WEBVTT 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.000 Foreign. 2 00:00:06.000 --> 00:00:18.000 Welcome to the GeoMob podcast, where we discuss geo innovation in any and all forms, whether for fun or profit. Hello, Stephen. 3 00:00:18.000 --> 00:00:20.000 Hi, Ed. Welcome to the podcast. 4 00:00:20.000 --> 00:00:35.000 Welcome to our summer chat, where we're here in July, mid summer. Yeah, been sweating a bit. It's been hot. But let me start, Stephen, of course, by congratulating you and your family. We have some exciting news. 5 00:00:35.000 --> 00:00:46.000 We do indeed. A little grandson was born a couple of weeks ago and the whole family is absolutely besotted with him. 6 00:00:46.000 --> 00:00:47.000 Congratulations. 7 00:00:47.000 --> 00:01:00.000 So there's no Geo news. I could talk for the next 45 minutes about my grandson, but I'll spare our listeners that they can buy me a drink when they see me at the Next Year Mob. 8 00:01:00.000 --> 00:01:14.000 I will actually buy you a drink at the Next Year Mob, as always, which will be on September 16th for those who don't yet have it in the calendar, so please sign up at which you'll be speaking. 9 00:01:14.000 --> 00:01:19.000 Of course I will be speaking and I will do my best to entertain the audience. 10 00:01:19.000 --> 00:01:20.000 Very nice. 11 00:01:20.000 --> 00:01:22.000 With no snapshots. 12 00:01:22.000 --> 00:01:27.000 Any other news on your side, Stephen? What are you thinking of? 13 00:01:27.000 --> 00:02:11.000 So, actually, a quick shout out to all the people who follow Mappery and constitute and contribute Maps in the Wild. My backlog is actually diminishing. For the first time in ages. I'm sort of not scraping the barrel, but I can see we are running a bit low. So if you've got some pictures out there that you thought you might send in, but you haven't got around to doing it, or if you're walking down the street and you see something, take a picture and send it to mapsappery.org or hit us up on Blue sky or Mastodon. 14 00:02:11.000 --> 00:03:18.000 That is actually relevant because I took a picture two days ago when I was out walking around BERLIN that I did 70. So I will do so. I will do so. Speaking of Berlin, Steven, I wanted to. We need to recap our Berlin event, which took place back in June. It was delightful, Stephen. It was honestly, in my opinion, the best Berlin event we've had yet. Partially because of great quality of talks, but also partially because, I mean, there is a certain joy to life on a long summer evening in Berlin after having made it through a very tough winter. And the mood in the crowd, great turnout. It was probably our biggest event yet. Afterwards, we're all at the pub and it was just wonderful, really. Just a delightful summer evening, perfect temperature. We have a great picture that we posted on the milestone that, you know, you can. You really just see everyone's in a great mood. 15 00:03:18.000 --> 00:03:29.000 So now you're making me feel that I have to make the effort to come out there and there's no excuses anymore. 16 00:03:29.000 --> 00:04:02.000 There's no excuses. However, it's not going to be a summer night because our next Berlin event is going to be October 1st. It's in, it's, it's. We have, I think we have four or maybe five speakers already lined up. So, um, and I'm pleased to announce we're going to be doing this in partnership with the GEO IT Organization which is kind of a industry trade body here in, in Germany. So they very generously helped us organize a venue and so it should be a great one. Should be, should be a very good one. 17 00:04:02.000 --> 00:04:04.000 October 1st. I'm right. 18 00:04:04.000 --> 00:04:09.000 October 1st if you want to come on out. So. 19 00:04:09.000 --> 00:04:10.000 Right. 20 00:04:10.000 --> 00:04:31.000 I do want to briefly let me take you through some of the talks that we had in Berlin because they were actually really cool and I think it shows kind of the diversity of topics that we're getting in Berlin. Our first speaker, Marcus, this was actually pretty interesting. Normally we have a no demo rule at geomob because. 21 00:04:31.000 --> 00:04:32.000 For good reasons. 22 00:04:32.000 --> 00:06:29.000 Yes, for good reason. Because usually it doesn't work and then we end up with doing a lot of IT support and stuff. Stuff. But this was kind of one where you kind of had to see it to get it because it was. He has taken OpenStreetMap data and combined it with you know, these, I don't know if you've ever played with these, these, the Facebook, the Meta VR goggles where so basically, so, so basically that he, I mean he, he has built some kind of app where you can fly through open street mount, you know, literally by like moving your arms like an airplane kind of and it controls the speed and, and you can kind of dive up and down and stuff. So it was actually really cool and a great validation for all the people out there who are mapping rooftops on OpenStreetMap to