of briefings necessary for officers, or being ableto quickly see whether a CCTV camera has captured acrime. But with a typical burglary costing £1000 toinvestigate, for DI Williams the “intangibles” are crimereduction due to better and quicker policing.

Conclusions Throughout this intense day, speakersemphasised, in making a business case for GI, youmust focus on the difference it will make rather thanthe technical case – don’t mention GI unless the CEOhas a geography degree. In the public sector it is tolink your case to a current policy theme.

Rounding up the day, key contributors were askedto name their number one priority. For Alan Smart it wasto get serious policy makers to realise the importance ofGI. Professor Foley called for each local authority todevelop an intelligence strategy (‘Don’t salami sliceintelligence!’). Andy Coote urged us to create thoseelevator pitches with no mention of GI, while GescheSchmid urged data transparency through free data.

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You may need to learnabout Discounted CashFlow.


location economics exploiting information

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columnist adena schutzberg

Adena Schutzberg isPrincipal of ABS

Consulting Group Inc.and Executive Editor

of DirectionsMagazine,

www.directionsmag.com

www.gisprofessional.co.ukjoining the geography jigsaw

. . . belief indata sharing isstrong enough

to test thepracticality ofcreating and

depending onthese data and

services.

“

“THERE IS CURRENTLY AN EXPLOSION of tools tocollect and share geo-tagged data. For many peoplethe salient example is of individuals capturing photosto share with friends. There are programs wherecitizens share photos and more with cityinfrastructure departments so graffiti and otherissues can be resolved. Online news sites now offermaps that document the extent of fires, or floods oroil spills with data supplied by individuals unluckyenough to be at the “right” place with a cell phoneor other device. Those into mapping for mapping’ssake may know of, or even contribute to use datafrom OpenStreetMap, where interested typicallyamateur mappers document their local streets andpoints of interest, alone or in “parties,” and share itvia the Web.

This model for sharing, which I like to call

“individual to aggregator,” seems to work well. Theindividual data collectors hopefully do good bymaking their city cleaner and safer or by helping tocreate a worldwide shareable map. The datarecipients (the city or data licensee) use thecontributions to better achieve their mission.

There’s another model of collecting and sharinggeodata, one that’s not about individuals sharingdata with aggregators, but rather organisationssharing data with aggregators. I call this model,“organisation to aggregator.” This idea has beengetting a lot of attention within the geospatialcommunity since the launch of Esri’s CommunityMaps programme in 2009. The idea is simple: Esriwants to tap providers of authoritative data (itsusers, other GIS users, private companies,municipalities, counties, states, countries...) tocollect that data into a series of basemaps for streets,imagery and topography. The provider organisationsput their data into defined templates, sign a contractand share it with Esri. Esri stitches the datasetstogether and publishes them out as services useablewith its software and APIs. It’s been a big hit;sessions on the topic at the Esri International UserConference were standing room only even at 8:30am! A webinar on the topic sponsored by Esri drewrecord crowds.

Esri may be the best known geospatial companyto put the idea forward, but the concept is not new.Tele Atlas (now TomTom) and NAVTEQ (now part of

Nokia) have had formal partnerships with public andprivate organisations to share data updates for sometime. The US federal government championed TheNational Map, with a similar vision. Google andMicrosoft have offered hosting and mergingopportunities in recent years and while someorganisations have signed on (imagery hosting inparticular was popular based on my anecdotalrecollections) the response doesn’t seem as energeticas the one to Esri’s offering.

There are many possible reasons for thedifference in response: the nature of the companies,details of contracts and perhaps even moreimportantly, timing. Is it possible that the Tele Atlasand NAVTEQ solutions were too complex? WereGoogle and Microsoft a bit too early in the evolutionof data sharing?

Several other “open” crowd-sourcing effortshave launched to join OpenStreetMap, includingOpenAerialMap and OpenAddresses.org, whichcollect and publish aerial imagery and addresspoints, respectively, with open licences. These effortstake contributions from individuals, but seem to mebetter suited to those same organisations withauthoritative data that Esri hopes to tap.

There are some important relationships requiredfor these models to work. Individual or municipalcontributors need to feel their contributions arevaluable and valued by the recipients. The recipientaggregator organisation needs to feel the data isvaluable, authoritative and/or shareable, asappropriate, to be integrated and published out. Themethod of creating, nurturing and maintaining theserelationships are currently being defined andredefined.

It feels like, for the first time, models areforming, and the belief in data sharing is strongenough to test the practicality of creating anddepending on these data and services. It’s interestingto note that most of the existing infrastructures havepopped up without money changing hands, withsome relatively simple licences and withoutgovernment intervention. Which solutions will “win”and “get the best data” and be “the most used” isyet to be determined. The variety of optionsavailable, I hope, will mean that one or more aresuccessful in the longterm.

Crowd-sourcing geospatial content Two Models arecurrently evolving, argues Adena Schutzberg. For them to work, both aggregators and

contributors need to feel valued. But how these relationships are developing has yet to bedefined.



. . . GI and GIS arereaching a

tipping pointwhere they

could be used asstrategic tools. . .

“

“

OPENING PROCEEDINGS under the mantra ‘Innovate,Connect, Succeed’, conference chair Simon Doylebacktracked us to that May day when the previoussecretary to the treasury left his ominous note “Sorry,there’s no money left”. In this tough economic climateDoyle challenged delegates to think hard about whetherour data is fit for purpose and to consider whether aproblem we face is that we’re not good at selling whatwe offer, before introducing the first of three keynotes.

Dr Andrew Hudson-Smith works at CASA, UniversityCollege London’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysisand has a job, which in his words, ‘allows me to dowhatever I want’. He freely admits to ignoring mostadvice and still gets a grant of £6m a year to ‘push,

question and fail’, although payback is expected. Luckilyfor his backers Hudson-Smith takes as his lodestar themaxim ‘wouldn’t it be great if. . .’ In the 15 years he’sbeen at the centre the lab’s work has moved from“hardcore GIS” running on Sun workstations (recentlyput in a skip) to an entirely online effort for PCs andiPhones (‘Google completely changed our lab’).

His latest research is around applying the Internetto objects, i.e. geolocating just about everythingwith a RFID tag. He wants to encourage people torecord their feelings and history of things they ownor dispose of. He envisioned a jumper donated to anOxfam shop that was able to tell the tale of brokenlove the previous owner tagged to it (a bit too muchinformation for this scribe).

Hudson-Smith says that GI is now part ofcomputer science and made some predictions:HTML5 will wipe out Flash; Chrome will take desktopGIS and Web 2.0 is just words.

CASA has worked on a 3D city model for thecapital (see the first issue of GiSPro, October 2004)beginning ten years ago when he capturedpanoramic data in Camden but was sued by the local

authority! Today there is “3D London” backed by themayor, free to all but still not adopted.

Friction and failure at the boundaries We arebecoming all too familiar with emergency andsecurity issues. Dr Robert MacFarlane works at theheart of government in the Cabinet Office where heis an assistant director with responsibility for theNational Security Strategy of the UK. As we know,complex and systemic risks usually have geographyand dealing with them requires joined-upgovernment that understands the need forinteroperability and what MacFarlane calls ‘thepredictability of effect’. As he observes, ‘there aremany teams but one playing field’.

The age of austerity will force better workingtogether amongst agencies and departments (well itbrought the Tories and Lib-Dems together) but it is atthe boundaries between organisations where thefriction and failure is, said MacFarlane. He talked ofthe ‘interoperability low fat layer cake’ and the‘terminology of doctrine’.

The Common Operating Picture will be familiarto those with knowledge of the emergency services.But is it a concept, a product or an environment? Heleans towards the latter, although sometimes theproblem comes down to ‘picnic’ he says. Picnic?PICNIC? – Problem In Chair Not In Computer!

To help solve these problems MacFarlane

candidly gave out his email for those with ideas,[email protected] but‘beware solutions looking for a problem’.

Looking for that light bulb moment ESRI UK’sRichard Waite took a somewhat predictable theme of“Britain needs GIS but it doesn’t know it”. He arguesthat GI and GIS are reaching a tipping point wherethey could be used as strategic tools rather than justoperationally. Waite believes this area is as yetuntapped and cites ‘the geography of demand’ forNHS services by the elderly.

‘GIS can deliver more for less’ Waite argues, butwe still need to get through to the boardroom. Herecently showed GIS to the former CBI chief andgovernment minister Digby Jones. ‘Wow, what anamazing tool’ was his response. ‘Why if it’s beenaround for 30 years isn’t everybody using it?’ A goodquestion says Waite, and it’s because we’ve notcommunicated it. We need to show more peoplethat ‘light bulb moment’.

Waite is also surprised that the “Total Place”initiative – the whole area approach to public

AGI GeoCommunity’10 Opportunities in a Changing World was thetheme for this year’s AGI annual conference. It proved a timely opportunity to review howGI can make a difference. Reporting by Stephen Booth, Hayley Tear and Robin Waters.

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AGI GeoCommunity‘10


Above: AGI DirectorChris Holcroftwelcomes delegates.Above right: Panelsession, from left toright: Richard Waite,Robert McFarlane andDr Andre Hudson-Smith.


. . . the largestexperiment inanarchy we’ve

ever had.

“

“


services – disappointingly makes no mention ofmaps. ‘Maps are intuitive’ he argues, ‘People get it.GIS can offer efficiency improvement, collaborationand transparency. Politicians will listen if you tellthem it will change society but don’t tell them aboutfeatures and technology’. His final plea to theaudience of largely committed GIS professionals wasto join him in tipping GI/GIS into the new world.

All tweet and no substance? A lively debatefollowed the keynotes, moderated by conferencechair Simon Doyle. ‘Was it all tweet and nosubstance’, he asked provocatively. Waite said weneed a very coherent argument with shortpresentations although Hudson-Smith reported thatit was a ‘lot of hard work getting the support ofLondon Mayor Ken Livingstone’ to back CASA’s 3DLondon. ‘How do we explain the big opportunity in140 characters?’ asked tweeter Steve Feldman.

With no clear answers on that one, discussionmoved to data.gov.uk with Hudson-Smith horrified atthe technology level needed to get the information. Hisadvice was ‘think about the public and walk away fromsolutions’. Waite added that we certainly needed tounplug it but we must treat government data withcaution. Feldman asked, ‘What’s the simple quick win?’‘Bring your GIS spec to the meeting’, arguedMacFarlane while Waite urged us to ‘scan the news andask is there a geo solution to this?’ He cited a recentproposed cut by the coalition government to reducetaxi fares for children with special needs, whichcurrently costs £1bn. Surely GIS could help. His finalthought was ‘create a hubbub, while Hudson-Smithurged ‘stop using the word GIS’.

