Central London is already mapped to a high level of detail (not astonishing given that OSM originates from UCL!), so we decided to focus on a much neglected topic, ie wheelchair accessibility mapping. Wheelmap.org, a relatively new initiative to highlight wheelchair accessible places, made it painfully obvious that almost no accessibility mapping had been done so far in and around UCL!

Catherine Holloway, a wheelchair accessibility specialist from our department, gave a great overview of relevant attributes to map, and even brought along a couple of wheelchairs for the students to sit in! Two of the student groups experienced the difficulties when trying to move about in a wheelchair, hitting obstacles, bad dropped kerbs and rough surfaces, a valuable insight into the very specific mobility problems of London’s wheelchair users.
The mapping party was also kindly supported by members of the OSM community, ie. Gianfranco,  Derick Rethans, and Alex who shadowed groups and supported them.

The first day was taken up with data collection, and the weather god(s) were very kind to us, with atypically warm and sunny weather for this time of the year, ideal to explore the different areas around UCL’s main campus. We subdivided the area into map slices, and 4 groups went off to collect data, each group recording their progress on walkingpapers print outs. After some initial confusion over what to capture, the groups soon got to grips with the task and went their separate ways to record: if shops and building entrances have step free access and if the toilets are wheelchair accessible; where dropped kerbs are; as well as pavement quality and minimum widths.

My group did south of UCL around Tottenham Court Road, and sadly we found a whole row of shops not wheelchair accessible in Store Street (see photo above). I must say that I was shocked by the number of businesses, pubs and buildings which today are still not wheelchair accessible, just in the very small area we mapped around UCL. After a productive two hours of mapping, we reconvened at the Department, to go for a well deserved pint of beer in the Jeremy Bentham pub (an essential part of any proper mapping party!).

On day 2, the students sat down to add their collected data to OSM, using Potlatch2. Andy Allan, one of the lead developers of Potlatch2, joined us for the lab session to support the students, but also importantly to experience how first time editors of OSM are using his software. In parallel, I setup screen recording software to gather new data on first time users interactions with OSM’s editing tools, in this case Potlatch2, in continuation of earlier work done in usability analysis, reported here before. Apart from some of the previously discussed problems in the usability of Potlatch2, of which Andy took keen notice and I am sure he will report back on as well, the students got on well with the editing. Soon the first changesets appeared on OSM, and the first tagged shops were updated as well on wheelmap.org. Some students even managed to finish early, taking the opportunity to edit and add information around their homes.

The results of the mapping party can be seen in the changesets generated by the students, as well as the numerous classified shops and amenities along Tottenham Court Road and its sidestreets, visible in wheelmap.org, where before there was just a sea of grey unclassified Points of Interest.

You can see the rest of the pictures in my Flickr feed!

This small research project from us then represents the first of an ongoing effort to better embed and implement a usability engineering culture in this great project!

Last weekend I attended the 2011 edition of WhereCampEU, held this time in sunny Berlin. It was a great conference, altough smaller than previously in London, but with more diverse presentations than last year’s unconference. I also presented our recent work on geoweb usability at the conference, even though we haven’t had a chance yet to do a comprehensive analysis of the user experiments data we collected. I will put online the presentation in due time. Some lively discussions ensued about the nature of OSM and to what extent it should conform to establish practice in terms of UI (established by Google with for example the Search Bar).

Apart from my own presentation, I just want to highlight some of the more interesting presentations here that I attended:

The first morning for me started to get interesting with a good discussion session on spatial databases, organised by this guy, leading with the definition of their necessary characteristics (does a spatial database need to handle projections!?!). The discussion in my opinion showed still a deep distinction between different application domains (this is obviously a continium): neogeographers who want lean, fast spatial databases and are happy with minimal spatial support functions, versus paleotards who want comprehensive entreprise class spatial databases loaded with advanced spatial features such as topological operators, comprehensive projection support and metadata handling… . These two extremes in my opinion needn’t be opposites, but the challenge for future spatial databases will be implementing a complete set of spatial functionalities while remaining, small, nimble and user friendly!

