How mapping and environmental data has become accessible to all
Mike Williams, Principal Data Scientist, and Guy Collins, Business Analyst as well as active OpenStreetMap contributor, look at the evolution of digital mapping and how, as a result, environmental data has become more accessible than ever before.
Who would have thought 20 years ago that you could access the UK’s entire road network – all 245,000 miles of it – on a device small enough to hold in the palm of your hand? And that you could ask this device to take you from Eagle Way to Acacia Avenue? And how many of you have tracked Santa on Google Earth on Christmas Eve? The technological changes over the last few decades have obviously been enormous. As a result, it has made mapping and environmental data accessible like never before, at the touch of a button.
The UK in particular has been a world leader in making data available, and this article will review the evolution of over 40 years of digital mapping and information, and where this leads the environmental data user in the future. In the past decades there have been many developments that have revolutionised how people use maps, gain access to them and ultimately interact with them. In 1995 the UK became the first country in the world to be fully mapped electronically at large scale as Ordnance Survey introduced Land-Line™.
Geographical Information Systems (‘GIS’) can actually be traced as far back as the 1960s. At its most basic level, GIS attaches location to data, whether it is a borehole or a pizza joint. One could argue that it is this particular combination of data and location that turns it into usable information (a process known in the industry as ‘geo- coding’).
However it wasn’t until the 1980s that the first commercial GIS computer package became available,
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notably from ESRI Inc. in California. The same period also saw the emergence of Computer Aided Design (‘CAD’) packages such as AutoCAD. Although developed primarily for industrial or architectural design, CAD systems could also consume geographical data. The main limitation of both GIS and CAD in those days was not only the available computing power but also the fact that data could only be stored in proprietary formats, creating many data silos and preventing easy data access.
Image: Promap screen shot
Accessibility of reliable location information broke new ground with the advent of the Global Positioning Systems (‘GPS’) in the early 1990s. This was greatly accelerated when President Clinton switched off military encryption for civilian users in 2000, resulting in a significant gain in positional accuracy. The early 2000s also saw greater interoperability between CAD and GIS packages, not least helped by specialist data translation tools such as Safe Software’s FME, allowing a free flow of data at least within the professional data community.
Then of course came the popularisation of satnavs, driven by companies such as Navteq and TeleAtlas who initially focused on the creation of streetmapping databases to make mobile navigation possible. By then the Internet had also made great strides forward and so we saw the first web-based mapping and data applications emerge, eventually evolving into the super-powered handheld
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