Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!

Inspired by this frankly hair-raising story of mini-Murdoch calling the editor of the Independent a fucking fuckwit (insightful commentary) and, of course, by Ridley Scott’s ‘1984′.

I do understand your present predicament and sympathise so, so feeply with you. (That was meant to be “deeply”, but I liked the typo.)

It must be very hard for you to even consider opening up a teensy little bit of the postcode data. You run a very tight ship where every penny counts. After all, every year, you make £1.5m in profit from the Postcode Address File. This income can then be used to offset approximately one thousandth of the total loss to the British economy incurred by your Genghis Khan-like approach to industrial relations.

Indeed, I feel a particular kinship with the founder of the Post Office, Mr P. Pat (pictured). Our new house looks a little like some of those on Mr Pat’s round, and it is only two doors away from the Post Office. Also, since we moved in earlier this year, I suspect our cat has been beating up Mr P. Pat’s black and white cat regularly.

However, may I kindly request that, bearing in mind your careful, some may even say jealous stewardship, of the Postcode Address File, that you start to actually use the fucking thing and deliver the fuck some mail to us that is meant for 11 Market Street, Charlbury OX7 3PH, rather than 11 Market Street Chipping fucking Norton which has an entirely different fucking postcode.

Thank you.

Paleo or neo – which are you?

I have a degree in Anglo-Saxon Norse & Celtic, I play the church organ, I work for a printed magazine about an 18th century technology, and I have several shelves of Ordnance Survey maps (excluding the unfolded ones, which are elsewhere):

Which I guess makes me a paleotard. Glad we’ve cleared that one up.

This was originally going to be a nice, friendly, fuzzy post about how ‘paleotard’, ‘neogeographer’, ‘freetard’ and the like don’t actually mean anything. How it’s quite possible to love the Ordnance Survey’s beautiful maps yet still think that maybe, maybe, their licensing isn’t 100% perfect. How it’s possible to be an OpenStreetMap activist yet still happily use Landrangers and Explorers, the AA Close-Up Atlas, Multimap, etc. etc. etc.

Then I saw Gary Gale’s excellent rant from the AGI Geocommunity event (where paleo vs neo appears to have been the main topic of conversation). He makes the same point. We are, to misquote Moby, all made of tards.

Also, I figured out something more interesting to say.

Let’s talk about scale for a moment. That’s a lovely old-fashioned concept, isn’t it? When was the last time you heard a freetard talk about a 1:50,000 map, or better still, one inch to the mile? I must be a paleo after all.

But scale is really, really interesting.

Ordnance Survey makes most of its money from very large scale (i.e. very detailed) mapping. That’s what government, utilities, property developers and insurance companies pay for. OS’s accounts are frustratingly vague by comparison to, say, British Waterways’, and when you’re holding up BW as an example of How To Do Transparency Right then you know something’s amiss. But a simple read-through of the space allocated to small-scale and large-scale products in the 08-09 Annual Report demonstrates that large-scale is where the money is.

Yet the majority of ‘neo’ stuff only needs small-scale data, and that’s especially true of public interest projects from CycleStreets to MySociety – the sort of thing Governments of any stripe should be encouraging. Even OpenStreetMap, which has an ever-advancing army of buildingtards doing bonkers micro-mapping stuff (hey, London guys, you should sort out your road numbers first. They suck), acknowledges this by only mapping road centrelines. OS MasterMap it ain’t.

Ordnance Survey clearly knows this but won’t admit it. It does claim to be adopting a “hybrid” model, but at heart, there’s no movement from: our data, our terms, you use it only as we see fit, we own everything.

So the notion that the data should be let out without these terms keeps gaining ground, from the Guardian’s Free Our Data campaign to the very learned Power of Information Review report.