Before our own presentation, Tim Waters from Geocommons gave an indepth demo of the new features of their 2.0 platform. Geocommons to me now stands as one of the best examples of a new generation of advanced geoweb applications, dangerously (for traditional GIS vendors?) coming closer to fully featured GIS app in the cloud. Geocommons now features a complete set of thematic mapping controls, allowing good cartographic prinicples in webmapping. One thing that struck me as something obvious, yet innovative is their use attribute data histograms to guide users as to the choice of thematic formatting. They also now allow users to store, display and analyse very large datasets with great performance, enabling users to go beyond visualisation to analysis of their data ( notably they now implement a set of topological operators). Again, given the advanced abilities of Geocommons, they had to solve a lot of usability challenges, which we would like to investigate further!

The second day came with a set of more advanced technical discussions, most notably for me a discussion session on differences between webmapping frameworks (nicely captured in this whiteboard). We first established that altough there are other libraries, for most geoweb developers, the choice really comes down to Google Maps API vs Openlayers (on its own or inside a UI framework such as  GeoExt or MapQuery). I won’t go into much detail here, as the discussion and its outcomes have been discussed by both people in the session, as well as members of the OpenLayers team.

Lastly, the conference closed with a very thoughtful presentation by Martjin van Exel on his initiative for the development of an API dedicated to historic OpenStreetMap data. In his presentation, he justified the development of a dedicated separate database and API from the main OSM database, based on some deficiencies of the current OSM data model, for example the fact that the versioning approach doesn’t catch all edits on a given object. Another challenge is the classification of OSM edits according to changes in ground truth, or simply refinements of the same data. Again, Martjin and his collaborators explain this all much better than myself.

We just finished our data collection exercise, which included eye tracking and screen recording ten OSM novices through their first experience registering, adding and editing information to OSM. A OSM test server enabled participants to complete registration, search for a specific scenario area, add and edit 11 features using Potlatch2, while being tracked and observed by a researcher. Although we will present comprehensive results from this study at the conference and the proceedings, I want to give just a quick glimpse into some of the very basic issues we have uncovered so far.

Where is the OSM Search?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6o3ZiosKtnA

We discovered that users have difficulty locating the Search on openstreetmap.org. This has been highlighted before. This video shows the gaze plot of one participant looking for the OSM search. The participant first tries to find the search functionality at the top of the page, scanning from left to right and back in vain. Only after having spent 6 seconds looking at the top, the participant starts to scan and read down the left-hand side of the page, before stumbling over the search at the bottom of the page.

Questions arise over the natural way in which users scan a webpage,and preconceptions about where they would expect a search functionality to appear. According to Nielsen, user reading behaviour of websites exhibits a dominant reading pattern which looks somewhat like an F, with two horizontal movements across the top and middle of a given page, before moving on to a vertical movement scanning the left content section. This pattern has been recognized and adopted by many prominent websites, creating in turn preconceptions in users as to where to expect prominent content/functionalities. Google for example consistently locates their search box on the top-left to middle of a given website.

This video is only an example of the consistent behaviour we have observed of participants exposing the F pattern when looking for Search. As the OSM website now stands, the Search functionality (which works well and is helpful once found!) is not in a clear and quickly visible area of the website, but “hidden” in a “drill-down” area last seen by the user.

As I said, lots more stuff to come out of this study, watch this space if you can’t make it to SOTM-EU!

Afrographique (Infographic of foreign investment on the African…).

Just wanted to highlight a great visualisation of Africa’s diverse economies from the perspective of Foreign Direct Investment levels. A subject close to my heart after 5 years of work in FDI & business analysis and mapping, this is just one example of how to better understand often overlooked patterns of economic investment and development through the use of clever visualisations & maps.