CBI’s sober view For those evangelists convinced thatGI is the solution rather than the problem, some verycold water was coming their way from Lai Wah Co, theCBI’s head of economic analysis. She opened the secondday’s keynotes by explaining the“fiscal retrenchment”we are about to experience. With growth for the currentyear forecast at 1.6% and 2% next year, we are buildingfrom a 5% drop last year. It may take awhile to get backto the high of 2008 when GDP topped £330bn.

It all began, according to the CBI, when thepublic sector grew rapidly from 5.2m people in 1998to reach a peak of nearly 6m today. ‘The predictionat the moment’ she said, ‘is a fall of 100,000 a yearfor 2011 and 2012 then higher up to 2015’.

We’re needed. . . for twinning Vanessa Lawrenceis a regular at AGI conferences. She examined the‘interference between professionals, citizens andbusiness markets’. In an era when oil supplies werewaning, education was still not universal and somepopulations were aging there is anxiety over foodsecurity, insurgency and natural disasters Lawrenceconcluded, ‘they all need us but they often don’t realiseit’. She also reminded us that information and clarity of

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message is something ourindustry still struggles with.

For Ordnance Survey, ofwhich she is the directorgeneral, these are times of“cultural change”. Initiativeslike GeoVation andOpendata.gov (for which shewas somewhat ill preparedbeing on the other side of theworld when Gordon Brownmade his surprise announcement) are being pushedby the mapping agency. More interestingly, Lawrencetold us about an odd twinning experiment betweenOS and the Royal Household; both organisationswith entrenched cultures but needing to adapt morerapidly to the modern world. It should make for agreat pub quiz question: “What have a liveriedfootman and a photogrammetrist got in common?”

“Oi - Sir Tim. . . With a choice of 50 sessionsrunning concurrently through five streams, somehard choices were necessary, so apologies in advanceto speakers whose presentations we missed.

Of all papers at the conference "Oi - Sir Timhands off my spreadsheet" was probaby the mosteye-catching! And Ian Painter, managing director ofSnowflake, did not disappoint. His starting point wasthe problem of data being locked up in inconsistentformats with a lack of sharing making decisions moredifficult - all compounded by a 'silo' mentality forboth data and the services provided.

These are exactly the issues addressed by thegovernment's open data campaign led by Sir TimBerners Lee. Ideally data needs to be legally open -accessible without restriction on use or re-use; sociallyopen - within a community that believes in an openenvironment; and technically open – delivered in aformat that hinders neither humans nor machines.

Painter showed a pyramid starting with the typicalexposure of existing documents, spreadsheets anddatabases. Easily achievable but with very manydifferent formats making it very difficult even forhumans, let alone machines, to interpret or mash-up thedatasets. This can be improved - at the cost of someeffort - by the data providers producing open standards-based data using XML, GML, KML, etc. If this data isthen given Unique Resource Identifiers (URIs) it becomes'linkable data' - and any sensible dataset almostcertainly has linkable internal records. But the final stepto Sir Tim's nirvana of 'Linked Data' requires that eachURI can be linked definitively with other datasets. This ismuch more costly and is generally outwith the remit ofdata managers within organisations unless they arealready using nationally recognised identifiers fromother sources. So the progression down the pyramid isof increasing usefulness but also increasing cost - theformer to the user but the latter to the provider.

Painter belieces that we need to think 'big' in terms


AGI GeoCommunity’10

The Linked Data Pyramid- ideally “delivered in aformat that hindersneither humans normachines.”



The intention isthat the

availability ofdatasets will be

built into thepublic task of

public bodies. . .

“

“

of SDIs aimed at B2B or G2G applications as well asthink 'small' when considering lightweight applicationsfor business to consumer or government to citizen. Butmost importantly we have to think out what ishappening and how we can become more efficientbehind the 'portal'. There are many opportunities forsharing facilities both within and betweenorganisations that do not involve loss of control of thedata itself but which make the publishing of the datathat much easier and more efficient. At present only 24out of 434 local authorities provide open data of anysort - and only 16 of those are truly open (and none areproviding true Linked Data).

So his message is that making data open shouldnot only be good for the user but should also makethe publishing of data more efficient if thoughtthrough from the beginning! If only we canovercome the cultural barriers. Any manager in thepublic sector who considers that the data theyprovide is 'their own' had better change their tunepretty quickly. Win Win or what?

Matthew Perrin of Envitia spoke on TechnologyTrends in the Geospatial Foresight stream. Hehighlighted the pace and scope of change, which isfaster than ever before as data on the Web doublesevery two years. He quoted Google founder EricSchmidt, “The Internet is the first thing humanity hasbuilt that humanity doesn’t understand – the largestexperiment in anarchy we’ve ever had.” The roletherefore of open standards, argued Perrin, was ofthe highest importance. He cited NASA’s findingsthat by using open standards they could save asmuch as 26%. Discussion amongst the rather sparseaudience for this session ranged around whether thedevelopment of standards was going in the rightdirection and how, under some circumstances,standards can be a barrier to change.

Under the sci-fi title, “When worlds collide”,Suchith Anand discussed the advantages of combiningOrdnance Survey and Open Street Map data as well asthe effects of crowd sourcing on mapping. He believesthat those who follow more formal approachesignoring crowd sourcing will miss an opportunity. ‘Theadvantage comes by combining the enriched taggeddata of OSM’ he argued. The community approach tomapping can provide mapping where there’s nofunctioning mapping agency such as during the Haitiearthquake earlier this year. His conclusion was that

these techniques have come to stay.“Practical open standards to connect geo-business”

is something many of us can relate to. John Fannon hasalready demonstrated in these pages how users with alittle savvy can use their coding diy skills to create usefulapps and routines (GiSPro June, August, October &December issues 2009). He argues that by using openstandards the benefits for apps such as requests andresponse are obvious. Through greater separation ofeach layer of software architecture and not dependingon proprietary APIs or vendor specific connectionmethods, open source can be beneficially exploited.

Switching to the green stream (environment) theenticingly captioned “The choreography of a 100year restoration programme” was nothing to do withfine works of art but buildings. Not just any buildingsbut ones that house some of the nastiest stuffknown to man. Mike Cottrill is senior technicaladviser GIS at Sellafield, the world’s most complexlicensed nuclear site. Spread over 4 sq kms with astaff of 8000, it is in reality a small town with its ownpolice force, fire service and much else. It costs ustaxpayers some £1.5bn a year.

Surprisingly, GIS is fairly new technology forSellafield. The challenge has been to convert all thesite drawings from CAD into GIS. ‘There’s still a longway to go for all data to be brought in’ explainedCottrill, ‘but the benefits to the site will be deliveryof new or improved products and services; a datadepository; improved business performance andenhance customer services.’ The challenge he saidwas ‘dealing with a blue-collar workforce reluctantto change, security issues, consultants anddeveloping a business case’.

Nessun DormaDelivering your first presentation at a conference isalways a bit nerve-wracking. At the party, Lisa Thomasof The Coal Authority, told us she was down to deliver“Data in the public domain: is anyone ready?” the nextday. Lisa was distinctly nervous and doubtless didn’tsleep that well. She needn’t have worried. She won notonly the prize for best paper awarded by the panel butwas also the delegates’ choice!

Sparkling finale More than two days of intenseconferencing came to a close with a sparkling finalplenary addressed by Prof Nigel Shadbolt, who alongwith Sir Tim Berners-Lee, advised Gordon Brown torelease all that data. The good news is that thecoalition government is keen to continue the processand he continues his involvement through chairingCLG’s Local Public Data Panel as well as sitting on thePublic Sector Transparency Board. His day job is in theSchool of Electronics and Computer Science atSouthampton University .

Shadbolt says that open data is creating waves ascentral and local government released their datasets.But he would not be happy until there was five-star

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AGI GeoCommunity‘10


Above: the Icebreakerparty kick-starts theAGI annual conferencewith AGI’s chiefoperating officer AlanWilks’ tough “Geo”quiz stretching the geocommunity.



. . . his debunkingof the simplisticas well as the

downrightfraudulent

purveyors ofstatistics. . .

“

“rating for authorities: one star for putting it on theweb all the way through to five for those who linkedtheir data to that of others. He gave two examples ofhow freeing data in the past had helped people. Theobvious one for us GI folk is Dr John Snow and hismapping of cholera to a water pump in the 1850s.More recently however (yet before the currentexplosion of mapping and free data) a civil servant hadcarefully tracked the incidence of bicycle accidents incentral London, following the death of a friend andthus helped others to avoid the blackspots.

Shadbolt believes the initiative that Gordon Brownlaunched last year can be traced to President Obama’sdirective of 21 May 2009 that called for openness as away of strengthening democracy. Today more than 4000datasets in the UK are in the public domain, despitewww.data.gov.uk looking like ‘something a couple ofPhD students knocked up. . . Yes!’ The intention is thatthe availability of datasets will be built into the publictask of public bodies so that it is freely available for usein any lawful way. The challenge is to make it ‘timely andfinely grained’ argues Shadbolt. He is firmly of the viewthat public bodies should encourage reuse of their dataeven if it meant that the top free iPhone download for aweek was the Asborometer, an app that enabled you togeographically locate Asbos handed out in your area.

Fiendish questions Alan Wilks again delivered amasterfull and fiendishly difficult quiz for the firstnight icebreaker, all based on some aspect ofgeography. If you thought you generally knew howthe world fitted together and had learnt somethingfrom either stamp collecting or just reading the dailypapers, Alan has news for you. Try this one: “Whathave the Sahara Desert, Lake Chad and the RiverAvon all got in common?”

It’s the real thing, or is it? W3G – the‘unconference’ prior to AGI GeoCommunity, was abit disappointing – not because of the content, butbecause it really didn’t feel much different from the‘real’ conference on the succeeding days. Samerooms, same audiovisuals, but no chairpersons andsome very interesting presentations or, in somecases, rants. So if you weren’t there imaginesomething between one of the normal conferencebreak-out sessions and the soapbox and you willhave some idea of the feeling. I gather the idea is totweet while you listen – but being a simple male Ifind it difficult to do two things at once.

Steven Feldman was playing the grumpy oldman and ranting about the inadequacy – or eventhe deliberate falsification – of maps based onnewly released ‘open’ data. All the old vices ofthematic cartography come to mind – only noweveryone can play.

