This month has seen the publication of my review of “Rethinking Maps: New Frontiers in Cartographic Theory”, editted by Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin and Chris Perkins, in Environment and Planning B.

The review begins thus:

For more see the full review. Sorry if you aren’t a subscriber to the journal, I suspect I can’t post the full text though.

A proof of the first chapter, courtesy of Martin Dodge, is available here.

Google maps has just added cycling directions and cartography, just for the US now but hopefully for the UK later. For me, an avid cyclist, this would be a welcome addition. Let’s have a quick look at the routing and cartography offered:

It is nice that google have decided to take cycling seriously as a method of travel, the cartography of the maps is clear and seems to suggest good cycle routes away from the major roads, utilising known cycle provision. Bike paths are represented by dark green; Bike lanes are represented by light green; and roads that aren’t specifically meant for bicycles, but are suitable, receive a dashed green line. The routing also seems to weight in favour of flatter ways as opposed to arduous hill climbs.

A quick comparison to Open Cycle Map, I feel is favourable to Google:

The Open Street Map based cycle map feels cluttered, the cartography isn’t as clean, informative or effective as Google, and there is no routing. On the plus side Open Cycle Map does feature a number of useful points of interest.

I very much look forward to Google extending their cycling map into the UK, there are no plans as yet, so fingers crossed.

The British National Archives has released a large number of files relating to UFO sightings between 1994 and 2000. These previous classified documents detail (often amusingly or excruciatingly) the reports made by members of the public to the MoD regarding the sighting of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs). As a geographer and a user of GIS, one of the overriding beliefs is that there exists an abundance of location information stored in documents waiting to be captured and analysed spatially. The records concerning UFO sightings are one such example, hundreds of reports of sightings that all give a location in addition to a lot of other information including numerous drawings of the ‘craft’ that were seen. Because I was interested in testing out the new “Unlock” geocoding service available though Edina Digimap for academic subscribers I decided to extract some of the place information from the first UFO file and use unlock to geocode the sightings.

For those who need clarification,geocoding refers to the process whereby a textual reference to a location, such as a place name, an address, a postcode etc. is given a spatial reference, i.e. a pair of coordinates that can be represented on a map. What “Unlock” does is take a given placename, look for it in a gazetteer – a dictionary of all known places- and when it finds it, returns the coordinate inforamtion associated with that placename in the gazeteer. The Unlock service can be found at: http://digimap.edina.ac.uk/unlock/

Using this service allowed me to create the following map:

I decided to classify the sightings fairly crudely by season as the impression I got from the data was that there were very few sighting in the summer, and more in the autumn and winter. These sightings are mostly from 1994, part of the earliest tranche of sightings released and are to be found in the first file released by the National Archive. As a result this only accounts for about a quarter of all sightings in this year. The MoD also like to make maps, however their techniques aren’t quite so well defined as we can now achieve with GIS and geocoding technologies:

Nevertheless the map is quite illustrative of the major patterns in UFO reporting (as this may be different from raw sightings).

The only downside to this whole process is that “Unlock” the site I used to geocode some of the data is actually quite poor. The site looks nice and the data is undoubtedly very strong, however it is a terrible user experience, there didn’t seem to be any accessible intructions on how to use the site and when I copied from the examples given to try and geocode my 50 places as a batch the output seemed to randomly drop some places in favour of several options for others, in spite of this individual searches showed that the dropped places did exist. An assessment of the sites usability is required – I can’t imagine it being used currently by anyone beyond real specialists, certainly no one will be unlocking much data unless they have a good familiarity with a number of web protocols and data structures. Hopefully in time though it will become more friendly.

It seems that everyone has been waiting for Apple’s latest invention, the iPad, however whilst others chose to speculate on the dimensions, aesthetic and performance (such as the Guardian’s relentless coverage), whilst giving little thought regarding why it might be useful, I thought I’d think about what it offers to the GIS community. We are of course assuming in has a GPS onboard, otherwise you’d need an add-on or hack.

Steve Jobs with an iPad (source: Gizmodo.com)

Essentially what we have is a tablet computer, these are not particularly new, a previous example having been the series of HP Compaq tablets. This technology is also not new to Apple who previously put out the ‘Newton’ platform for PDAs and had their OS X (illegally) modified by company Axiotron to run on a tablet-style computer based on reassembling a MacBook and christened the ‘Modbook‘.