Interestingly, though, OpenStreetMap contributors aren’t pushing for it (which rather kiboshes an otherwise entertaining rant from the AGI). That, I think, is because they’re interested in the small-scale data, too. OSM will have a complete small-scale map of the UK in a few years’ time, and as the backlash against data imports shows, they’re having fun making it. There are now hundreds of UK towns and villages where OSM is more complete and up-to-date than OS Landranger and Streetview. Even the most trivial analysis of OSM’s growth rate shows a quick trajectory towards national coverage.

So if the large-scale stuff doesn’t matter, and OSM is advancing towards small-scale completion, why am I bothering to write any of this?

Because, I guess, I really am a paleotard – well, a little. Like lots of people, I love Ordnance Survey maps: that’s why I collected a whole edition of them. I don’t want to see the Landranger relegated to being an expensive niche product used only by those who don’t have satnavs. I don’t want to see a generation of map users believing that there’s nothing better than rounded-end Internet cartography.

But that’s exactly what’s happening. I lost count of the number of head-in-hands moments during the Ordnance Survey presentations at the Society of Cartographers’ Summer School. “Extremely popular sites nick all the tiles” was the most quotable. Geovation was the most tragic – a whole initiative devoted to encouraging ideas, when there’s no shortage of ideas or even of coders, only of data. The bar chat about OpenSpace usage limits, and Landrangers-for-iPhone that are more expensive than the paper maps – really – demolished any pleas of “listen to us, we’re trying to work with you” from the presenters. It was one long exposition of the fact that the OS still doesn’t get it.

I was reminded of a dyed-in-the-wool BW section engineer telling his boss he couldn’t cope with the new (1990s) way of doing things. “I’ve spent all my life trying to keep people away from the canals. Now you’re telling me you want to get as many people onto them as possible.” Ordnance Survey is still at the “trying to keep people away from the data” stage.

So a whole generation of people is growing up without the Ordnance Survey. I would love to see statistics on the average number of OS maps bought by 25-year olds today, compared to 10 and 20 years ago. The (yes) epic fail that is OpenSpace is the most obvious example: no-one can ever name more than one site made with it, and even that site (Where’s The Path) is essentially a comparison tool for Google aerial imagery.

This is why OS must open up its small-scale data. Not because of any doctrine that facts should be free. Nor because we need the data – we do, but OSM is filling that niche. But because today’s maps and tools are being built without OS data. Today we’ve had the announcement that Flickr photos can now be linked directly to OSM data. If OS had opened its data three years ago, maybe we’d have seen Flickr linkage to OS IDs instead.

The Ordnance Survey, simply put, is heading into irrelevance.

All it can do is release small-scale data, unencumbered by anything but attribution, and hope it’s not too late. Right now it probably isn’t. In two years’ time it will be. Off the top of my head:

• Street names and geometries
• Public rights of way
• Postcode->co-ordinate lookup
• Administrative boundary data, including electoral divisions, Access Land etc.
• Major natural feature names and geometries (peaks, main rivers/water areas)

Yes, it would result in some initial loss of income for OS. I’ve already explained the long-term benefits for OS in ensuring its continued relevance. Many will also make the case that the benefits to the wider economy will more than make up for it.

There are two more political considerations.

One is obvious. Releasing small-scale data would remove the need to stop wasting money on nonsense such as OpenSpace, Geovation, lawyers’ letters to Google (and others) about derived data, and today’s five-minute wonder, OS VectorMap Local which has thus far failed to set the world on fire.

The second is less obvious. Ordnance Survey is regularly talked about as a candidate for privatisation, helping to fill that modest hole in the public finances. (It’s usually somewhere in the list between BW and the Royal Mint.) Let’s say the small-scale business dies and OS is no longer a household name, though still earning much the same from its large-scale data sales to utilities and local authorities. All of a sudden, the ‘national interest’ argument for keeping it in the public sector is much smaller – and the political fallout from selling it much less. And I don’t get the impression that OS wants to be privatised.

But hey, I guess the Stasi is pretty much immune from privatisation.

Answer: a spraymailing PR bunny who knows how to use PHP.

