A Spatial Odyssey

Last week the United Nations Initiative on Global Geospatial Information Management (UN-GGIM) put out a paper titled 'Future trends in geospatial information management: the five to ten year vision' ( available here  as PDF). Now I must confess prior to reading the document and seeing tweets from people I knew who appeared to be attending a session of this group in Qatar I hadn't heard of the UN-GGIM. However it appears to be a group that's been set up in recognition that geospatial information can assist with development of nations; national and region initiatives on geospatial information need to be better coordinated and that 'developed' countries can lend a hand and resources to the benefit of less-developed countries. Some laudable aims there certainly, but anyway I digress slightly from the future-trends document itself... Overall I think the document is a well-constructed ‘snapshot’ on the current main trends in geoinformation. Whils...

Today I had the pleasure of chairing the UKOUG Oracle Spatial SIG at Oracle's London City Office. I'm on the Committee for the SIG and use the technology a lot in my day to day work, so my view is biased, but I do like the SIG as I always leave it with a better idea of the Oracle Spatial technology roadmap and invariably have at least one 'take-home' idea or tit-bit which I have gleamed from one of the other presenters, sharing their experiences of Spatial.   Happily today was no exception. Albert Godfrind (part of the Oracle Spatial development team) gave a great insight into the likely Spatial enhancements in the 12c R1 database release (the 'c' if you are wondering stands for 'cloud' which was obviously one of the key directions announced at Oracle Openworld earlier this month) all delivered in his wonderfully no-frills Gallic style. 12c is currently in 'beta 2' so will probably not hit the shelves until at least mid-2013. In summary...

So a year on from the announcement of TomTom Geospatial for Oracle at OpenWorld 2011, the first day of OpenWorld 2012 saw the announcement of a similar tie-up between Oracle and Nokia. The deal will allows users of Oracle Fusion Middleware (now the home of the MapViewer technology) to integrate services from the Nokia Location Platform and Maps API into their enterprise apps. The deal is perhaps not surprising given the previous relationship between Oracle and Navteq, and the full consummation of Navteq into Nokia. This also follows a number of other recent deals by Nokia with various car manufacturers and the likes of Garmin, GroupOn and Amazon. Presumably the new deal will not affect the existing relationship with TomTom and offers a wider choice of mapping services for the Oracle user. From the Nokia perspective this gives them another channel to market as they compete for 'mapping' market share with the likes of Google and Apple.

So over the past few weeks the competition war between computing's big hitters has ramped up in a number of interesting ways (particularly to those of us in the spatial / location arenas) amidst a slew of product launches and releases. What is clear is that again the competition are not afraid of stepping on each others toes in core areas. Apple's announcement last week that it's mobile devices would now feature their own mapping was not unexpected, and indeed Google somewhat pre-empted the move a few days earlier with it's 'next dimension' roadmap for it's now long-established mapping services. The news has already caused much debate and discussion, and this post does not attempt to dissect or analyse this particular information; although I would recommend that anyone interested reads some of the following blog posts: http://geothought.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/reaction-to-apple-maps-announcement.html http://www.vicchi.org/2012/06/11/a-bipolar-attitud...

This week I glimpsed fist-hand the rather disconcerting evidence that the use of location still has a long way to go in our emergency services. As you may or may not know, I'm a fairly keen runner and hence when I'm away from home working I endeavour to get out for a few miles each day. Now earlier in the week my run along the canal towpath in Leeds took a rather eventful turn as I came across a chap who had apparently suffered from some sort of seizure and was lying prostrate on the ground. Now I wasn't first on the scene, but it had clearly happened moments before, and along with the chap's friend a number of cyclists and runners had stopped. His friend told us that the young man had a similar episode about 3 weeks ago and was having some checks, so after the man was placed into the recovery position his friend was told to call 999 as he clearly needed help. Now the problem was, although we were only a couple of miles from Leeds city centre, we were at a rather ...