Technologies such as smartphones are really pushing forward what can be done geospatially, the Apple iPhone, for instance, allows apps to connect to GPS and provide ‘location based’ services- a popular term a couple of years ago which has still yet to really take off. However it is the Android platform which really seems to be pushing forward mapping on smartphones, with Garmin and Nokia forging ahead with development. This seems logically connected to the fact that Google, officially an internet giant, is behind the android operating systems and has itself invested heavily in mapping, most recently launching the ‘Streetview’ components of it’s Google Maps resource. However, much of what currently exists on smartphones is navigationally based, using prerendered tiles and allowing little in the way of interaction, editting or analysis. Ostensibly this is because smartphone still lack the computing power to conduct GIS functions. This is where tablets come in, just a netbooks occupy the inter- smartphone/laptop territory, tablets do likewise but with a perspective different to the netbook, rather than simply being a tool for browsing the internet, a tablet computer offers laptop functionality with a more portable and user-friendly set up for people in the field or on the move.

iPad shot showing map and hinting at location and thus GPS capability - crucial for field GIS. (source: Gizmodo.com)

Currently, the most notable mobile-GIS is ESRIs ArcPad. ArcPad is software which complements their flagship ArcGIS Desktop product, which is currently on release 9.3, but look set to introduce 9.4 (now upgraded to ArcGIS 10) sometime soon. ArcPad is fundamentally designed as a GIS tool for experts, in the field. As such it focuses on likely requirements such as editting, digitisation, attribute tagging, and display. Unfortunately ArcPad, as with ArcGIS desktop, only works on Microsoft OSs (either mobile or PC) thus it is unlikely to be much use on the Apple iSlate without either a virtual machine or dual boot (and why would you want to do that to your new, long awaited Apple product?!). Users of ArcPad will note too that the appearance of ArcPad (see this ESRI pdf for some screenshots) is very much connected to Microsoft’s pre-7 lack of design aesthetic and many note instabilities in the software, either as a result of the platform, or due to ESRI software’s legendary instability.

So ArcPad is unlikely to revolutionise field GIS on the new Apple iPad anytime soon then. So what other solutions are there? Well, Fieldworker seems like a potential solution, but I was too bored by their website’s sales rhetoric to really figure out exactly what it is they wanted to sell me. Likewise Starpal’s HGIS (Handheld Geographic Information System) might be a good candidate if I could get over their mid 90s website. Others such as FieldSmart by Mapframe or PocketGIS look more promising. However the thing that would most excite with regard to the potential offered by new tablet PCs and mobile GIS would be a port for Quantum GIS (qGIS). Whilst some functionality is lacking, and perhaps it has been a bit rushed to 1.0 status, the elements that would be most applicable to a mobile GIS are there, such as digitisation and display. Similarly, members of the community seem to think that creating a mobile version of this open source software would not be a huge effort. I suppose with this in mind, it might not be inconceivable to look at openGeoda as something that could also be developed to run as a mobile GIS, although it will likely require more work than qGIS. Nevertheless, I’ve recently been running openGeoda and qGIS on my Macbook and they seem to complement each other well.

So, essentially what I’m suggesting is that Apple’s latest product offers the potential for some new innovations in mobile GIS and I for one would be excited to see them coming from an open source angle.

One of the most popular media narratives regarding care in the NHS is based around the concept of a ‘postcode lottery’. It is however something that is also acknowledged by the Department of Health in some areas of health care, for instance in the NHS Cancer Plan it is noted in chapter 1 that:

“In addition to relatively poor survival rates, the NHS also suffers from unacceptable variations in access to high quality cancer services.” (DoH, 2000)

The term ‘postcode lottery’ thus refers to a situation in which there exists geographic variation in the quality and type of treatment that prospective patients receive. As such the care any given patient receives is connected to where they live, thus the term ‘postcode lottery’ arises. The existence of such a situation is attributable to any number of factors including NHS resource allocation, insufficient numbers of specialist staff in a given area, accessibility to key services, and the possible presence of another postcode lottery centring around prescribing and access to pharmacy services. Connected to this idea is the proven fact of the ‘inverse care law’ first described by Julian Tudor Hart in 1971 which shows that communities most at risk from bad health tend to have the worst levels of access to the required NHS services. Wealth is often a factor in this function, in that the areas most at risk from poor health are likely to be those areas which are more deprived (as per the IMD) or from neighbourhoods which are again less-desirable or well-off (as per OAC).

The particular findings of the Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) relates to access to surgery to combat obesity, a particularly popular topic within the NHS at the moment:

“Access to NHS weight-loss surgery is ‘inconsistent, unethical and completely dependent on geographical location’, say senior surgeons” (RCS, 2010)

The RCS goes on to make a somewhat sinister claim that in some areas where budgets and resources are stretched, NHS decision makers are ignoring guidelines and denying patients’ access to surgery. Whilst in others, patients who already meet the criteria are forced to wait until either they become more obese or develop life-threatening illnesses like diabetes.The RCS calls for a basic tenent of the NHS systems to be upheld – universal service and the values that surround it that are enshrined in the NHS Constitution (2009) regarding fairness:

“Surgeons want to see consistency and transparency across the NHS so that patients are clear about what they are entitled to and doctors can treat all patients equally.” (RCS, 2010)

The main findings from an anonymous survey of UK bariatric surgeons (surgeons with a specialism in obesity related surgery) reveals that:

• Approximately two thirds of surgeons said patients who are eligible under guidelines are refused surgery in their centres.
• Criteria for surgery varies dramatically depending on geographical location and within the same Strategic Health Authorities.
• Some centres are treating patients with referrals from multiple Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) with different eligibility criteria meaning that patients with a BMI of 60 + are being refused surgery in the same hospitals that are treating patients with a BMI of 40 or less.
• Some Primary Care Trusts are refusing to commission any obesity surgery.