Through lucky timing, I have been able to take on two jobs within the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering here at UCL:

• I have now started work as a Teaching Fellow in the Department, working closely together with Dr Muki Haklay. This role involves the complete spectrum of tasks and responsibilities of a lecturer, taking over the running of the Research Methods for Engineers Msc module, tutorials and practicals in the undergraduate and postgraduate degree courses, the supervision of Msc and PhD students, as well as participating in several research projects, including the Mapping for Change social entreprise.
• I will also soon start work as the principal research fellow for the JISC funded G3 project (check out our blog!). This project is creating an interactive online mapping system to teach geographic concepts in a user friendly manner to new learners from outside the world of geography and GIS. Users will also be introduced geographic data relevant to their particular discipline and know where to look for more. This is an exciting project where I will be focusing on the technical development of both the server and client-side environment.

Apart from my activities as a Teaching and Research Fellow at UCL, I am also investigating in paralell the commercialisation of my EngD research outputs, in close partnership with Bone Wells Urbecon, a economic development consultancy. The business potential of my research lies in improved data & methods for the characterisation of town centres and other business areas, to improve business location decision-making, and sustain local economic development.

… ‘Extreme Citizen Science’ (ExCiteS) research group. The group’s activities focus on the theory, methodologies, techniques and tools that are needed to allow any community to start its own bottom-up citizen science activity, regardless of the level of literacy of the users. Importantly, Citizen Science is understood in the widest sense, including perceptions and views – so participatory mapping and participatory geographic information are integral parts of the activities.

more information at the original post on Muki’s blog: A postdoctoral position and 3 PhD studentships in Extreme Citizen Science « Po Ve Sham – Muki Haklay’s personal blog.

One year on, I reran the analysis on forum participation, and to my regret, not much has changed with a continued fall in user form posts. Forum contribution numbers have now in March 2011 reached the level of mid-2006. 2006 of course marked the release of  Manifold 7.0, which first introduced significant entreprise level features into the product, and which the graph reflected in an impressive spike in forum participation numbers.

Apart from the near stasis in which Manifold 8.0 now is, with some intermittent bug fix updates still provided, other developments have also impacted community participation. Significantly, after a period in January 2011 of intense discussion on the forum, Manifold introduced a new set of forum posting rules that effectively now limit the discussion on technical issues, precluding any discussion of Manifold’s business practices and company developments. Also, copyright infringement claims were logged against various individuals that set up independent Manifold community hubs on sites such as Facebook or LinkedIn (disclosure: I am the administrator of the LinkedIn Manifold user group), resulting in the closure of the Facebook page.

These tightening of business practices interestingly coincided with the apparent transferral of Manifold’s business address from CDA International, based in Carson City, Nevada, to a new company, Manifold Software Limited, with headquarters in Hong-Kong.

What can be a conclusion from all this? As it stands, not much has changed, and although Manifold 8.0 is still as good a product as four years ago, one can only wonder if there will ever be another significant update? Manifold’s competitors are also catching up, and significantly offering new developments in web-based services, an area which Manifold has left to third-party developers to further develop so far. Also some of the key technical advantages of Manifold are eroding, for example true 64bit operation in ESRI’s ArcGIS 10.1, weakening Manifold’s claims of technical superiority.

First day back in the office after an exhausting weekend attending the WhereCampEU unconference here in London.  The conference was really well organised, with great venues and food, and all that at zero cost thanks to very generous sponsors and a great bunch of volunteers! Also thanks for the free beer at Smithy’s sponsored by Axon Active, I thoroughly enjoyed the pub evening.

Attendants came from over 13 different countries, with public and private sector attendants, web2.0 startups, core OpenStreetMap people and a strong presence of academics, specifically UCL!

Slowly, people seem to be uploading their presentations to the wiki, allowing a more complete view of the content presented. Altough in retrospect, I might have made some bad decisions regarding which sessions to attend, my conference highlights included definitely the Skobbler presentation, the Zen of Map Quality , and Steven Feldman’s business model workshops. On the Saturday afternoon, Bob Barr passionate analysis of the current and future state of the Ordnance Survey made for a great closure to the conference. I didn’t make it to the post conference drinks on Saturday.

Overall, I would have wished for less Openstreetmap presentations, at times it felt like a dress rehearsal for the SOTM2010 !!! But, I will definitely return to WhereCampEU 2011, as it is a great opportunity to network with a wide array of relevant players in the geoweb industry and OSM community.

