Tomorrow marks the visit of Simon Lannon, Senior Research Associate at the Welsh Scool of Architecture, Cardiff University. This follows the joint-drafting of the STEEV client-side web application functional specification and delivery of energy efficiency variables complete with policy scenarios (decarbonisations of the electricity supply & removal of gas from homes, and business as usual). Both datasets incorporate energy improvements and renewable technologies. There is much to discuss in terms of spatial referencing (TOID versus centroid), licencing issues (with respect to the OS Mastermap data and the street address files used licenced from the Post Office?), and the data schema and transfer. The CHEST-OS Licence is due to be reviewed and updated in August of this year and this may well have (positive) implications for delivery of licenced content over the internet.
The current OS licence agreement states:
“Open Access Services” means services provided by a Datacentre to other academic services and development projects allowing access through an In-Line Service to Existing Digital Maps and Digital Maps without Secure Authentication. Open Access Services include, but are not limited to, Go-Geo!, GeoXwalk and e-MapScholar.
where
An In-line service is defined as
““In-Line Service” means a set of functions, provided by a Datacentre, that controls access and execution of operations for the exchange of geo-spatial data and maps over the internet with other academic services and development projects. Requests and responses are structured according to ISO Standard 19119 or any other industry standards and enabled by a class of software known as middleware.
Our understanding is that the STEEV visualisation tool (as an In-Line Service) may allow us to use and display derived OS content over the internet without Secure Authentication (bearing in mind the actual geometries are neither available nor obtainable) as context mapping. This will have a positive bearing in terms of providing access to the tool for proposed demonstration purposes at RETROFIT50 and related workshops later in the project.
Our trusty GIS Analyst (Fiona) has also been experimenting with visualisation techniques such as heat maps (scoping the use of Acidmaps – http://acidmaps.org/ and the graduated colours/symbols functionality within ArcMap). Our initial thinking was that should there be licencing issues then an open tool could be built in parallel using open mapping products to visualise the energy efficiency variables however the fine spatial granularity of the said variables renders such an approach inappropriate. Ho Hum. Back to that particular drawing board!