Charles Kenelly from Esri (yes they are allowed toattend unconferences) alluded to Ben Goldacre whowrites the ‘Bad Science’ column in The Guardian and his

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debunking of the simplistic as well as the downrightfraudulent purveyors of statistics – whether geo- orotherwise. ‘Metadata is sh…’. He pointed out that mostuseful metadata is lost between data capture – where itshould be automatically captured (and used to aidsubsequent processing) – and the final “product” whichis then given its own metadata that is more likely to bewishful thinking than objective reality. He made a pleafor metadata to be captured at the record level andmaintained throughout the production processes. Verylaudable but it needs a cultural somersault!

Peter Batty is into usability testing. Every productshould be put in front of its intended customers, atwhich point the developer should shut up andwatch. We all know how intuitive interfaces are best– we need the Google maps of this world to sweepaway the huge menus that used to face us on screenand we can only make those breakthroughs by beinghumble enough to realise that the customer is king.

Up North Snowflake’s Eddie Curtis explored the opendata and linked data confusion, putting across a simplemessage: open data is good (but see above!) whereasLinked Data still has a lot to prove. Only two people inan audience of 40/50 had actually used Linked Data.

The unconference ended with a panel session withGary Gale from Nokia, Nick Bicami, Peter Batty, EdParsons and Chris Osborne. Steve Feldman chaired,which to me gave the impression that theneogeography boom has peaked. There is a realisationthat there is only so much advertising out there tosupport ‘free’ services; that the real money and thereally interesting applications are in the business-to-business market place – even if this may often bedelivery of ‘public’ services. Furthermore – as shown inmany of the previous examples – neogeography is verycitycentric. Many applications need continuous 3Gbroadband and many users will be wary unless thiscomes at a flat rate bundled with their devices.

Finally the panel were asked what was dead ordying. Candidates included SDIs in general andINSPIRE in particular (but the suggestion that GoogleEarth was in effect an SDI did not find favour with EdParsons). Others were OGC/ISO standards (on thebasis that the Web will always favour its ownstandards) and location conferences!!

• AGI GeoCommunity ’11 will be heldSeptember 20th to 22nd 2011 at the EastMidlands Conference Centre, Nottingham.

AGI GeoCommunity’10


A theme of “Hats” forthe party saw somenotable examplesworthy of Ascot.

The AGIparty is

always a funevening and

not to bemissed.



BENTLEY SOFTWARE is best known as a CADplatform and the main competitor to Autodesk. It isperhaps surprising that in terms of revenue Bentley isnot that far behind Autodesk. Both companies offerGIS functionality.

Infrastructure is the watchword for Bentley andseems to be interpreted (conveniently) as almostanything in the environment that is man-made. Avice president of the company even treated diners toa couple of songs composed around the subjectduring the awards dinner. A high-risk strategy, youmight think, but no-one left the room and he was alot better than most X-Factor contenders!

Information modelling Version V8i was launchedin November 2008 as a number of modules that havesince been added-to, revised and updated. Therelease introduced interoperability between softwarewithin the Bentley stable and interoperability withother suppliers’ packages, so that customers can mixand match. The major innovation in V8i was buildinginformation modelling (BIM).

BIMs are really 3D geographic information systems,in which every element of the building is describedusing attributes and can also have parametricbehaviour attached to them. The latter features areused as an aid to design and in the world of Bentleyare known as generative components. The equivalentin Autocad is the parametric block. Extend this train ofthought a little further and you can take out quantitiesof building materials from the attributes and simulatehow the building will be constructed in detail. Thereare software routines that can develop a constructionschedule and even a visualisation package to simulatehow the building will be constructed. It is an excellenttool for planning and enables the developer to

demonstrate that their plan works and helps to buildconfidence with everyone involved in the project.

Use of BIM is not just confined to the planning,design and construction phases of a project; it can beused to support maintenance of the building,refurbishments and even its eventual demolition.

Generative components for city models All thismay seem to have only the vaguest relevance to GISas we know it, but the three projects submitted forthe ‘Innovation in Government’ Be Inspired awardwere all GIS projects and one of them made use ofgenerative components to update city models.Odense Kummune from Denmark submitted aproject “On-the-fly 3D City and Urban Modelling”.Unfortunately, although they won the award, theywere unable to present at the conference.

In the same category, GeoSite.dk presented a paper“GIS4Mobile Connect Online Mobile Device”. Using aspatial web service, municipal work crews use mobilephones to capture and submit photos and attributesfrom the field whilst managers in the office can transmitdata to site indicating locations for inspection.

The final submission in this category was for“Mapping Using Web Feature Services” presented byRune Tvilium of Tvilium Landinspekterfirma A/S. Inthis project Tvilium devised a means of importingcurrent geospatial data from several servers using aprogram called WFS Booster where previously thework had to be done by hand.

The word from Charlotte Returning to citymodels, a round table discussion was held on “3Dmodels for intelligent cities”. Bentley have their ownGIS application – Bentley Map V8i. This package isbased around Microstation and Oracle Spatial andincludes the capability to produce 3D city models. Thecompany has hired Patrick McCrory, former mayor ofCharlotte, North Carolina to sit on the Bentley

Bentley V8i rolls into the 3D City Richard Groom reportsfrom Bentley Systems’ annual conference and “Be Inspired Awards”. Four hundred users

from all over the world attended this year’s event in Amsterdam.

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city modelling BIMs to GIS


Below: UsingGenerativeComponents to buildthe Odense City Model.

Left: Greg Bentleywelcomes delegates.


He urged theaudience to

embrace theirrole of

educating apublic that doesnot understand

complexity.

“

“

Infrastructure Ambassadors Council. The ambassadorsare employed to “engage with the global communitiesof practitioners, constituents, and organisationsinterested in the key challenges of and opportunitiesresulting from sustaining infrastructure”. He urged theaudience to embrace their role of educating a publicthat does not understand complexity. To promote citymodels, we have to speak the language of the peoplewho make the decisions.

Participants seemed to think 3D city modelling isa useful tool for planning, noise studies, shadowanalysis and disaster mitigation but one has to askwhether these benefits justify the cost and what levelof detail is necessary. 3D cities have to be completeand maintained and so most participants thoughtthey should, like national map series, be theresponsibility of government. It was suggested thatdevelopers should be obliged to submit their BIMsfor inclusion in the model. But there was plenty ofresistance from those who reckoned it wasunreasonable to make developers pay to produce aBIM only to eventually give it away for free, for thepublic good. A delegate from the City of Rotterdamsaid that they already have a model. They hadeffectively converted their conventional 2D mappinginto 3D, thus maintaining compatibility. They alsoinclude utilities in the dataset.

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City models: where GIS and CAD meet It isinteresting to note that due to the cost of surveyinglarge-scale data, the concept of 3D cities started atsmall scale (Level 1) and that, as costs havedecreased, has moved towards detailed large scaledata (Levels 3 and 4). The discussion exposed someconflicting thought between the disciplinesrepresented on just how intelligent the cities shouldbe. Mobile laser scanning technology has alreadyevolved to the stage where point cloud dataaccuracies comparable with precise ground survey arebeing achieved in street corridor surveys. So, the basedata for 3D modelling in cities is rapidly becomingcheaper and more accurate at levels of detail 3 and 4.This will bring with it applications for detailedengineering design in streets as well as buildings. Thisis where GIS and CAD meet. City models have, up tonow, been the preserve of GIS but, to be successful,standards at this scale and level of detail must alsoinvolve surveyors and the disciplines that will start tobenefit from accurate city-wide 3D data.

The terms GIS and CAD were not mentionedoften during the conference: the emphasis was onmodelling – building information modelling. Thisused to be confined to the inside of the structure; itnow encompasses the surrounding streets and isgoing city-wide.

city modelling BIMs to GIS



. . . there seemslittle concernfor the extent

to which all thisdata will lead tothe holy grail of

intelligentunderstanding.

“

“

I am privileged, through a combination of my pastmembership of the Government Statistical Service,my present membership of the Royal StatisticalSociety and the AGI and my current work withconsultants Informed Solutions, to have a closeinvolvement with two worlds. The ‘new’ world ofgeographic information, which is being driven by the

open data movement and the opportunities offeredby the semantic web and within government by theTransparency agenda and data.gov.uk, and the moretraditional ‘old’ world of geographical nationalstatistics. Over the last year or so I have been struckby the very different sets of issues and approaches,which appear to be uppermost in these two ‘worlds’.

This reflects the very separate domains occupiedby these worlds. I have sat through excellentsessions, at which very experienced andknowledgeable analysts from central and localgovernment have discussed their issues of commoninterest – census and other socio demographic dataetc – where the whole emphasis is on quality issues,with no mention at all of data.gov or of the rapidlygrowing opportunities offered by imaginative use ofweb technology.

On the other hand I have also sat through equallyexcellent sessions, as exemplified by many of thepresentations at the AGI conference this September,which have dwelt in great depth on such issues ofcurrent concern to the GI world as the pros and consof free data, whether it is really free or not, howcloud computing will affect the use and availability

of GI, how prepared the UK is in terms of INSPIREcompliance etc etc. and with, in particular, a majoremphasis on the impact of data.gov.uk together withthe availability of Ordnance Survey data. However,there seems little concern for the underlying dataquality. More importantly, there seems little concernfor the extent to which all this data will lead to theholy grail of intelligent understanding.

Does this matter? I believe it does and that thefull potential value from a combination of the best ofboth worlds will not be achieved while some keyfactors in the current debate continue to beoverlooked as a result of this separateness. At thesame time I believe that the question is not asstraightforward as might at first appear and I am verytempted to respond, for example, to ‘Is Data.gov.ukthe answer’ by firstly asking ‘What was thequestion?’ and then by qualifying this by doffing mycap to the infamous Professor Joad by the statement‘It depends what you mean by data’.

I do think that the answer to the latter statementis key to establishing some clarity of thought onthese issues and also in explaining the emergence oftwo different cultural approaches. With or withoutthe ‘geographic’ tag, there is a fundamentaldistinction to be drawn between the meaning of‘data’, in the sense that The Office for National

Statistics generally understands it as opposed to aloosely structured set of individual observations oflocal significance. The former is where eitheradministrative records or sample survey data arecollected, cleansed, aggregated and then possiblyadjusted, at some aggregate level deemedappropriate, for example to make allowance forseasonal or other regularly occurring factors, so as toproduce a meaningful and reliable estimate relatingto an issue of economic or social significance.

One new house. . . Taking for arguments sake theexample of housing, the fact that a new house hasbeen completed this morning in Sheffield is selfevidently of no relevance whatsoever as an item ofdata whether in terms of an assessment of the trendin house building or of the extent to which theresidents of Sheffield are suffering from animbalance between supply and demand for housingrelative to similar areas or to the nation as a whole.

