Eye on the web - reprise

Some of you may remember my article “Open Source Mapping Matures” in which I covered a few of the projects and companies who provide open source along with the fact that the ‘free’ is not just related to cost but also ‘freedom to innovate’.  Unfortunately I feel this was a bit premature in publishing as, unknown to me, on November 28th 2005 news came to the geo spatial open source community that the MapServer Foundation had been created. 

What is the relevance of this?  Autodesk, a software company with a turnover in excess of 1 billion dollars a year.  Autodesk has contributed its next-generation web mapping platform to the foundation as an open source project.  Previously its offering was known as MapGuide, and the new version, at the time of writing, is named MapServer Enterprise.  In doing so the MapServer Foundation has been established to provide a business and operational framework to better support the ongoing development of open web mapping technologies, including MapServer, the most widely-used open source web mapping platform.

On Demand

As you may appreciate from the above reprise, I believe that there are changes afoot for the GI market and the software market in general.  Application and services provision is becoming far more prominent than simply shifting boxes of generic tools for a licensing fee.  In the web space, location related services can no longer be measured with traditional models of hits in thousands or millions but, in some cases - Google Maps, MSN MapPoint, MapQuest, Yahoo maps etc - it is in the billions.

“On Demand” and “Live” are terms that are being pushed by many large organisations.  This is where a subscription based model replaces the standard software licence fee.  A customer subscribes to the services they require and quite often the vendor will host these services which save the customer upfront and also ongoing costs.   As I mentioned in my last instalment of Eye on the web, “mash-ups” are becoming more and more apparent.  Any organisation, whether in the GI world, and regardless of size, needs to be able to geocode their information prior to being able to effectively mash-up.  Geocoding software and data costs often hinder this.

Historic Geocoding

When I returned to the UK from an extended visit to Australia (10 years not penal related) it was not viable for most organisations to geocode to Address Point for the whole of the UK.  The licence fee was a six figure sum –and it was pounds sterling not Australian dollars!  Geocoding can be a profitable business.  Take Quick Address Systems, in my view they are the leaders for geocoding and their turnover shows it – in excess of £51 million worldwide per year.  Admittedly they provide more than just geocoders and their address verification systems are integrated with systems that don’t have any geographic requirements in retail, call centres etc.

After investigation through a major GI vendor website, it is possible to geocode to UK street address or Address Point using a traditional ‘offline’ geocoder - if you are willing to pay tens of thousands of pounds.  I believe that in the future there will be ways that provide more value for money.

Global Online Geocoders

There are a variety of global geocoders both online and offline.  One of the best examples of a traditional offline geocoder is that provided by Whereonearth Ltd, recently acquired by Yahoo!  They have a comprehensive database which “offers geocoding to postcode city and/or administrative centroid precision for more than 200 countries and more than 2 million populated places”.  This is pretty impressive and so is the price tag!

Probably the most comprehensive online geocoder is part of the Microsoft MapPoint Web Service.  This provides address level geocoding in over 25 countries - most countries in Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand and various ones in Asia.  This is a transaction based (pay per hit) web service and therefore requires a licence and also a platform access fee.  This access fee is comparable to the purchase price of a desktop geocoder but, it also gives online mapping, it is still out of the reach of many potential users.

Building a global online geocoder

I thought it would be a good project to see just what it would take to integrate a global online geocoder.  After investigating what was available and the associated costs, we opted to build our own.  We needed to source global place names, street address level geocoding in the US and postcode level in the UK.  Our results from scouring the internet were:

• Global Places database, free, over 2.5 million places with coordinates
• US Street Address geocoder, free, over 4 Gigabytes of data with coordinates
• UK Postcodes, not free but purchased, 100m centroid coordinates

In building this geocoder (we also built web services around it to perform lookups) we came across and old problem that affects many organisations – Positional Accuracy.  This is not exactly the same issue that arises for many organisations migrating from Ordnance Survey Landline to MasterMap, although it is similar.  We have to ensure that our data aligns when it has been sourced from different data sources and also captured at different levels.  In some cases it isn’t too much of a problem – the difference of the centroid of a town being one kilometre isn’t an issue when you are looking at it nationally, although you don’t want coastal towns being offshore!

With this data we have now built a comprehensive database that suits our customer needs – a simple & cost effective means of locating their assets or customers.  The advantage that we have is that our customers are, for the first time ever, able to visualise their information and therefore seeing where an asset is.  Within a kilometre is sufficient as they can now see it!

Free Geocoder - On Demand!

To follow the spirit of BBC backstage mantra "Use our stuff to build your stuff”, geocode.isharemaps.com has been created and offers free use for non-commercial (or a simple subscription based licence for commercial access) to a worldwide place name, US address and zip code and UK postcode centroid geocoder.  I believe that this will help many organisations around the world be able to provide ‘Location Based Mash-ups’.  Go to geocode.isharemaps.com and register for a licence key and give it a try.  It will not suit everyone’s requirements and doesn’t aim to provide everything that some of the alternative geocoders offer but we’re sure that it will provide benefits to quite a few people around the globe who want to start building websites with location based elements.