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Ordnance Survey Free

Published February 3, 2010 democracy , linkeddata , ordnancesurvey Leave a Comment

There’s been a lot of positive rumblings coming from government recently about open and linked data. One of them is a consultation about the future of the Ordnance Survey, and in particular, a proposal to release a number of existing OS products for use at no charge under a CC-By license. This is Section 7, and the part of the consultation I want to focus on right now.

From Section 7:

Ordnance Survey Free is intended to allow communities to combine (or “mash-up”) government data about their community and environment from a number of sources and illustrate their findings in a geographic context:
•   the raster products will enable developers to produce an application that overlays their information on a map and to zoom-in from a national view with MiniScale® down to the street level with OS Street View®
•   the gazetteer, boundary and postcode information will enable widespread use of these commonly used geographies and it will act as a link between other government data sets which reference the same geography
•   the 1:50 000 Scale Gazetteer provides a definitive source of town and place names to search and locate a place of interest on the map; Code-Point® provides the location of every postcode to enable accurate search and display of specific locations and it will link to other data with a postcode reference
•   Boundary-LineTM provides the outline and a unique reference to all the administrative and electoral units of Great Britain
•   MeridianTM 2 and Strategi® are small scale vector products which provide the geometry of features to allow customisation and combination with other data. MeridianTM 2 includes a full named and attributed road network.

It is Code-Point and Boundary-Line which I feel are the most import data sets to make freely available.

In our democracy, with a First Past the Post electoral system, which is supposed to provide a strong link between citizen and representative, the fact that today, the Boundary-Line dataset is private, and not free-for-use by any citizen is astonishing. I struggle to believe that Boundary-Line is commercially significant to the OS, or alternatively that the majority of licensees are not public bodies*. Releasing Code-Point would increase the value of a Boundary-Line release significantly, allowing correlation of post-code and administrative region. With Post Codes as the primary location identifier in every day use, building services on top of Boundary-Line without Code-Point would be really tricky.

I’m sure that there are similar arguments for the other sets suggested, but I think Boundary-Line and Code-Point are a crucial and clear starting point.

Another portion of Section 7 asks how these OS Free products should be delivered (Web App, Download, Web API, DVD priced at/near cost). To which I can only respond… yes! The Boundary-Line and Code-Point information should be made accessible as Linked Data along the lines of the data.gov.uk projects, providing a Web API. It should also be made available as an easily downloaded data set, and a simple Web App would be very easy to produce. The other data sets (which include graphical tiles) are a more difficult area, but wouldn’t advocate that OS should compete with Google Maps or Bing Maps. The OS can probably learn from OpenStreetMap from the way they share their large data sets.

The consultation runs until mid March, and I’m still considering how comprehensive a response to write, given the chances of a change in Government, and hence that chances the consultation will be ignored.

* Taking data from [1] and [2], for 2008/09, over all OS products, it appears that about 42% of OS revenue came from Central and Local Government.

[1] http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/costs_to_central_and_local_gover#incoming-52363

[2] http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/aboutus/reports/annualreport/08-09/docs/accounts-2008-09.pdf

Notebooks (of the paper variety)

Published December 27, 2009 Uncategorized 1 Comment

I often ponder what to take to a meeting – nothing, laptop, notebook+pen are the popular options. Nothing has the disadvantage that it looks like you’ve come unprepared to take notes, which I think can be a taken as a bit disrespectful. Laptop has the advantage that it allows you to do anything you can do at your desk. This is also its curse. You can all too easily get sucked into responding to an e-mail or IM rather than paying full attention to the meeting you’re in. So a notebook+pen are a solid 3rd option. They say ‘I’m prepared to listen, pay full attention, and take notes’.

If you ever take a look at a notebook I take into a meeting, you’ll notice that the last notes are from a meeting at least a month previous, probably with someone ‘important’. Also likely is that they were written, never to be read again. This is the curse of the notebook in my office.

My ‘theatre’ notebooks on the other hand get used a lot more frequently, get modified and updated, and the information used to make decisions. In short, they’re useful, and I enjoy and benefit from the format.

The ‘theatre’ meetings are, of course, out of work time so laptops are less appropriate, but there’s another reason why they get used in such different ways. The main reason is the ‘clean desk’ policy in operation at work. This means that whenever I leave my desk, any written material needs to be locked away. Frankly, this is too much hassle for me to actually use a notebook at work. Having to unlock a drawer every time I want to look at some notes and check if the drawer is locked again with everything in it whenever I leave my desk isn’t worth my time. It’s far easier to use a laptop which auto-screen-locks, and is a single thing to lock/unlock (to/from the desk) when I move around.