On the other hand, viewed from a localperspective, and one which is much more in tunewith the data.gov.uk world, the world of crowdsourcing and open data and so familiar to members

From Data to Knowledge: delivering true transparencyThere appears to be too much of a bipolar approach to the development of geographic

data, argues Peter Capell. We need to understand the relationship between data,information and real knowledge.

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data - knowledge - transparency


“Information is notknowledge”

– Albert Einstein


. . .a recentreport from the

NationalStatistics

Authority. . .clearly identified

widespreaddissatisfactionwith the waythat officialstatistics are

made available...

“

“


of the AGI community, the completion of this housemay be a highly relevant item of data. This may befrom the point of view of the relief it might bring tolocal housing needs or conversely to local communityconcerns with over development of land.

Another example might be the distinctionbetween the importance locally, as data items, of thenumber and location of potholes in my street, asopposed to the importance of data collected in orderto enable a reliable judgement about the nationaland regional standard of road maintenance.

These two very different concepts of ‘data’, are Iwould argue, behind the very different approachesto the use of technology to facilitate the extractionby users of the potential intelligence andunderstanding which can be created from anexamination of this data.

Continuing with my example of new housebuilding, those responsible for compiling andpublishing regional statistics on housing continue, asthey have traditionally done, to focus their attentionon producing such aggregate estimates, inaccordance with all the principles and practices setout in the latest Code of Practice for OfficialStatistics. This includes, in addition to highlyprofessional preparation of the statistics themselves,equally professional preparation of very carefullyworded formulations of the messages implied by thefigures, including clear warnings about thelimitations of these interpretations. The late Sir JohnBoreham, Head of the Government Statistical Servicein the early 1890s once memorably commented ‘Ouroutput is words not numbers’.

Are we satisfied with the statistics? It is thisapproach to the production of statistical informationthat is behind most data-related items, which hit theheadlines on a frequent, almost daily basis. For example,the shocking fact published today as I write, that inLiverpool, Nottingham and Glasgow nearly a third ofhouseholds, containing at least one person of workingage, had no one in work last year. Or the recentheadline-hitting news resulting from the first inclusion inthe Integrated Household Survey of questions on sexualorientation, the results of which were presented in mapform by the Guardian’s Data Store.

However, a recent report from the NationalStatistics Authority on ‘Strengthening UserEngagement’ clearly identified widespreaddissatisfaction with the way that official statisticsare made available and recommended majorimprovements in the exploitation of web-basedtechnology.

This approach, emphasising the reliability andauthority of the carefully managed outputs but withlittle flexibility of access to the source information,is in marked contrast to the recent development ofdata.gov.uk and to the approach being takenforward by the Transparency Board. The key

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emphasis here is on the benefits of easier access todata and to the possibilities that the semantic webopens up for developers to create innovativeapproaches to using this data. The example which ismost often quoted being the creation virtuallyovernight of a site giving cycle routes avoidingaccident blackspots.

This is seen as a way of ‘unlocking’ the potentialintelligence, which can be gained from a very ‘free’approach to access to data. For those of us in the GIworld it has been very encouraging to see theimportance for this process that the governmenthave attached to the role of mapping.

However, there are concerns with this approachover the risk of inappropriate analysis due to a lackof awareness of quality related issues. It is alsounclear the extent to which this approach will lead toa step change in the creation of real intelligence,rather than just creating a sea of data. There is adanger that all too often users, whether members ofthe public, policy makers, government ministers,councillors etc. are merely being ever increasinglyswamped with data without gaining any more clearunderstanding or real intelligence.

Seeking real enlightenment My argumenttherefore is that real enlightenment needs a moreconcerted approach; one that combines the best ofthe two strands of public sector inputs describedabove together with working in partnership with theprivate sector. We need to bring together both the‘big picture’ from the national scale withprofessionally designed and conducted surveys andinterpretations of administrative records, with thesmall, but ‘real’ world of local, even single point,data including crowd-sourced data.

This need has been made all the more urgent bythe new announcement by the coalition governmentof the Transparency website. The success of this increating real transparency will need an intelligentapproach to providing the user with the mostappropriate range and balance of access toinformation together with analytic and ‘visualisation’tools, which is of course where the role ofgeographic information is paramount.

The delivery from data of enlightenment,insight and good judgement requires solutionswhich draw on all the skills, traditional and new,statistical and technological. The public sector andthe private ‘solutions’ sector need to work increative and collaborative partnerships to createreal value. The values of national scale sources, withthorough preparation and balanced interpretationand commentary, and of the ‘rawness’ of localsourcing and immediacy, can be complementaryand do not need to be contradictory. Transparencyand usability requires openness and a willingness toshare and join up, which are the features of thenew semantic web world.

data - knowledge - transparency




EUROGEOGRAPHICS WAS FORMED IN 2000 when satnav was in its infancy, few mobile phones offeredlocation-based services and many governments andbusinesses were only beginning to realise the benefits ofgeographic information. Today this data is routinely usedto make decisions about policy, business or leisure by aspatially-enabled society, which brings opportunities andchallenges for national mapping, land registry andcadastral agencies.

Our membership has almost doubled and as ithas grown so too has our knowledge and ambition.Members’ expertise is now sought across the worldand, as a result, we are becoming an internationalnon-profit organisation to ensure we can continue tomeet the needs of our stakeholders. This moverecognises both our increasingly international statusand the need to represent our members in a widerpolicy environment. Our head office has alreadyrelocated to Brussels so that we can continue toprovide objective and constructive support to theEuropean Commission, Parliament and institutions ofEurope more quickly, efficiently and effectively.

A reputation for available, reliable dataEuroGeographics members’ ‘invaluable’ commitmentto making geospatial data more accessible and readilyavailable across the European Union was recognisedrecently by Herman Van Rompuy, President of theEuropean Council, when he opened the Association’sannual General Assembly. He said: “Effective policydepends on good information, and in such ageographically diverse Union it is vital that weunderstand not just what is happening, but where it ishappening. This information needs to be readilyavailable to policymakers at all levels so that theEuropean Union, and the countries within it, can usegeospatial data to improve the lives of citizens, the

environment and the strength of our economy.”To maintain their position in the modern

geospatial market place, EuroGeographics’ membersknow that they must continue to demonstrate theirexpertise in providing the authoritative, definitive andhigh quality data needed to make the EuropeanSpatial Data Infrastructure (ESDI) a reality.Eurogeographics’ activities come together in anumber of spatial data infrastructure (SDI) projectsproviding services to access information from differentdata providers across Europe. The Association is keentherefore to offer its wealth of experience to play aprominent part in realising the ESDI. SDIs have acrucial role to play now that technology has drivengeographical information into the mainstream withpeople using services underpinned by an SDI to accessinformation about places and spaces.

Creating high quality, authoritative, interoperabledata just once to be used many times demonstrateshow EuroGeographics’ members add value. This notonly avoids duplication of effort and costs in both thecollection and management of geospatial information,but also ensures compliance with existing legislation,such as INSPIRE, and compatibility with EU member

state policies.Despite the changes of the last decade, the

Association’s mission – to further the development ofthe ESDI through collaboration in the area ofgeographical information – and vision to achieveinteroperability of our members’ national land andgeographic information remain entirely relevant, withmembers now focused on delivering the EuropeanLocation Framework to meet the challenges ofgeospatial data use in the 21st century. Initiatives suchas the European Spatial Data Infrastructure Network(ESDIN) are making excellent progress in thedevelopment of services to integrate existing nationalspatial datasets and provide INSPIRE compliant dataand services. The project, which is coordinated byEuroGeographics, has already delivered a world first inquality evaluation web services.

Maximising public sector information forgrowth With its aim to remove barriers to thesharing of digital content across borders, the ESDIbeing developed by EuroGeographics’ members is asignificant contribution to the Digital Agenda forEurope and the creation of a Digital Single Market,which is vital to ensure Europe’s competitiveness inthe global economy. Opening up access to contentand ensuring that it can be readily exchangedthroughout the European Union (EU) is one of the four

Strength in numbers EuroGeographics is marking ten years of pan-European collaboration for mapping, land and cadastral agencies. Dave Lovell and

Patricia Sokacova explain the work of the Brussels based organisation.

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EuroGeographics’ first ten years


Dave Lovell, OBE, FRGSCGeog, EuroGeographicsExecutive Director.

Zeljko Bacic andPatricia Sokacova.

Above: membersduring the GeneralAssembly in Brussels.Inset: Herman VanRompuy, President ofthe European Council,addressesEuroGeographics.


. . .we canbenefit from the

expertise,knowledge,

proficiency andexperience ofmore than 50

nationalinstitutionsthroughoutEurope. . .

“

“


action areas of the Digital Single Market, and one thatis fundamental to stimulating the cycle of demand.

This offers great opportunities forEuroGeographics’ members in their role as officialproviders of geographical information in Europe andthe Association recognises that it has a key role toplay in ensuring this data is used and re-used tomaximum effect.

Members are playing an active and constructiverole in the review of the Directive on Re-Use of PublicSector Information (PSI), and are particularlyinterested in ensuring increased use andsustainability of their data. The Directive, in forcesince 2005, sets out a minimum set of rulesgoverning the commercial and non-commercialexploitation of existing information, includinggeographic data, held by the public sector.

Strength in numbers Close co-operation betweennational mapping, land registry and cadastral agenciesis vital to the success of their activities.EuroGeographics’ four Knowledge ExchangeNetworks, their webinars and regional conferences,provide an important benefit for members. Members’willingness to share knowledge and best practice hasalready delivered four pan-European products –EuroRegionalMap, EuroGlobalMap, EuroBoundaryMapand EuroDEM; the EuroGeoNames web service; and anumber of important projects that bring together theexpertise of its members and make maximum use oftheir information.

EuroGeographics membership gives us theopportunity to serve the geoinformation community,to enhance our professional development and last butnot least to be recognised by our colleagues,” saysMihai Busuioc, Director General, National Agency forCadastre and Land Registration of Romania. “In thisway, we can benefit from the expertise, knowledge,proficiency and experience of more than 50 nationalinstitutions throughout Europe who share professionaland scientific interests in this particular field of activity.As a result of our participation in joint projectsdeveloped by EuroGeographics, we have adjusted ourdatabases to European standards, which has increasedpublic and private sector access to publicinformation.”

“We also had the honour of organising the 2008General Assembly” continues Busuioc. “This eventoffered us not only the opportunity to connect to thescientific progress in mapping and cadastre but also tointegrate into the international community in the field.”