make it more realistic. So very cool. And then we had several other talks that really stuck out to me. I mean then we had a talk about a woman, kind of a more academic work analyzing the housing crisis here in Berlin. But then we had the guy who became our best speaker, Oliver. He has in his. As a hobby. I don't know if you've ever played any of these kind of games, these kind of world conquering games like Civilization or something like that. You know, where the goal of the video game is kind of you, you build up your society over time and stuff like that. And anyway he's kind of Built his own engine for doing that over the years. And that was actually pretty interesting. And it was funny because afterwards he told us at the pub, he was like, this is the first time I've been able. Normally when I try to tell people about this hobby of mine, no one wants to hear about it. And he was like, it was a delightful. 23 00:06:29.000 --> 00:06:48.000 We had a young woman on the podcast a couple of years ago who drew maps for online games. I think. Yeah, I do recall that designer who did that kind of stuff. But this sounds really amazing. 24 00:06:48.000 --> 00:08:04.000 It was very interesting and he went to crazy extents. Like for example, he scraped some Chinese company's website that they. They import marble or something like that to get the locations of where marble. So in this game you can have different resources spread around. And so, you know, he would try to figure out where people could get marble and stuff like anyway, it was a true labor of love. Next we had a guy, Amir from this company. This, this. Unfortunately he didn't come along to the pub because I wanted to ask him. This was very interesting because they build a fantastic looking application for sailors, recreational sailors to do navigation and of course with the weather and stuff and the visualizations and were really interesting and really getting into the use case of like, you know, on the boat, you know, you need to see it on your iPad, but it might be really sunny, you know, or. And things like that and connecting to the data of the boat and things like that. But the thing that was kind of bizarre about this is that they do this from Berlin, which is not. I mean there is some recreational sailing kind of on lakes and stuff here. But you know, you would expect it more like maybe Hamburg or something for 25 00:08:04.000 --> 00:08:07.000 small boats or for your. 26 00:08:07.000 --> 00:08:15.000 Yeah, like you know, little sailing boats. But also, you know, people going on like real tours like, like sailing around the Mediterranean or whatever. 27 00:08:15.000 --> 00:08:22.000 But why wouldn't you have a. I mean those boats have got navigation systems on them all. 28 00:08:22.000 --> 00:09:07.000 Yes, but he said they're not actually pretty good and they're actually super expensive. The kind of ones from Garmin and stuff like that. And in terms of usability, I mean he showed us several screenshots which. So I guess, you know, you can, you can. I'm not the expert on this but yes, there are navigation systems but they're very expensive and very. So they're targeting more kind of the recreational sailor people who are also kind of using paper charts and things like that. And maybe they have kind of a basic, you know, of course they have a GPS on their, on their boat or Maybe on their phone or whatever, but it doesn't necessarily have like all the, the data about the wind and all those kind of stuff. 29 00:09:07.000 --> 00:09:09.000 Right, okay, okay, okay. 30 00:09:09.000 --> 00:09:21.000 And you know, they're targeting the niche of you don't want to spend a massive amount of money on a full professional setup, having been on boats in 31 00:09:21.000 --> 00:09:29.000 less than pleasant weather where you've got no mobile reception anyway. 32 00:09:29.000 --> 00:09:32.000 Well, that's the other issue, of course. 33 00:09:32.000 --> 00:09:38.000 I can think of nothing worse than trying to look on a phone or a tablet. 34 00:09:38.000 --> 00:10:02.000 Well, he also made the point of a lot of those tools that you mentioned. I mean, one thing that was very interesting is he really went deep on understanding the use case. So one use case is of course while you're on the boat navigating in real time. But another big use case is the planning of the trip. Obviously you want to do that at home on your desktop. 35 00:10:02.000 --> 00:10:03.000 That makes sense. 36 00:10:03.000 --> 00:10:27.000 Then another use case is of course the after the trip, reflecting on the journey and analyzing it and maybe sharing it with your friends and stuff like that. So it was an interesting product in its own right. It's called Orca. But also it was an interesting talk about really understanding the use case for these navigational tools. 37 00:10:27.000 --> 00:10:39.000 Having said that, I think navigation on a sailing boat is a classic use case for paper. 