It was taking a look at my notes for a recent show that made me realise that I’m missing out at work. There are a bunch of benefits to the notebook+pen experience which I’m missing at work. The ones that stand out are the ease of drawing, sketching, annotating, and sharing.

Sadly, I don’t see relaxation of the clean desk policy as likely. I guess I need to hope that phones and laptops evolve to make drawing, sketching, annotating, and sharing as easy as paper.

PastryKit – Why?

Published December 23, 2009 Tech , apple , javascript Leave a Comment

Recently, John Gruber publicised the PastryKit JavaScript framework which Apple uses to give a ‘Native’ iPhone experience in iPhone WebApps published by Apple (see the DF post for example videos). What I haven’t seen anywhere is an explanation of why Apple would take this route (a JavaScript framework) to provide this experience.

The alternative approach would be for Apple to build support for this functionality into the MobileSafari browser. This could be done with, for example, Vendor Specific CSS Properties. They could introduce -iphone-app, -iphone-header, -iphone-toolbar, and -iphone-momentumscroll. These could be applied to specific <div> elements, allowing the MobileSafari to suppress Safari chrome and place elements in the correct place. There would be a few advantages to this. Firstly, the performance would be far superior. The performance on the iPhone and iPhone 3G of PastryKit isn’t quite good enough. Implementing the functionality within the browser engine would have far superior performance. Even where PastryKit performs acceptably today, it’s still chewing unnecessary battery. Secondly, extending MobileSafari would allow the functionality to be easily used by developers outwith Apple, without having to include a lot of additional JavaScript in their appliation. Thirdly, it would be iPhone specific. As it stands, I assume that PastryKit webapps running on Firefox mobile (Fennec) will behave like an iPhone app, even running on other platforms. That seems like something that Apple wouldn’t want to encourage. There are more advantages to xtending MobileSafari, but those are the main ones.

So why might Apple have developed PastryKit, and what might they be planning? I can’t help but think that this is a skunkworks or R&D project that’s escaped, without any strategic thought on Apple’s part. In that case, use of it is probably a tactical move, which I think will over time by building the support into MobileSafari. How long that takes will, IMO, depend on the AppStore, and the competition it and the iPhone receive from Android and Pre. I think it’s only when webapps become popular on those platforms that Apple will take the step to improve the iPhone web SDK.

Another possibility is that Apple want to provide the iPhone experience on non-iPhone hardware. I can’t quite get my head around this possibility. But Apple do have a knack for surprises.

iPhone 3G – 18 months down, 6 to go

Published December 16, 2009 Tech , apple 2 Comments

I’ve had an iPhone 3G for 18 months, and so I have 6 months to go until 2 things happen. Firstly, that my existing contract with O2 expires, and secondly that Apple release another improved version of the iPhone. So now is an interesting time to look at what I’ve enjoyed about the iPhone, and what I might be looking for in a replacement.

What I’ve enjoyed:

Unlimited/everywhere internet access
Decent mobile web browser
Lots of Apps available at a couple of clicks
Decent media player

My short wishlist for a replacement:

Larger screen (but not a larger device overall)
Wireless Data Sync (I don’t want to have to plug my phone into my laptop just to get up-to-date podcasts)
Decent (video) camera
Longer battery life
More powerful web-technology apis (accelerometer, camera, etc)

The iTunes experience is a force likely to drive me in the direction of an Apple replacement unless an alternative appears. One thing that would attract me to an alternative would be a cloud centric rather than PC centric sync. I’m not sure if that’s likely from anyone in the next 6 months or not.

Bad Science

Published August 13, 2009 Uncategorized 1 Comment

As someone who’s regularly frustrated by ’scientists say…’ reports on BBC Breakfast, happening into a talk at OpenTech by Ben Goldacre was a pleasure and a revelation. Go, watch the video, and if you enjoy it, go buy the book ‘Bad Science’. That’s what I did, and I’m very happy I did. As someone pretty fluent in the scientific method and critical thinking, I found the examples really interesting, the encouragement to really analyse what’s said in the media motivating, and the realisation there are lots of other frustrated people out there utterly relieving.

Google #1 for WebSphere ESB 6.2

Published December 14, 2008 IBM , google , twitter , websphere , websphereesb , wspolicy 1 Comment

WESB 6.2 was released on Friday and anyone Googleing “WebSphere ESB 6.2″ this weekend appears to get a tweet from me and a rather more in depth discussion from my colleague David Currie.

As David points out, the combination of the policy driven mediations and the service gateway scenario support is a huge leap forward, and enables a whole host of new metadata driven scenarios. To me that’s the most exciting thing about this release. Why? Because it opens up the possibility of fewer mediation flow components, and less time in the WID tooling. There’s some good WID tooling to generate service gateway mediation flow components, but I wonder how many people will actually create service gateway mediation flow components, and how many will simply reuse an existing one with different metadata… only time and customers will tell.