A global community The principles of the INSPIREDirective can be applied to the wider geospatialcommunity to deliver worldwide benefits andEuroGeographics is committed to establishingmutually-beneficial relationships with like-mindedorganisations wherever they may be. The aim ofthese activities is to avoid duplication of effort and

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the pooling of expertise, knowledge andresources.

The Association has a pioneeringstrategic collaboration with PSMA Australia,an organisation with whom it shares similarbusiness attributes, values, challenges andstrategies to deliver continental datasetsand SDIs. Both aspire to deliver benefits tothe wider spatial and non-spatialcommunities through their support ofspatial community development.

EuroGeographics has strategicmemorandums of understanding with anumber of other organisations in the fields ofresearch, cadastral, geographic information,surveying and standards. Through itsengagement activities, it works closely withthe European Parliament and EC institutionssuch as EUROSTAT and the EuropeanEnvironment Agency (EEA).

With global purse strings pulled tight,interoperability and the development andimplementation of standards are vital toprevent unnecessary and costly multiplicityin the geographic information market. Ourmembers are committed to providing aframework which will form a foundationfor a wide range of services to benefitgovernments, businesses and citizens byenabling a wealth of information such associal or economic data to be linked andreferenced to a geographical location orfeature.

A number of them have already developedNational Location Frameworks. A European LocationFramework is the logical next step. It will enable andpromote the integration and sharing of location-basedinformation from multiple sources through a set ofprinciples, concepts and methods evolved throughbest practice and with the intention of improving dataintegrity, promoting greater reuse and faster, easiersharing of application information.

Together we are stronger The rapid growth ininformation and communication technology showsno sign of slowing down as users demand ever moresophisticated products and services but, as thefinancial crisis continues to take its toll on nationaleconomies, how does the sector continue tomaintain standards and meet these expectationswith greatly reduced budgets?

We need to combine our efforts in a worldwidealliance of geospatial associations to create acommon policy, strategy and action plan to deliver aglobal location framework. It is an ambitious visionbut, by working together, we can achieve so muchmore than working apart. Together we are strongerand so is the future of the global geospatialcommunity and those we serve.


EuroGeographics provides a singlepoint of contact for communicatingwith the national mapping, landregistry and cadastral agencies ofEurope and is committed torepresenting their interests; enablingthem to benefit from networkingopportunities and its high profile inthe European and internationalgeospatial information arena; and toaccess funding for research anddevelopment projects.

Director General, State GeodeticAdministration Republic of Croatia,Zeljko Bacic explains: “Being part ofEuroGeographics brings us a numberof advantages and benefits. Theseresult from the intensive cooperationestablished among members throughthe execution of various projectsrelevant to Europe and participationin a number of working and interestgroups dealing with issues that affecteach individual organisation, forexample the European Spatial DataInfrastructure (ESDI). We are proud,therefore, to have been one of theorganisations which establishedEuroGeographics ten years ago.”

EuroGeographics’ first ten years



G’day cobbers. This column is being composed inAustralia where the weather is brilliant and the floraand fauna are of course markedly different toanywhere in Europe. My golf is no better for beingplayed upside down but the greenery of the course,the noise and colour of the birdlife – not least thekookaburras laughing at my mistakes – and thecomplete disdain shown by the kangaroos, isseriously engaging and uplifting!

Imagine my surprise to open the Sydney MorningHerald to find columnist Elizabeth Farrelly writingabout “Britain having the wonderful Ordnance Surveymaps with every mediaeval barrow and bridle pathwhich gives them the thrill and power of genuinecreated art.” In her essay entitled “Road to nowhere”she compares and contrasts modern roadmaps of theoutback (apparently often with conflicting positionsfor drivable tracks) with aboriginal song lines (auralmaps?) and British maps from the time of Saxton.“Accuracy matters, as much for charting a dirt trackalong the dingo fence as for pinpointing a mediaevalEnglish landmark,” she remarks, struggling to find theway to Kilcowera.

She is bang up to date with the use of the term

“geo-data” as well as pointing out that many earlyexplorers died while making maps and wrong directionsin the outback can still lead to death from dehydration.This is serious stuff. She asks the questions: Isn’t itillegal to produce or sell maps that are not 100%accurate? What about the duty of care? Do mapmakerscarry liability? Or is it simply that the dead don’t sue?Whether (or which) satnav would have given herdirections to Kilcowera we don’t discover!

She goes on to suggest that European mappingtraditions – much like aboriginal paintings – depicted aworld view as much as the world. Long before Australiawas mapped by Europeans there are many mediaevalmaps with very distorted images of the British Isles – atthe edge of the Roman Empire or Christendom – thatsimply reflect their cartographers’ (or patrons’) beliefs oreven politics. Aboriginal paintings and song lines werecontemporaneous and, to their authors, just asimportant and informative.

Now I am not sure how the concept of scale ishandled by song lines – though one suspects that timeand walking speed might be factors – but in Europethis month we have the INSPIRE directive mandatingmetadata for reference information with one of itsmandatory fields being scale. We all know that scale isthe ratio of distances depicted on a map to the realdistance on the ground. Geodata does not (andcannot) have a unique scale. It may be derived from

mapping that was originally published at a certainscale or it may be a scanned image of such a map.However, that data can be displayed on a screen,combined with other data or printed as hard copy atany scale that the computer (or a user) wishes!

Why do I mention this? Because, in early November2010 – one month before metadata (including scale)becomes mandatory for Inspire reference data – thereis a debate on the Inspire interest group on LinkedInabout the meaning of scale in metadata. Purists wouldhave banned the concept of scale from geodata orgeo-metadata long ago. They would have insisted onusing accuracy (absolute or relative) and/or resolutionand would have suggested that scale could only beconverted to accuracy or resolution by using anintimate knowledge of the surveying, production andprinting techniques for any particular map series.Datasets collected digitally simply don’t have scale.Features captured by multiple GPS positions don’t havescale. Satellite images are never described as having ascale – only a certain resolution. Should we really behaving a discussion about the scale of geo-data in2010? Surely this just shows how old fashioned andmap-centric the GIS world remains!

And, Inspire rolls on regardless. If you visit theInspire website http:// Inspire.jrc.ec.europa.eu/index.cfm/pageid/182/list/indicators you will see a tableof the status of Inspire in each country of the EU (andEFTA) with links to appropriate national reports,websites and the standard indicators mandated byInspire. The indicator spreadsheets make dull reading(anyone able to make them interesting should apply toGIS Professional immediately - we can use people likeyou!). But it is interesting to note that of the 27 EUmember states three (Cyprus, Lithuania and Malta) haveproduced nothing – no website, no indicators, nonational report. Italy produced a report (no website andno indicators) while the French, Irish and Italians stillhave no acknowledged national Inspire website. Severalcountries appear to have only produced Englishlanguage reports despite being perfectly entitled toproduce only native language versions.

At the risk of assault from Aussie mappers I willend by quoting Elizabeth Farrelly again. Her essayconcludes: “…our casual approach to mapping thecontinent suggests a thin and perfunctory sense ofownership. Perhaps a deep connection with thiscountry will continue to elude us while ‘she’ll be right,mate’ remains our anthem.” Personally I have foundthe maps pretty good – though I confess to sticking tothe Pacific coast and not needing to find organic cattlestations a thousand miles away from Sydney! G’day.

Do we need scale in geodata? Our columnist discoversrespect for the Ordnance Survey down under whilst he ponders the value of scale in

Inspire reference data.

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Geodata doesnot (and

cannot) have aunique scale.

“

“

Robin Waters is anindependent consultant. Heis also chair of the AGI’sINSPIRE Action WorkingGroup and secretary of theBSi IST36 StandardsCommittee for GeographicInformation.

eurofile



...public servicesmust develop a‘create once anduse many times’

approach. . .

“

“

THE PRINCIPALITY OF WALES has a unique place inthe political landscape of Great Britain – it is a regionthat is defined by much more than a dictate fromcentral government. Though linked through culture,history and a sense of national identity, there remainlarge disparities within the principality from theurban to the rural and across the north-south dividein relation to the Welsh language.

Trying to bring all these voices together, at leastin the world of gazetteer management, was thelatest in the series of Aligned Assets’ sponsoredgazetteer best practice days. Titled ‘One Wales – OneVoice’, it saw over 60 delegates from 35 differentorganisations come together in Llandrindod, Powysin November to discuss and debate a wide range ofissues affecting gazetteer management.

Eighteen of the 22 Welsh local authorities, half the

Welsh emergency services, plus a number of otherpublic and private sector organisations heardpresentations ranging from the management of anurban gazetteer by Cardiff Council, through to theissues surrounding bilingualism in address management.

An underlying principle to the day was the unifyingfactor of the NLPG (National Land and PropertyGazetteer), which is created by local government, withits use available to the emergency services. Now widelyregarded as the most definitive source of address dataacross England and Wales, it formed the basis of muchof the discussion during the day.

Phil Hall and Matthew Seymour from CardiffCouncil talked about how they work closely with othercouncil departments such as non-domestic rates in orderto maintain the accuracy of their LLPG (Local Land andProperty Gazetteer). This level of precision has enabledthem to place their LLPG at the heart of the Council’swork. Capturing of individual rooms in university halls ofresidence has made their LLPG central to the work ofother departments such as electoral services.

From South Wales Fire & Rescue Service, DaveBennett demonstrated very clearly to delegates theproblems of poor quality address data, with severalslides showing examples of supposed deleted recordsthat still existed and a number of what are called

NBRs (no building record), which are records lackingsufficient data to actually find them on the ground.He explained that the need to constantly validate thedata to overcome these issues was hugely time-consuming, pointing out that joint working towardsthe full integration of the NLPG was the solution.

Sue Beetlestone of Powys County Council andformer chair of AGI Cymru followed with an explorationof how land and property gazetteers, and the LocationWales programme have a mutually beneficial role to playin improving the quality and use of location. Oneelement she emphasised was how the greater use of theUPRNs (unique property reference numbers), which areheld against each record in the NLPG, can be used as acommon reference in keeping with the UK LocationStrategy’s definitions of geographic names, addressesand streets. As Sue pointed out, by doing this, ‘we knowwe are talking about the same place’.

The Welsh Assembly Government was representedby Shaun Powell, their NLPG project manager, who gavea well-received presentation on efficiency savings andhow to attain them. Sean emphasised how wider use ofthe NLPG across Wales could lead to less duplication ofwork, greater access to definitive and up-to-datelocation information and more linkage between localauthority systems and the wider public sector.

