Month: August 2007

Well done OS, you’ve done it again

As mentioned on, Digital Urban and Londonist, to name but two blogs, as well as the usual suspect, the Guardian covering the story. The Ordnance Survey have again shown their rather blinkered approach to public responsibility in favour of commercialisation by stopping a UCL CASA project to show air pollution in London within Google Earth using 3D buildings.

Since the 3D buildings are produced in part from OS MasterMap data the project is now only able to be used within government departments, as they have licenses to use the datasets already. The point of the UCL’s project was to allow the public to have a view of the situation.

The Londonist article describes the OS as the bank manager character from the Nationwide adverts, constantly going against normal thinking with ‘it doesn’t work like that’ answers. Some may think this is a bit harsh, but personally I’d say it was apt for:

The UCL’s own user interface is still available on their project site, but I don’t know how long that will last, it is, however, very impressive.

Another rant about the lack of maps

Being technical and loving maps, I tend to expect that other people that are into maps would want to use them wherever they’re relevant.  One area I always expect to see a map is next to addresses for shops/events.

I know some people aren’t technical when it comes to putting content on websites, but most places manage to at least put a link to Multimap/Google Maps, however, people who’s job it is to know about GIS I expect a little more of, and I think rightly so… a company such as the AGI (the focus of this rant) and it’s event sponsors have an interest to promote the use of GIS and mapping in general, and what better way than showing maps on their own sites in the most relevant places?

So what’s wrong with their site?  If you look on their first ‘When and where‘ page there is an address of the location of the event, with a link to the location’s website, but no map or map link.  Then you may notice the link to the ‘Travel Informtion‘, where they do at least have a link to a PDF map and to Streetmap.

Ok, so maybe that would ease my frustration, and I suppose when I saw that they’d at least put some sort of map on there, it did, a little, but of course I’m expecting more… Looking at the PDF map it is an A4 page with a map at the top, and that’s it… no directions (which they’ve got on their site), not even the address (so you can use SatNav).  Then, knowing the Streetmap website, you can’t plot routes to that location (which you can do from almost any other online map service).

Come on! People in the GIS and mapping industry should always be thinking ‘would a map add value to this information’, but it feels like sometimes they’re not thinking properly at all.