Charmouth and Lyme Regis

Published November 27, 2008 Personal , friends Leave a Comment

Last weekend we (Myself, Kat, Katie, Chris and Dan) had a fun weekend exploring Charmouth and Lyme Regis. Looking forward to the next one (and for Rich, Sue, George and Jim to make it!)

Web Services Make Connection – what it actually means

Published October 28, 2008 Tech , standards , webservices , work Leave a Comment

I had a conversation yesterday that reminded me how confusing I found WS Make Connection the first time I saw it in action. It’s a really simple specification designed to do something really simple, but the names used in the messages can cause no end of confusion.

Though Make Connection can be used standalone, it’s currently primarily used to provide retransmission capability for WS-Reliable Messaging 1.1, so I’ll focus on that scenario.

When providing reliability in an environment where the service provider cannot open a connection to the client (e.g. because it’s behind a NAT device), the service provider still needs a way to send messages to that client.

An example would be retransmitting a response message to a client because the original transmission of it failed.

In this case the client needs to connect to the service provider to provide a connection for the service provider to use to send the response. That’s what Make Connection is. It’s a specification which defines a single one-way message which a client can send to a server, which allows a server to send a message to the client using the HTTP response channel.

i.e MakeConnection message=’Hi, I’m client xxx, and here’s an HTTP connection you can use to send me a message if you want to’.

The confusion: People used to session oriented technologes (including WS-RM of all things) see a ‘MakeConnection’ message and assume it’s setting up a long running connection that will be used later on. This is not the case. A MakeConnection message only has meaning for the length of the HTTP request/response interaction it is sent in. For subsequent messages from the server, additional MakeConnection messages must be sent by the client.

Nearing the end….

Published October 9, 2008 IBM , Tech , standards , webservices , websphere , websphereesb , wspolicy Leave a Comment

Last week’s announcement letter means that my current project at work is coming to an end.

I’ve been working for that last 6 months on the WebSphere ESB 6.2 release with a particular focus on web services and policy. So the bullet points most relevant to me are:

New policy-driven ESB mediation, including integration with WebSphere Service Registry and Repository
Support for the WebSphere Application Server Web Services Feature Pack and SOAP 2.1 (sic)

The policy driven mediation is one answer to Katy’s recent question “What’s so great about WS-Policy?”. WS-Policy provides a standard format to describe requirements, and with the policy driven mediation we exploit this standard to describe requirements on a mediation flow (or more precisely the primitivies within one). Using WS-Policy means we can use the existing support for WS-Policy in WSRR to author an attach policies, and allows users to use their existing WS-Policy expertise (or more likely for the moment – develop expertise which they can use later in other areas).

The policy driven mediation support is also an example of componentisation in action. We’ve spent a chunk of the last few months extracting the WS-Policy engine from WAS 7 to use it in WESB 6.2. WESB uses it in a very different manner than WAS, so we’ve made some changes on the way, but I think what we’ve ended up with will be useful in both products (and more) for a long time.

I’ve been less involved in the Web Services Feature Pack support. I’ve mainly been helping colleagues understand all the great new technologies, how to use them, and how we can best exploit them in WESB and WPS. It’s always eye-opening talking about something you’re so familiar with because so much that’s just background knowledge to you is advanced and complex to people with a focus elsewhere. I’m looking forward to seeing this second (or is it third because of WAS 7?) phase of customers working with JAX-WS, WS-RM and more.

With development for this release winding down I’ll be spending a bit of time out of the office talking to customers about what they can do with the current and coming releases – I look forward to hearing a bit about what they’re up to.

Trips….

Published August 1, 2008 Personal , apache , usa Leave a Comment

Not trips that are bought and paid for by work, but trips I quite fancy anyway, and will cost lots…

ApacheCon US – To see what all the fuss is about, and meet lots of interesting Apache people

New York for Hogmanay – Because it’s supposed to be right up there with Edinburgh

South by Southwest – It looked great from the edges this year, so doing it properly would be fun.

So now all that’s left is to work out what I can afford, and to find people to do go with…

c

Twitter Updates

whoa: "at peak, roughly 3 Gigabits/sec of traffic go between FarmVille and Facebook" from http://is.gd/a8UXo 1 day ago
Urgh. Forgot about some scheduled downtime... should have stayed in bed 1 day ago
Reading @bedlamtheatre EGM minutes and happy to note that things went the right way 3 days ago
Hmm. Left my phone for 5 mins... apparently was a mistake. Let me know if you find out what they did. #fb 4 days ago
depressed by the BBC retreat in the face of News International 1 week ago