English Strategic Health Authorities acts as containers for Primary Care Trusts. The RCS has reported that even within some SHAs there exist PCTs which have a different policy towards obesity care. Thus the postcode lottery exists at a number of scales.

Guidelines set out by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) were intended to herald the end of postcode lotteries, but in this case it seems that the power of local commisioning has meant that the national guidelines haven’t been followed. This has led to a call for the Department of Health (DH) to invest further in a strategy that will uphold patients right to not be subject to unequal access to treatment.

Finally, one wonders about the merits of refusing access to treatment, when, as Dr David Haslam (Chair of The National Obesity Forum), states:

“Bariatric surgery is amongst the most clinically-effective and cost-effective specialities in any field of medicine, preventing premature death, and transforming lives, whilst saving vast amounts of money for the NHS and the economy. Even the most cynical taxpayer should support bariatric surgery, alongside clinicians, in opposing the unethical and immoral barriers to surgery imposed by NHS purse-string holders.” (RCS, 2010, emphasis added)

Acknowledgements

The post is derived from the RCS website here

The map image is from data subject to: Crown Copyright 2009 UKBorders, an Edina/JISC supplied service.

We all know that representation in GIS is achieved primarily in either of two ways: with objects or with fields. This classic dichotomy was discussed at length during the 1990s when it suddenly became apparent that it is important to consider how the mapped representation of geographical phenomena actually changes our experiences of these in reality, or vice-versa.

If we look at a GI science text (the top of the pile being Longley et al, 2005) we learn quite simply that objects represent discrete entities that we might encounter such as cars, wheelbarrows, buildings, fences, roads or fruit. These discrete objects are best encoded as either a point, line or area (polygon). This gives the discrete object a kind of exacting presence in the GIS environment. On the other hand, things that aren’t discrete, i.e. they exist not as a single definable thing, but as a continuous ‘everywhere’, can be lumped into the ‘field’ category, which we know as ‘raster images’. These rasters are grids of cells which cover a defined area entirely and hold a value for each cell giving a defacto continuous field. Obviously using cells means it isn’t continuous, but lets ignore that and pretend we’re happy; in the end a good resolution will fool you into thinking that a raster represents a continuous space.

Now, vectors have generally risen to dominate the discourse of how we see the world. The cutting-edge products are all vectors, OS mastermap for example, and rasters have fallen by the way side a bit, as a social researcher it is easy to look at rasters as ‘something environmental GIS’ers do’. Nonetheless it is all too easy to find impassioned reasonings for the use of raster, or field, representations in GIS – as Helen Couclelis (1992) wryly states: “People manipulate objects (but cultivate fields)”. Thus there exists a tension in how we ought to think about representing our world and thus how we actually see it.

A Grid Cell with red flares representing the position of a subject when the neuron was 'on'.

Which brings me onto the main point: it seems that scientists in UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience has established how the brain creates internal maps of new environments. The brain uses ‘Grid Cells’. The grid cells are actually special neurons which hold a sort of ‘spatial memory’, when you encounter a space these neurons fire in a sequence that, when mapped, show up as geometrically regular, triangular grids. Regarding this, Dr Caswell Barry said:

“It is as if grid cells provide a cognitive map of space. In fact, these cells are very much like the longitude and latitude lines we’re all familiar with on normal maps, but instead of using square grid lines it seems the brain uses triangles.”

So perhaps Helen Couclelis was right, we do use fields and luckily within GIS we have implemented any number of geometric rasters, obviously a square raster is standard, but triangles are not uncommon and neither are hexagonal matrices. What is more, the triangulated irregular network (TIN) acts as a kind of go-between, part vector object and part continuous field. Therefore, your brain on GIS is actually very closely related to your brain anyway! Perhaps a more field-based view of the world is called for.

References

The original article on this discovery is here.

Couclelis H (1992) “People manipulate objects (but cultivate fields): Beyond the raster-vector debate in GIS”, in Theories and methods of Spatio-Temporal Reasoning in Geographic Space, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 639, Springer, Berlin.

Longley P, Goodchild M, Maguire D and Rhind D (2005) Geographic Information Systems and Science 2nd Edition, Wiley, London.

I have recently been made secretary of the Output Area Classification User Group (OACUG), a research group based at the Royal Statistical Society (RSS). This is a second role to complement my position as Postgraduate Representative of the Quantitative Methods Research Group (QMRG) at the Royal Geographical Society (RGS). My colleague Alex Singleton has also been made chair of the OACUG.

The Output Area Classification (OAC) is a geodemographic classification, meaning that it is a system for characterising the type of people that live in a given area based upon their demographic data from the 2001 census. There are 3 hierarchical levels to OAC, consisting of 7 groups at the top, 21 at the middle and 52 at the bottom level. The intent of OAC is to provide a simple and general measure of ‘neighbourhood type’. The scale at which OAC is reported is Output Area (OA) which is an areal unit that contains roughly 125 households.

A good visualisation of OAC exists at on the London Profiler site.

Further information at the OACUG and QMRG.