Hello,
The following press releases were sent to you recently. We should be very grateful if you would tell us whether or not you intend to make use of them.

Not a good start.

TECHNIFOR – #1174 – 2009-03-10
XF530p: the portable deep marking solution | Capable of attaining a depth of 0.4mm, the XF530p is the world’s first portable deep marking by micro-percussion machine – which stands out for its versatility and ease of use. Whether it is used on tubes or smooth surfaces, it is simply applied to the part, with no need for other pre-tension equipment or supplementary positioning. It can mark pipelines (oil, mining, gas), lifting/hoisting equipment (pallet trucks, forklift trucks), “off the road” vehicles and even naval constructions and metallic structures.
http://ns204460.ovh.net/press/pressdoc_files/1174/CUK_TECHNIFOR-XF530P.pdf 

Ok. And that has precisely what to do with the inland waterways of Britain, pray?

But hey. We get plenty of irrelevant press releases, mostly about the America’s Cup or other saltwatery things. I can live with that. The really offensive bit is in the headers.

Subject: MEPAX Monthly Reminder
X-Mailer: Mepax/Php 

So. You add us to your initial mailing list, without permission, because you found Waterways World on Mediadisk – or some such grot – filed under “boating”… and this press release talks about “naval constructions”.

You then, astonishingly, write a nag mailer to follow up every single such misdirected release with a “monthly reminder”. And you expect us to write a personalised reply (”we should be very grateful if you would tell us”) to your automated mailer.

After recovering the power of speech, I have written a personalised reply to info@mepax.com, and it does involve the words “get” and “lost”.

(Clare’s list of Top 10 PR mistakes should be compulsory reading for bunnies everywhere.)

There has been some debate in the OpenStreetMap community about the exact provisions of the Open Database Licence.

Richard Weait has done a very good job explaining it in diagram form, but the exact nuances of the licence may still remain unclear to some. Therefore I hope the following illustrations will aptly yet concisely show the intricacies of licensing geodata, and the respective virtues of CC-BY-SA and the ODbL.

Thank you for your time.

Back in the early days of amateur webmapping, many of us got regularly, righteously exercised about the “Multimap patent”.

The patent is described thus:

“A map of the area of a client computer (10) is requested from a map server (11). Information relating to a place of interest is requested from an information server (12) by the client computer (10). The information is superimposed or overlaid on a map image at a position on the map image corresponding to the location of the place of interest on the map. The information (or “overlay”) server (12) may contain details of, for example, hotels, restaurants, shops or the like, associated with the geographical coordinates of each location. The map server (11) contains map data, including coordinate data representing the spatial coordinates of at least one point on the area represented by the map.”

The patent, filed in 1996, was granted several years later in Europe, the States and Australia. (Read the full US patent, or search for EP0845124B at the European Patent Office.)

It’s clearly pretty wide-ranging; the “map server” and “information (or ‘overlay’) server” describes every mashup since the days when the cynics were calling it ‘Red Dot Fever’ (popularly attributed to Schuyler Erle, though I had it in mind that it was Saul Albert) – never mind ‘Google Maps Fatigue’, or, ahem, ‘Why Mashups Suck‘. Almost every webmap could be subject to this patent.

But, fortunately, Multimap never really showed any signs of exercising the patent. Sure, a reference number sat at the bottom of every Multimap page, but that always seemed not so much “we intend our lawyers to get medieval on your ass”, rather “hey, we were here before these Google upstarts, you know”. Indeed, as far back as 2002, Edward MacGillavry – who has a much longer webmapping CV than most of us – could write that Multimap has never “taken any steps to enforce their patents… I am wondering what the actual benefit is of patenting technologies like this”.

Well, today we know.

Coals to Newcastle / patents to Seattle

Multimap was bought by Microsoft in December 2007. At the time, received opinion was pretty much “well done to the plucky little British guys for getting bought”, at a time when Google’s march seemed unstoppable.