Shaun explained that the Welsh AssemblyGovernment recognises that Welsh public serviceshold and maintain property and location informationin different ways, leading to inefficiency, poorcustomer service, duplication and error. He went onto say that it acknowledges that public services mustdevelop a ‘create once and use many times’approach, cementing this with the assertion that £3million of benefits was the target to be achievedthrough wider use of the NLPG.

The day concluded with Pete Roberts from theOrdnance Survey explaining the PSMA (Public SectorMapping Agreement) and how this would providegeographic information from the mapping agency,free at the point of use for public sector bodies, andsubject to no limits on re-use when used internallywithin the public sector for public sector activities.

The event generated very positive feedback andsome excellent debate, with one delegate remarkingthat it was ‘about time that some of the issues raisedwere brought into the open’. Despite its differences,Wales will always benefit from a sense of unity thatnaturally allows for better joined-up working andjoined-up thinking, which is ultimately what the bestpractice day was striving to achieve. Owain Glyndowr,revered ancient Prince of Wales would be proud.

One Wales – One Voice: Addressing the IssuesSharing practice and experience through the NLPG and local gazetteers, over 60 delegates

from across Wales gathered in Llandrindod, Powys reports Carl Hancock.

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Wales addressing


All eyes focused onaddressing the issuesat Aligned Assets’Welsh event.



. . . the study hasfinally given

everyone somewell researched

quantifiablebenefits, which

should bepromotedwheneverpossible.

“

“

THE CUTLERS’ HALL IN SHEFFIELD (above) is a reallymagnificent building representing a famous industryand a famous city. The Company of Cutlers inHallamshire still have the right to defend the use of“Sheffield” as a Certification Mark and back a“Made in Sheffield” campaign. The main hall of theirVictorian headquarters was a suitably imposingvenue for Everything Happens Somewhere 2010.

On 20th October over 250 delegates came fromall over England and Wales to celebrate best practicein gazetteer use and maintenance and to learn howgazetteers may be one of the best tools for

increasing efficiency and saving taxpayers’ money.

Rejuvenation Sheffield is an exemplar of arejuvenated industrial city; the NLPG and NSGExemplar Awards are given to authoritiesrejuvenating their services with innovative thinkingand up-to-date technology. By the time you read thisarticle there may have been an announcement abouta National Address Gazetteer (who’s been NAG-ingwho?) and everyone at the conference was awaitingthe outcome. Clearly the National Land & PropertyGazetteer and the National Street Gazetteer haveshown how useful national gazetteers are – and howdifficult it has been to reach national agreement onstandards and processes for keeping them up todate. But even more important are the localauthorities, which update these national gazetteers.Local council land and property gazetteers and localstreet gazetteers from highway authorities areabsolutely vital to many of the services that localauthorities provide. Without them council tax is notall collected; planning applications cannot be made;emergency services cannot reach life threateningincidents; potholes don’t get filled; and the electoralroll becomes out of date and more expensive.

It’s the money stupid! Backing up thesestatements with a concrete business case wereGesche Schmid and Andy Coote, who presented the“value for money” study carried out for the LocalGovernment Association by ConsultingWhere. Thiswas covered in our last issue, which was distributedto all delegates in their conference information pack(Location economics: valuing GI for local publicservice delivery – GiSPro, October 2010). Geschealso used real-time push-button voting to see howdelegates’ perceptions compared with the findingsof the LGA study. Perhaps unsurprisingly there was alarge measure of agreement – most of the audiencewas probably involved in answering thequestionnaires! Gesche’s final message was foreveryone to go out and shout about the success ofthe gazetteers – the study has finally given everyonesome well researched quantifiable benefits, whichshould be promoted whenever possible.

However, Andy was horrified to discover – on ashow of hands – that only 5% of the audience hadany knowledge of Discounted Cash Flow. Hesuggested that some knowledge of DCF might beessential for any gazetteer manager to stay in theirjob! He has a range of techniques on offer for thosethat had to make these cases but reminded us that

‘it was all about people’. The best systems could bedestroyed by incompetent people; the worst systemscould be made to function by the best people. Theability to communicate to the decision makers in alanguage that they understand is also vital.

Exemplar Awards Michael Nicholson – CEO ofIntelligent Addressing (IA) – introduced the awards,jointly sponsored by IA and the Improvement andDevelopment Agency. The winners in each categorywere presented with their awards by CouncillorShaffaq Mohammed, a Cabinet Member of SheffieldCity Council. Each of the winners was then given sixminutes to describe their entries with the delegatesasked to judge an overall winner based on thepresentations.

Your reporter was one of the judges for theseawards – and it was very interesting to see the moreinnovative applications entered this year.

Both the Green and Financial Awards were won bythe London Borough of Harrow for its waste project.Who said being green cost money? The project savesmoney with more efficient collection rounds andreduction in landfill while increasing customersatisfaction and creating less CO2 in the process.

Everything Happens in Sheffield Value for money is nowthe guiding light for the public sector, as Robin Waters discovered when he attended the

NLPG & NSG Exemplar Awards in the city of cutlery and Clegg.

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NLPG: exemplar awards



. . . well-knownsearch engineswere unable todirect me to thecurrent location

of SheffieldPost Office...

remind me whywe need up-to-

date gazetteers?

“

“


Savings are estimated at £3.1 million over a decade. Harrow also won the Technology Award for a

unique pilot application using bar codes on outgoingmail that enabled any items returned (via the RoyalMail) to be scanned and instantly allocated to afollow-up service to improve the quality of the LLPG.This can be used for any mailing from the counciland effectively ‘piggy backs’ on the existing postalsystem at virtually zero cost to the borough.

The Citizens Award went to West OxfordshireDistrict Council, which used theLLPG to communicate andfacilitate the roll-out of a newwaste scheme. Mailings tocitizens were specifically targetedand led to much increased use ofthe council website (and hencereduction in cost) for preferencesand complaints. At the same timethe results provided feedback onthe quality of the LLPG and wereused as an exemplar todemonstrate its value to manyapplications.

Cambridgeshire Fire andRescue Service won theIntegration Award for their‘Golden Thread’ – a real co-operation between thisemergency service and all of the District LLPGs withinits area. Address related queries have reduced by80%; maintenance of the gazetteer has reduced by103 man days per year and 85% of queries are nowcorrected or processed within four days. They arenow offering the service to other areas.

The Street Naming and Numbering Award this yearwas won by Plymouth City Council which tookadvantage of the 70th anniversary of the Battle ofBritain to name streets in developments on an ex RAFCoastal Command flying boat base and a hospital sitethat received a direct hit on its maternity ward.Aircraftsman Shaw (better known as Lawrence ofArabia) served at RAF Mountbatten during the nineteenthirties and Catalina flying boats flew from there toguard the western approaches. The Christian names ofseveral nurses killed in the maternity ward now live on– with the permission of their families.

And the overall winner of the 2010 Exemplarwas: Sarah Turner, Business Solutions Manager, WestOxfordshire District Council. Congratulations to herand to everyone else involved in a really upliftingevent when a lot of people were awaiting the day’sother announcement with dread – theComprehensive Spending Review.

The afternoon divided into three parallel streams,“Efficiency Savings” sponsored by Aligned Assets,“Citizen Focus”, sponsored by Experian QAS and“Working Together” sponsored by GGP Systems. Allthree streams had three excellent speakers who reallyfocused on the stream themes and discussed issues

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that really matter to local authorities and otherorganisations within local government. Twenty-twoexhibitors were also in attendance with a really welldesigned exhibition where lunch and refreshmentswere served to maximise contact time. Amongst theexhibitors was the Office of National Statistics – theyare of course currently merging the NLPG and thePostcode Address File from Royal Mail for next year’scensus. So the question is – what do Trout Catfishand Roach have to do with the census? Answers nexttime – but if you can’t wait then go to the ONSwebsite and have a look!

Post(office)script For those who didn’t make it toSheffield this time, you are too late to view the cityfrom the big wheel – it is moving to Hyde Park,London, in time for Christmas. However you will stillbe able to play “hunt the post office” usingwhatever help you can get. Local residents,shopkeepers, and well-known search engines wereunable to direct me to the current location ofSheffield Post Office. When I eventually found it thecounter staff advised me that this is a well-knownissue – they relocated several years ago from animposing Victorian building on a main square to anex Co-op shop a couple of blocks away with a tinyand badly signed entrance. Now just remind me whywe need up-to-date gazetteers?

But my friends assure me that the real benefit ofliving in Sheffield is the immediate hinterland – only tenminutes to the Peak District. The jury is still out onhaving a multilingual local MP as deputy prime minister!

NLPG exemplar awards


Left: the team from WestOxfordshire District Council behindthe awards: Back row: NinaHickman, Julia Hilborne, Ben Ebeling,Jane Ebeling, Guy Taylor. Front row:Sarah Turner (Business SolutionsManager) and Becky Butler(LLPGcustodian and GIS Manager).

Cllr Shaffaq Mohammedfrom Sheffield City

Council presents theTechnology Award to

Luke Sudden, LLPGOfficer, from LondonBorough of Harrow.



. . . manyauthorities have

been slow tomatch theuptake of

mapping in theconsumer world.

“

“

THE EXPLOSION OF mapping technology online hasbrought the potential of location to the forefront ofpublic consciousness. With the marriage of the web,GPS and mobile 3G phones, consumers now expectto have access to live, location-sensitive informationwherever they are.

Need to find the nearest leisure centre? What

about a review of all the restaurants in a three mileradius? Where’s a pub with Sky Sports? Mobile GIS,though the term isn’t commonly used by consumers,is now an everyday part of life.

However, while the public sector has oftenpioneered developments in this area, many authoritieshave been slow to match the uptake of mapping inthe consumer world. For councils, mapping data haslong been the preserve of back office specialists, withaccess limited to internal departments such ashousing, highways, utilities and emergency services.

New directions Yet the results of a recent surveycommissioned by PBBI suggest that local authoritiescould be on the verge of a mapping-based revolution.The study, “Understanding the Future of GIS Usage inthe UK Public Sector”, was undertaken in June 2010by K2 Advisory and surveyed 100 GIS practitionersworking for local authority organisations in the UK.

Within the past six months, 44 percent of localauthorities have been involved with projects toprovide public access to mapping data that waspreviously only available internally. Even morepromising, 73% of local authorities reported thatthey expect to provide location-based services to the

public within the next six months. Based on thesefigures, GIS could feasibly be at the vanguard of theweb-based services that councils make available totheir citizens in the coming years.

But it isn’t just advances in technology that aredriving this change. Of equal, and perhaps greaterimportance, is a wider shift in attitudes around dataownership, both by governments and by society at large.