First a disclaimer, my motivation for this post is not to discredit Manifold the software package or CDA International Ltd. I hesitated for a long time before finally deciding to post this very brief and probably flawed “analysis” based on many assumptions, with the aim to start an earnest discussion on the commercial development of Manifold GIS in a wider market context, based on more than just this starting point of analysis.

For the past 6 years the web forum Georeference has been the hub of the Manifold GIS user community, providing a virtual gathering place for users, enabling the development of a vibrant online community of expert users, sharing knowledge, discussing wider issues and helping novice users on a level that is very rarely encountered in other support forums. I believe it is fair to think that for many users of Manifold GIS, it is the first port  of call when looking for information, help and advice with the software, before making use of paid support from Manifold directly. So as more licenses of Manifold are being sold and used , the number of forum users, posts and threads should increase in parallel. Given this premise, forum activity levels then act as a very imperfect proxy for the market penetration rate of the Manifold GIS software package. There are of course several caveats* to this theory.

The forum thankfully records and shares usage statistics (number of posts/threads per month). I assembled and visualised the growth in terms of forum threads and posts over the past 6 years in the graph attached below. In order to give some context, I also included the release dates of significant versions of Manifold on the graph.

One very fundamental observation from this graph is that since  Manifold v8 has been released, there has been a decline of activity on the forum. Whereas in the preceding years, there was almost uninterrupted growth in user forum activity, right now, over two years after the release of v8, the forum contributions have returned to the level of mid 2006, and trend doesn’t imply a return to growth.Also notable has been the gap between the software release cycle prior to v8, and after. Whereas Manifold used to bring out a major revision each year (2004,2005, 2006,2007), for the past two years, users have been waiting for Manifold v9.

Given the caveats detailed below, what conclusions can the graph give us on the general business development context of Manifold?

I believe it is fair to say that CDA, the company developing Manifold GIS, are a high-tech software company (i hesitate to use the term start up, as they have been on the market for 8-10 years), which have a disruptive product, challenging the established GIS market in terms of pricing structure (and some may argue in terms of software quality/features). The study of disruptive technology innovations has been formalised in a number of theories, one very prominent one being the “Crossing the Chasm” model. This model aims to explain the specifics of marketing of high-tech products, and distinguishes two crucial stages: First, the product is marketed to and adopted by “visionaries”, a small set of users which form a small base of early adopters of the product. In order to gain mass market adoption though, the company crucially needs to gain enough momentum to jump the proverbial “Chasm” towards the pragmatists (early majority). A step at which many high-tech companies ultimately fail!

Manifold certainly has achieved a core basis of highly motivated early adopters which act as voluntary technology evangelists, as evidenced by the very supportive online community, as well as a number of user initiated meetings. From this basis, Manifold has over the past 4 years been working to gain momentum to cross the chasm towards the early majority in the GIS market, rapidly issuing improved software versions, opening a partner centre in Silicon Valley, starting to issue press releases and other media related activities. The success of these measures though lies in the continued rapid pace of updates being sold, given that Manifold do not levy annual maintenance fees from its existing user base.

In my opinion, as of right now, CDA Int. Ltd. are stuck in a limbo between an established early adopters user base, and the early majority user base they are trying to reach in order to significantly advance their market penetration. While they seem to be struggling to finish version 9, their existing user base seems to be eroding, increasingly frustrated by a lack of updates and activation issues, while many of the early majority users, more technically conservative, are holding back from buying in to Manifold, waiting to see what v9 brings to the table.

*Important caveats complicating the estimation of the number of users/licenses from forum activity levels :

1. Not every user of Manifold is an active participant to the forum. Most likely only a very small percentage of Manifold users ever contribute to the forum.
2. Most users will only participate when they have a problem/question they need advice for.
   
3. A given person might be responsible for a varying number of Manifold licenses. This can range from one user with one license, to one administrator who is responsible for hundreds of licenses installed across a company, or embedded as a software component invisible to end users.