We worried that some of Multimap’s bright sparks would be assimilated, of course – but hey, this is the land of Maps 2.0, they won’t find it hard to get jobs. (Visit mapme.at, it’s great.) We fretted that the sole existing OS Landranger slippy map would be taken down, to be replaced by some crap Virtual Earth cartography. That sort of level of furrowed-brow, slightly-bad-things-might-happen concern.

We had forgotten about the Multimap patent.

I am not kidding. I really don’t remember anyone even mentioning it. Searching today, I can see that Rob Dunfey at gisconsultancy.com had been smart enough to spot this angle. Directions Magazine remembered, too, and asked Multimap founder Sean Phelan – grandfather of webmapping, and holder of first the patent, then a very large cheque – about it in passing. He was non-committal. (Probably thinking about his yacht, rather marvellously named Nerdvana.)

Flossie!

Fast-forward to the present.

Earlier today, I idly looked at the latest Google News results for ‘openstreetmap’. I noticed a new site: www.flosm.de, built by an outfit called 123map.

As the name suggests, it’s done in Flash – and as the author of Potlatch, the Flash OpenStreetMap editor, that interested me straight away. It’s a slightly bizarre concept: it superimposes TeleAtlas vector data on OpenStreetMap tiles, so you can compare the two. (There are potential bandwidth-leeching and licensing implications in that, but that’s by the by.) I haven’t seen a great clamour for this, but never mind. Any road up, it’s not going to change the world.

But the story I’d found in Google News was… more interesting. You can read it here (softpedia.com), but here are some of the choice quotes.

“123map revealed that, in order to build Flosm and additional services that it is yet to deliver, it licensed technology from Microsoft, taking advantage of the company’s intellectual property licensing program…

“‘[123map] recognizes, like so many technology companies across Europe, that a way to spur growth in our industry is to license patented technology for mutual benefit,’ explained David Kaefer, general manager of Intellectual Property Licensing at Microsoft…

“It is the specific Microsoft technology that enables this comparison, by making it possible to overlay information on a map image.”

Specific Microsoft technology? flosm.de is built with Flash and appears to call serverside Perl (e.g. http://www.flosm.de/tools/geo03/geocoder_flash.pl?thm=98). I don’t see any Silverlight or .net. I don’t see any Microsoft technology.

Then one of the denizens of the #osm IRC channel pointed me towards the German-language OSM mailing list. Detlev Reiners of 123map has posted there several times, and most recently, has explained a bit more about the Microsoft connection. I don’t speak German, but fortunately Google Translate does. Besides, “Sean Phelan” is the same in any language.

“The patent describes the overlay geographic data, which from different servers on which the data is subject to the client delivered. They are then included on the basis of their geographical Coordinates superimposed. Inventor Sean Phelan.”

In other words, the same Multimap patent we were so worried about seven years ago.

So there you have it. Microsoft is actively claiming a patent for putting stuff on webmaps.

Where now?

Think how, if applied, this changes the webmapping landscape. Every Google Maps view: a penny to Microsoft. Google Earth? Several pennies, I reckon. Yahoo? OpenStreetMap? Anything using OpenLayers? A new startup, like CloudMade or Geofabrik?  Start saving. You owe Microsoft. 

And at a tidy royalty for pretty much every map on the web today, the $50m price for Multimap looks good value. Seen the other way round, the patent looks like a very, very canny investment by Sean Phelan.

Of course, it’s not quite that simple.

Back in 2002/2003, when we were all getting worked up about the patent, Proper GIS Types looked into it and concluded that it was so much baloney. Carl Reed, an OGC chap, found several examples of prior art (1 , 2). A presenter at an Ordnance Survey-sponsored conference in Cambridge the same year concluded both that prior art existed, and that the patent was merely “the automation of a manual process” anyway.