Data for all Such is the level of empowerment thatboth organisations and individuals receive fromgeographic and location-based data, that providingaccess to it is becoming a regulatory requirement inthe public sector.

For example, the EU Inspire directive, which cameinto force in May 2007 with an expectation of fullimplementation by 2019, aims to create a EuropeanUnion spatial data infrastructure, which is based upondata and metadata concerning 34 spatial data themes.The scheme will enable public sector organisations toshare environmental spatial information, which will, inturn, help to facilitate public access to this data acrossEurope. Implementation of Inspire in the UK has been

identified as a key task of Ordnance Survey, the UK’snational mapping agency.

This “democratisation of data”, and the changesin infrastructure needed to realise it, has hugeimplications not just on the way local authorities canuse and share information, but on the lives ofcitizens themselves.

Engaging users According to the K2 study, localauthorities increasingly recognise this. Nearly half(49%) of the authorities questioned saw thepotential of interactive mapping services to enable“a way of demonstrating government commitmentto provide improved services to, and engagementwith, citizens.”

This also fits in well with the Government’s visionof the “Big Society”, where individuals andcommunities are empowered to take greaterresponsibility for their local services and environment,and helped to help themselves. Making local authorityinformation available online in a visual, self-servicemapping format not only addresses this concept, butalso has the potential to alleviate the considerableburden placed on the frontline staff tasked withanswering queries from the public.

Mapping the future – where will GIS lead local authorities? With GIS technology developing rapidly, and high

bandwidth internet access the norm, conditions are perfect for location-based data tospearhead the web services that local authorities offer their citizens. Steve Deaville, Head

of public sector strategy at Pitney Bowes Business Insight (PBBI), looks at what we canexpect to see from geospatial database systems in the coming years.

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the potential of location


Above: An example ofinteractive mappingfrom Southwark.


Seven out often local

authoritiesreported that

increased accessto geospatial

data speeds updecision-

making. . .

“

“


Interactive mapping technology can provide thepublic with quick answers to “Where’s my nearest. . ?”type of questions. For example, Waltham Forest offersmap-based information on everything from marriagevenues to allotments to the latest roadworks.

As well as streamlining users’ online experiences,these services can encourage better interaction betweenthe council and public. For example, while looking forbin collection days on Harrow’s website, you may alsohappen upon information detailing members of yourlocal safe neighbourhood team at the Met Police.

And these examples could be the start ofsomething far bigger. As GIS data is increasinglystandardised and shared between organisations andlocal authorities, the potential for previouslyunthought-of services, created from the marriage ofseemingly disparate information, is tantalising.

Share and share alike Local authorities frequentlywork, and share information, with multiplesubcontractors. Utility companies, refuse managementfirms and housing associations are all closely involved inthe day-to-day operations of local authorities.

One of the key benefits of improved GIS serviceswill be more accurate sharing of data betweencouncils and subcontractors. Better geospatialinformation can simplify relationship managementand help coordinate activities, such as roadworks,that are carried out by multiple firms.

The results of the K2 study bear this out. Sevenout of ten local authorities reported that increasedaccess to geospatial data speeds up decision-makingwhen working with other organisations and/orsubcontractors. Seven out of ten local authoritiesalso found that increased use of GIS helps withforward planning as well.

On the move? For many council workers, accessingGIS data on the move could be extremely useful. Only29% of councils currently provide mobile GIS servicesor applications. Nevertheless, mobile access togeospatial data has been made available in someareas, including housing services, highway inspection,vehicle tracking, woodland management, waste andcleansing, and rights of way management.

However, most local authorities are still notproviding mobile access to GIS data to the public –for instance, 81% of councils do not provide citizenswith applications that make use of the user’s real-time location. Although this is likely to increase overtime, this rise will be tied to smartphone ownershipin the general population. According to a 2009Nielsen survey, only 12.6% of the UK populationown a smartphone. The relatively small user demand,combined with the costs associated with applicationdevelopment, may temper the growth in usage ofthis aspect of GIS in local authorities.

Scope and integration When asked which service

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areas have seen the greatest increase in theapplication and use of geospatial data to enablebetter decision-making, the results were varied.Transport, traffic and highways management werereported as seeing the greatest increase, followed byflood management and emergency planning.Infrastructure and waste management were also cited.

However, the study also found that the integrationof location-based data into core applications such asCRM and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systemsis key for around half of the authorities questioned.The 47% that have done so say it enables improveddata sharing, creating a single source of informationthat simplifies tasks and speeds up decision-making.One GIS professional said: “GIS has enabled our CRMteam to answer 90% of enquires without reference toback office staff”.

A long road ahead? The development of GIS inlocal authorities faces some challenges. 26% of surveyparticipants said that integrating GIS into corebusiness applications was not a priority. And 43% didnot know why this integration was not happening.These figures suggest a general lack of educationsurrounding the benefits of GIS, which needs to beaddressed by CIOs and IT directors in local authorities.

And although the signs are positive, the pressureto cut costs in the UK public sector could constrainthe growth of GIS services in some councils. Becauseof this, the integration of cheaper and more practicalcloud-delivered geospatial data is a likely to play keyrole in the development of GIS services.

Councils are often accused of being slow toadopt new technologies, but “Understanding theFuture of GIS Usage in the UK Public Sector” showsthat many of these organisations understand howgeospatial data can simplify relationshipmanagement with the many parties they liaise with,and offer useful services to the public. The challengefor them now is to fully integrate it with their coreservices and processes. For most local authorities,integrating geospatial mapping technology is animportant way of realising new efficiencies andincreasing citizen satisfaction through easier andbetter sharing of location-based information.

potential of location


Above: UK Postcodesby Population Density.



. . . the firstnational

conference onLocation

Economics. . . toexplore and

express the ROIof using GI and

GIS...

“

“In fact 98% of delegates thought the eventprovided value for money and 90% said it eithermatched or exceeded their expectations. We werehighly appreciative to get a high level of sponsorsupport, quality speakers and enthusiasticdelegates. Numbers attending were down from theheady heights of 625 in 2009, but still remainedcomparable with earlier years and came in at justunder 500 delegates. For the first time AGI ran aGeoWeb “unconference” the day before the mainconference started. Over 70 delegates attended thisexciting new free-form event format dubbed “AGIW3G”. AGI plans to offer a similar event next yearwhen AGI GeoCommunity’11 moves to a newhome in Nottingham. Stratford has served AGI verywell and we look to our four years there fondly, butwe also knew that to stay “sharp” we needed tomove.

Backing UK Geo AGI has also provided sponsor-ship and support to a range of fellow geoorganisations and events including, for example,GISRUK, OSGeo UK, IMARest, WhereCamp EU and

UK GeoForum. In terms of formalizing joint workingAGI has signed memoranda of understanding (MoU)with IMARest and the British Cartographic Societyand is in discussions with others.

We were also extremely pleased and privileged tohave Jack Dangermond deliver the AGI AnnualLecture at University College London, when hevisited the UK in the summer. Jack spoke fondly ofthe AGI and recalled its founding years in the late1980s and early 1990s.

In late November AGI again held its AnnualAwards at the Royal College of Physicians in Londonand celebrated a bumper year of innovation in a broadrange of sectors. A couple of new awards wereintroduced. One for achievement in the charitablesector and another for “best business case”.

Inspired forsight AGI worked with a large groupof notable experts to create a Foresight Study,published earlier in the year. Alongside a fascinatingsummary report of the state of the geospatial worldin 2015, over 30 expert papers were publishedalongside it and can be found at:www.agi.org.uk/foresight.

AGI’s work with Government has continuedunabated, not only with INSPIRE and the LocationProgramme, but in providing a number of

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AS YOU READ THIS THE AGI year in terms of eventsand general activities will be over. We can look backin reflection and see many great achievements madein what has been a year of challenge, a year wherethe state of the national economy has affected mostof us. What follows is not exhaustive, rather a quickglimpse at some great steps forward by theAssociation.

A significant change early in the year was tomove to a new platform for the AGI website. The oldsite had become middle-aged, increasingly bloatedwith content and more inelegantly structured as itslife-cycle progressed. Furthermore, it was expensiveto run pro-rata to more modern solutions. Afterconsidering its options AGI opted for theSquarespace platform from a small but innovativecompany based in New York. Easy to develop,sophisticated in capability and offering goodextensibility, the new look AGI website went live inearly Q2 of 2010 and has since proved very popular.

Vibrant and topical events The events programmecontinued its theme of vibrant conferences in

Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland, as well as abusy series of evening networking gatherings held bythe AGI Northern Group. Co-operation with theBritish Cartographic Society led to a “BetterMapping II” seminar in London and AGI alsofacilitated meetings and events for the ShareHolderExecutive and the UK Location Programme. AGIadditionally ran the first national conference onLocation Economics in Q4 of 2010 to explore andexpress the ROI of using GI and GIS, and how it hasa critical role in achieving “more with less”. See page10 for a report on this event.

AGI groups, for example, the Suppliers SIG, theMarine & Coastal Zone SIG, the Environment SIG andthe Utilities SIG, continued to run annual events oftopical interest and it was reassuring to see delegatesstill getting out to attend them, despite theeconomic downturn. Significantly too, IST/36, theAGI British Standards committee for GeographicInformation, worked with AGI staff to put on anISO/TC211 Plenary Event in Southampton, which sawaround 130 international GI standards expertsattend. Hearty thanks go to Ordnance Survey forthrowing open their facilities for this symposium.

September’s AGI GeoCommunity’10 was thefourth and final AGI Annual conference to be heldin Stratford-upon-Avon and proved a great success.

2010: the AGI year in perspective A significant yearwhen the Association’s influence, comments and events have gained widespread

recognition. Many have worked tirelessly for AGI but another year of challenge looms,reports Director and CEO Chris Holcroft.

AGI column

Chris Holcroft is Directorand CEO of the AGI.


consultation responses and, for example, thefacilitation of meetings in relation to the PublicSector Mapping Agreement, which will go live inApril 2011.

Chartered Geographer and CPD activity is veryimportant to AGI and members can apply to the AGIat nominal cost to have their CPD activity recordedand certified each year.

The AGI Council Elections in 2010 offeredeVoting for the first time ever. This seemed to stirgreat interest amongst AGI members who voted inhigher numbers in the first two days of the electionthan the whole duration of previously run ballots.

