Nestoria Blog

As part of our ongoing series of interviews with thought leaders in our space, today we interview Ed Parsons, a highly regarded member of the UK geography community. A fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, Ed was until recently the CTO of the Ordnance Survey. Prior to that he has a deep background in GIS (Geographic Information Systems), both commercially and in the academic world. Ed's blog is at edparsons.com

1. The last two years have seen an amazing amount of innovation in the online geography space. Which developments have you found to be the most interesting, the most innovative, and which do you think will have the most impact on society as a whole?

Yes the last two years have been the most exciting I can remember in the digital geography space, the massive surge of innovation has been a result of the opening up of geographical information which had until then been locked up behind expensive GIS systems or was beyond the scope of individual use. Two unrelated developments have opened up geographical information, the development of rich mapping API's and the growth of community developed datasets. 

The Mapping API's interestingly are the combination of new technology in the form of AJAX libraries and perhaps more importantly advertising based business models which allowed the likes of Google and to a lesser extent Microsoft to fund the licensing of massive amounts of commercial geodata, which they can then make available "Free" at the point of use to developers and users.

Technology has also really driven the development of community based geodata projects like OpenStreetMap and Geograph.co.uk , now almost anyone with a laptop/pda and a cheap GPS can capture fit for purpose geographical information. In many ways the Geographical Information market was a perfect one to really make the most of what is now known as the Web 2.0 philosophy, inverting the traditional top down approach to information provision, with technology now making the citizen central in both the use and creation of geographical information - This is a massive shift in the industry and the more traditional content providers are trying their best to ignore this - at their peril !

2. The UK seems to have a wealth of geo-related online communities like Geograph.org.uk, OpenStreetMap, New Popular Edition Maps, and Free the Postcode. What do you think of these efforts?

It's great to see so much coming from the UK community, but we have to recognise that many of these efforts exist because of the very particular nature of the UK geodata market. Although the UK is by far the best mapped country in the world, because of the licensing regime Ordnance Survey and the Royal Map operates under, it is very difficult for individuals to get access to even relatively small scale data, as a result efforts like OpenStreetMap (OSM) and Free the Postcode are filling a market need. 

I have always personally been very supportive of these "Open Source" mapping projects and they are offering the user more choice in the market, and just as with software both open and closed source will coexist in the market for the foreseeable future. While at the OS I often suggested that some of its small scale data products could be made open source perhaps to contribute to projects like OSM, but as a organisation it was not ready to make such a step, I'm sure however in the future National Mapping Agencies will embrace Open Source.

3. What are your predictions for online geography in the UK in 2007? 

I don't think we have yet seen the full impact of a networked global market on information businesses, by this I mean access to huge numbers of computer operators in India and China who can create and process geographical datasets that previously were not economically viable. For example organisations have in the past invested in computer algorithms to automatically identify features such as buildings from aerial imagery, these have met with limited success. I expect this year we will begin to see datasets captured from image or out of copyright map sources using offshore operators starting to become available.We will also see continued embedding of geographical data in online applications, hopefully increasingly been used as a source of context, sorting information using proximity as a filter term. Hopefully we will also begin to see the "walled gardens" of the mobile network operators beginning to break down allowing more innovative local based services on mobile devices.

4. What are your thoughts on the developments in the property search sector in the last year?

I must admit to not watching the property search sector particularly closely however, it would appear that vertical search sites like Nestoria and other aggregators are beginning to move beyond the online shop window approach. After-all finding a property for many people is actually a geographical problem, with constraints to do with proximity to schools, public transport etc. equally important as number of bathrooms and price!

5. What are the challenges you think a vertical search engine for property like Nestoria faces?

Visibility and awareness. both in terms of vertical search generally, i.e. some sites are actually better than Google for specific information !! , and then within the vertical itself. Was is interesting is that in 2007 the traditional marketing approaches are not necessarily the best approach, after-all when was the last time you saw a myspace advertisement !! 

Many thanks Ed for offering us your thoughts. We agree vertical search engines are often better than general web search for finding specific types of information. Here at Nestoria we'll do our best in the coming year to find innovative ways to raise our visibility and to find chances to work together with the UK's community of geographic innovators.