But Microsoft must know this. They’re big enough and – surely? – not so stupid that they wouldn’t try to enforce a patent with enormous negative PR potential… unless they thought it might stand up. And it’s a fairly familiar patent strategy: pick on the little guys first, get a steady income stream. Once the precedent is established, go for the medium-ranking sites. Then, eventually, go to Google and say “I think we should talk”.

I hope Google’s lawyers have their answer ready. I hope it’s not too far removed from Arkell vs Pressdram.

Future Publishing has a spiffy subscription management website, myfavouritemagazines.co.uk (cf this, but clearly not as horribly naff as this).

It does everything you could possibly want, online, which is clearly both convenient for the customer and efficient for the company. And they’re quite proud of it: ”The links below are designed to give you complete control over your subscription.” “This area is designed to answer your every need.” All of that. You can order back issues, get a replacement for an issue that hasn’t arrived, change your delivery address, and so on. It makes me quite ashamed of our simple little online order system at WW.

Except the one thing you can’t do is cancel a subscription. “Please write to us at any time during the initial 60 day period [sorry, the what?] supplying your full name, address, subscription number (if possible) and magazine name. Write to: Future Publishing, Unit 4, Lathkill Street, Market Harborough, Leicestershire, LE16 9EF.”

Free clue: making it difficult doesn’t stop people cancelling their subscription. It just makes them pissed off with you and less likely to buy one of your other magazines.

“This is a beautiful Cathedral in very good condition”???!!!?!!1111eleven!1

For goodness’ sake! It’s an 8th century foundation with some of the most breathtaking architecture in the west. It has a stunning Henry Willis organ, the Mappa Mundi, and a beautiful situation on the River Wye.

And what does Google pick out to tell us as the single most important fact about this wonder? Some witless user-contributed review that the cathedral is “in very good condition”.

I mean, what is this – eBay? “Super R@RE! Item sustained some damage in 1786 when the west tower collapsed but has been fully repaired by authorised professionals. Would make a fine adornment to any city riverbank or a large mantelpiece. Price does not include postage, COLLECTION ONLY!! Would prefer paypal. Check out my feedback!!!!!!”

At least Hereford gets off quite lightly. If you use an iPhone to Google for Worcester Cathedral, the annoying map-listing (right at the top again) is for “Worcester Cathedral (opp.)”. I kid you not. Founded in 680 AD, an inspiration to Elgar amongst others, with an organ that’s just undergone a £5m restoration – and the world’s biggest search engine relegates it to a bus stop.

obWaterways: London Bridge is even better.

obOSM: and unlike Google, OpenStreetMap does actually mark Hereford Cathedral.

One of the pleasures of a Sunday morning is reading the Observer in bed when it arrives… having changed from the Independent on Sunday as a result of its ridiculous obsession with celebrity, its sub-Dawkins aggressive, unthinking secularism and, well, Janet Street-Porter.

And counter-intuitively, the first section I turn to (as a bleeding-heart LibDem-voting arts graduate yadda yadda) is Business & Media – partly for the Media pages, which are generally excellent, but also, bizarrely, for the opinion and, in particular, Simon Caulkin, ‘Management Editor’.

Now, I would no sooner expect to enjoy a column by any Management Editor than I would the newsletter of the Celine Dion Fan Club. But, actually, Simon Caulkin is right on the money, every week. This week’s column is just one example, and this paragraph is air-punchingly, hallelujah-shoutingly glorious:

“Of course there’s no hiding that much public service is depressingly bad, but again this has nothing to do with public or private; customer service in the private sector is equally poor. This is not surprising because, ironically, the badness in both cases could be said to be another market externality – the purchase of identical IT-based mass-production service systems geared to meeting the internal incentives of the management consultancies that sell them rather than the needs of the end customer. Intrinsically, there is no reason why public-sector organisations cannot provide service at least as good as the best private sector outfits – and a growing number of them do.”

Please excuse me while I print this out in 72pt type and post it to A Certain Public Sector Agency which we all know and love.