After this busy year AGI can still look to thefuture in a viable position and with strong relevanceto the UK geospatial scene. Its progress andachievements are very much down to its memberswho volunteer and contribute time and effort totaking the AGI forward. This year’s Chairman AndyCoote has worked tirelessly on behalf of theAssociation as have the AGI’s other officer holdersand team of employees. Next year will inevitably beanother year of challenge and one where the AGI,with a significant exposure to the public sector, willface difficulties in maintaining revenues frommembership and events. Nonetheless we have plansto take the AGI through future lean years and

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maintain a high level of service and activity for itsmembers. I would appeal to all members, individualand corporate, to continue to support the AGI if theycan and for non-members to join and take advantageof the unrivalled opportunities to network andacquire knowledge that AGI membership offers.Finally, may I offer a big thank you to all who havesupported and contributed to the AGI in the first 21years of its operation.

AGI column

The AGI exists to“maximise the use ofgeographic information(GI) for the benefit ofthe citizen, goodgovernance andcommerce”.Membershipdetails are availablefrom [email protected] by calling: +44 (0)207036 0430

. . . progress andachievementsare very much

down to. . .members whovolunteer and

contribute timeand effort to

taking the AGIforward.

“

“

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Map of a NationA biography of theOrdnance Survey

By Rachel HewittPublished by Granta, h/back £25,ISBN978 1 84708 098 1

This highly readable and informativeaccount of the early years of theOrdnance Survey deals mainly withthe events that triggered itsfoundation in the mid 18th centuryand the early surveys in Britain andIreland. Amongst many things youwill learn of the lack of clarity overexactly when the OS came into being(1791, 1801, 1810 or even, forpedants, 1855) the influence of theFrench Revolution, the early politicalbattles and the state of mappingthen and in the preceding years.Unusually, the book is the author’sdoctoral thesis and could have done

with some editing and reduction ofthe bibliographical notes, cited worksand credits. It cannot be necessaryfor this to account for over 25% ofthe printed pages.

That criticism out of the way,readers will find the early chaptersespecially rewarding if like me yourhistory is a bit shaky on the eventssurrounding the ’45 Rebellion (thelast battle on British soil). Thepivotal but fatal role of Lord Lovattin supporting the Pretender CharlesEdward Stuart is especially welldrawn. Hewitt also focuses on themany characters who played keyroles in the emerging mappingagency, drawing widely on hersources to give them virisimilitude.Watson, Roy, Watson, Mudge,Dalby, Colby, Ramsden even thelandscape artist and experthachurist Sandby (recentlycelebrated with an exhibition at theRoyal Academy) are all given fairstudy. The narrative gives aninteresting account of how thesecharacters had contact with andwere influenced by contemporarysociety figures like the painterJoshua Reynolds, the novelistMatthew Arnold, the PoetWordsworth, the mathematicianand inventor Charles Babbage

(revered for his mechanicalcomputer) and the controversialAstronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne,

The author captures well thetrials and challenges those earlysurveyors had to surmount increating the primary triangulation,especially in linking Ireland to themainland but also in Colby’s ill-faited venture with the French tomeasure a meridian arc as far asthe Shetlands, which he had hopedto build on Roy’s work with Cassinitwo decades earlier.

A striking aspect of the historyof the OS is that it has too often inthe past been distracted from itsprimary task. With much of Englandand Scotland still to completeresources were switched to Ireland,which Colby enthusiasticallyembraced. Meanwhile, the mainlandwas enjoying a burgeoningeconomy with factories, new estatesand railways changing thelandscape forever; and leftunrecorded for decades. Yet anotherdistraction occurred in 1864 whenit was decided to map Palestine andSinai (1870). Useful work for bothsides in the 1914-18 war but againthere was still plenty to do at home.

For surveyors who have longcomplained of the OS’s lack of clear

and loud warnings over the dangersof scaling up digital mapping, theproblem is not new. Upon completionof the six-inch survey of Ireland manylandowners enlarged the maps fortheir estates, highlighting errors. Onewonders if any builder relied on themfor site plans.

The author has written aworkmanlike study of the early yearsof the OS although perhaps does notdraw enough critical conclusions.There is also little on the so-called“Interior Survey” – the secondaryand tertiary triangulation anddetailed mapping. This must haverequired enormous resources.Hardnosed surveyors and technofansmay also want to skip the oddparagraph or two of poetry (theauthor is clearly a lover ofWordsworth whose works mentionedthe progress of the OS and itssurveyors Mudge and Colby). Herdescription of early instruments andtheir use seem sound enough but sheis on shakier ground when it comesto the modern age with mention ofmapping by “laser-driventheodolites”.

I commend this book for yourChristmas list but we await a similarlively account of the OS’s emergenceinto the Edwardian era and beyond.

booksIssue No 37 December 2010

a readable account of the events that led to the foundation of the Ordnance Surveytogether with the mapping agency’s formative years


products & servicesIssue No 37 December 2010

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A game changer Sized at 24 × 20 × 10cm and aweight of 5kg, Faro’s Focus3D laserscanner has been hailed as a gamechanger. The scanner is four timeslighter and five times smaller thanits predecessor and comes with anintuitive touch-screen control panelsimilar to an iPhone. The scanner isentirely self-contained, (no externalbatteries or laptops) and data iscompatible with most commonsoftware applications.

Mobile mapping to cmsThe new MobileMapper 100 GNSShandheld for mobile mapping anddata collection can deliver 1cmaccuracies and comes in alightweight 620g unit. The GIShandheld from Ashtech integrates anopen operating system, built-incommunications and with optionalGlonass and 45 channels, it canreceive more satellites. New featuresinclude: built-in GSM to allow mobileconnection to web-based correctionservices, an electronic compass, g-

sensors and a 3 mega-pixel camera.The device can be supplied by UKdistributors, Ormston Technology orPositioning Resources.

Streetmapping for GISA new mobile laser mapping systemwith an integrated panoramiccamera has been launched by 3DLaser Mapping and IGI mbH.StreetMapper GIS can be mountedon any type of vehicle and collectsstreet level asset information foruse in GIS or other desktopsoftware. The system has a singlevehicle-mounted laser, enablingmapping to a range of 300m and acapacity of 300,000 measurements

per second. The integrated digitalcamera can capture street levelimages along the survey route,recording features that can betagged directly to the GIS database.3D Laser Mapping has alsodeveloped a suite of datamanagement software specificallyfor the StreetMapper GIS.

Monitoring risk dailyA new high-resolution satelliteimaging service aims to provide theoil, gas, energy and mining sectorwith early visibility of potential riskassociated with operations.Launched by Infoterra, theAssetMonitor “Daily Response” riskmanagement service uses satellitedata such as Spot, Formosat 2 andTerraSAR-X satellites to provideimagery with a daily revisitcapability, providing organisationswith a clear timeline of potentialdrilling spills or pipeline leakage.

Centralising address dataSymphony iExchange, local land andproperty gazetteer connectivitysoftware, is now available as astand-alone module from AlignedAssets. Used in local government tocentralise address data and giveaccess to it across all departments,users can export changes in theirLLPG to other systems, where thedata can be imported. Also releasedis a subscription version of Aligned’sstreet naming and numberingmodule. To find out more, visitwww.aligned-assets.co.uk.

Combined CRMA new customer relationshipmanagement (CRM) software offersbetter management of contact andaddress data by front line staff in thepublic sector. The software, fromAligned Assets and Optevia, aMicrosoft Dynamics CRM reseller andintegrator, manages contacts andrelated information but sources itsaddress data from organisation’s Landand Property Gazetteer. The softwareis based on Dynamics CRM acting asthe master system for contacts andSymphony Gazetteer forming themaster system for address data.

Managing NLPG dataCadcorp has announced anapplication to assist its users in themanagement of National Land andProperty Gazetteer data. The NLPGData Loader application takesgazetteer data and builds a databasewith a structure to match the NLPGmodel. By holding address informationin a structured database, it is easierto present information on people,properties and places in any GIS thatcan read the database directly.

BRIEFS

GGP Systems is introducing a newpayment plan, called FlexiPay, for allnew purchases, allowing customersto spread the cost of their softwareover a three or five-year period.

Postcode Anywhere has announced anew service for planning faster routesfor commercial fleets, using real-worlddata collected by customers usingTomTom devices. The service combinessmart optimisation algorithms andvehicle height, weight and width datawith speed profiles. For more, visitwww.postcodeanywhere.co.uk.

GeoXploit version 2.0,MapMechanics’ package ofsoftware and data for mapping andgeographical analysis, offers up-to-date mapping with more detailedfeatures; greater precision inidentifying locations on maps;improved performance; and moredetailed demographic data.

Avenza Systems has announced therelease of PDF Maps (free from theApple store): a geospatial PDF readerfor Apple iOS devices including theiPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch.

Trimble has introduced new softwarefor information extraction tailoredfor three mobile mapping workflows– Trident Analyst 2010 for spatialimaging; roadway signs; and GIS. Thesoftware addresses projects fromnetwork-level GIS inventories tohigh-accuracy CAD projects,providing users with increasedcapability and productivity.

Bluesky has launched a new way to obtain evidence for use in boundary andother land-based disputes or studies. Priced at £175, the OldAerialPhotosphoto-pack contains two digital image files; one archive aerial photograph ofa location in the past and a corresponding image from the most recent aerialsurvey. The photo-pack also contains A4 printed versions of the aerial photos,a certificate of authenticity, a copy of the archive search details and, whereavailable, the supporting flight report from the archive scan.

Photo evidencefor settlingdisputes

calendarIssue No 37 December 2010

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GIS in Mining & Exploration 201118-19 January, Grand Hotel Stockholm, Sweden.More information: http://gisinmining.com/Event.aspx?id=383902

Defence Geospatial Intelligence (DGI) 201124-27 January, QEII Centre, London, UK.More information: www.wbresearch.com/dgieurope/home.aspx

GEO-11: World of Geomatics and GIS Innovations6-7 April, Holiday Inn, Elstree, UK.More information: Email, [email protected] orwww.pvpubs.com/events.php

GI4DM – GeoInformation for Disaster Management3-8 May, Antalya, Turkey.More information: www.gi4dm2011.org/

31st European Association of Remote Sensing Laboratories(EARSeL) Symposium 2011: Remote Sensing and Geoinformation

not only for Scientific Co-operation30 May-2 June, Czech Technical University, Prague, Czech Republic.More information:www.earsel.org/symposia/2011-symposium-Prague/

The British Cartographic Society Annual Symposium:The Power of the Image8-10 June, Shrigley Hall, Nr. Macclesfield, Cheshire UK.More information:www.cartography.org.uk

25th International Cartographic Conference and the 15th GeneralAssembly of the International Cartographic Association3-8 July, Paris, France.More information: www.icc2011.fr

11th International Conference on GeoComputation20th – 22nd July, University College London, UK.More information:http://standard.cege.ucl.ac.uk/workshops/Geocomputation/index.html

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