Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

Does anyone know anything about mapping and/or geographical data representations?

Specifically I’m looking for some maps in an open vector map format, ideally one that is chunkable for piecemeal download over a GPRS connection, scales reasonably easily and is handlable by midrange mobile phones.

The format is the important bit for the moment, the maps themselves can come later.

(And, yes, I’m half tempted to reverse engineer the map database out of my satnav software, but I fear that is going to get a bit boring after a while)

Oh, and while I was poking around for a community about such things I discovered – which is rather more geeky than even I am really comfortable with.


Categories: Memories.

/ 5 Comments

5 comments

  1. karohemd

    *blinks*
    Something is too geeky for you? I’m shocked! ;o)

    Hm, I used to know a bloke (also called Neil) who works for Smallworld (now GE) but I haven’t seen him in a while and I don’t have any contact details. He might know as Smallworld do mapping/GPS software.

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  2. maluse

    I’ve been looking into this a bit recently (in order to use the agri data from DEFRA). There are lots of different formats but the Open GIS format seems a sane vector format. I’ve got the PostgreSQL database system installed at home with the PostGIS extension (both free) which allows this format data to be manipulated (could be the sort of thing you’d need for the server end of the GPRS connection).

    There’s a remarkable amount of free geodata around. You can certainly get country outlines, town coordinates, and height information (from a NASA RADAR survey of the planet). Here’s a quick grab of my private wiki scrapbook where I’ve been collecting open geo data stuff. Feel free to grab.

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  3. gothwin

    Hi, Mel pointed me this way as I work for Ordnance Survey.

    I’m not sure if you are doing this for work or fun. You might like to look at the data that OS provides to see if it’s of any use. You can download sample data, and it’s all provided in GML (a type of XML).

    I work in the research team and people have playing with maps on mobiles in the past.

    I should point out our data is expense – so you might not want to try this if it’s for fun. For more recreational type mapping try Mapping Hacks and the community around it. Hope this helps a bit.

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  4. neilh

    To some extent I’m in control of the source of the data, the project doesn’t have data at the moment, so it needs to be collected but what I’m interested in is a way to link the spatial and temporal information to data storage mechanisms for that data. Most likely the data will be complex data (videos or pictures rather than text, so conventional database isn’t really the right solution).

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