38 00:10:39.000 --> 00:10:48.000 Yeah. The problem is the paper is out of date, of course, and the world changes. I mean if there's a big storm or whatever. 39 00:10:48.000 --> 00:11:00.000 No, it doesn't give you weather, but it's just knowing that you've got charts that are usually laminated in plastic. So they're not just paper charts. They're sure. 40 00:11:00.000 --> 00:11:05.000 But what I mean is like the depths and things change quite. 41 00:11:05.000 --> 00:11:42.000 Yeah, I agree, they do change. But anyone who goes out in a boat and then you're more than a mile away from the coast, you really need to have some navigation. You really need to understand navigation and you really need to be able to revert back to a compass, a GPS and a chart. Well, because technology can go to go to crap. And then, you know, these are potentially, you know, even for small, you know, for leisure sailors, they can be life threatening events. 42 00:11:42.000 --> 00:11:51.000 Well, this is the point where I should again repeat our call to have someone come give a talk at geomab to explain to us how a sextant works. 43 00:11:51.000 --> 00:11:52.000 Okay. 44 00:11:51.000 --> 00:13:03.000 Which is I would love to have that talk. So I don't know if anyone out there is listening and who actually knows how that type of thing works, which. But that would be a great talk. Anyway, just to close out at the Berlin event Then our final talk, I also actually really quite enjoyed because this was a startup called Terra Task. What was interesting here is that it's an app for landscape planners, which is a micro geospatial service. It had a great. Based on the screenshots, I haven't used that, but it had great, great us. A very impressive looking service. You tell like a lot of thought had been put into really understanding the use case of these landscape designers and kind of. And I think particularly in the age of AI where making software has gotten in theory simpler, I think there'll be even more of a premium on this usability and making it understandable for the, for the, the customer or the consumer. 45 00:13:03.000 --> 00:13:19.000 It's interesting that in 2026 at a GeoMob we've got somebody talking about landscape design and that sort of thing, which is the actual origins of esri. 46 00:13:19.000 --> 00:13:21.000 All right, I did not know that. 47 00:13:21.000 --> 00:13:27.000 Yeah, that's where Jack Dangerman started out in that space, you know. 48 00:13:27.000 --> 00:13:28.000 Okay. 49 00:13:28.000 --> 00:13:40.000 So, yeah, and he built some software tools to help him to do that. And then those software tools became the business. So there you go. Yeah. 50 00:13:40.000 --> 00:14:03.000 Anyway, it was circle. We've come full circle. It was, it was a wonderful event and thank you to all of our speakers and thank you to our hosts and yeah, it was just. It really feels like Berlin has kind of hit maturity and I would say certainly the equal of geomob London at this point. So in many regards. So. 51 00:14:03.000 --> 00:14:06.000 Yeah, but I haven't spoken there yet. 52 00:14:06.000 --> 00:14:12.000 Well, no one's stopping you, Stephen. You gotta get. That being said, I think the lineup is full for October 1st, so. 53 00:14:12.000 --> 00:14:14.000 Okay. 54 00:14:14.000 --> 00:14:59.000 But yeah, very, very fun evening. And now we're. Now we're in a bit of a break for the summer and in September I think we have four events already on the schedule. First of all, big congratulations to the organizers in Dublin. They've got another event lined up, I think in October. And Bernie in Fredericton in Canada, he's got the second event on the schedule, so things are moving. I think we'll probably get a Barcelona event at some point in October or so to get in on that. Yeah, it was a. We had a great run there. April, May, June. 55 00:14:59.000 --> 00:15:01.000 I know this is a stupid question. 56 00:15:01.000 --> 00:15:02.000 Yeah. 57 00:15:01.000 --> 00:15:08.000 Right. But why is Fredericton got the initials yfc? 58 00:15:08.000 --> 00:15:12.000 Okay, so that is the airport code and I believe. 59 00:15:12.000 --> 00:15:14.000 Why the hell is it yfc? 60 00:15:14.000 --> 00:15:49.000 I. Okay, all right, calm down. I believe this is a vestige of the fact that all airports in Canada start with Y. Okay, so at least, at the very least, Vancouver. Let's as starts with a Y if I. Which also doesn't particularly make sense, but I think they, you know, I think at some point when the airport codes were invented, whatever in the 30s or 20s, you know, a century ago, they chose. Why? 61 00:15:49.000 --> 00:16:01.000 Okay, okay, you see, you know this because of the geocoder. You know all these weird and wonderful facts about places and their names and their codes and. 62 00:16:01.000 --> 00:16:07.000 Well, Steven, it's true. And actually that is a good segue to my brief. My update on OpenCage. 63 00:16:07.000 --> 00:16:09.000 I teed you up there. I teed you up. Go ahead. 64 00:16:09.000 --> 00:18:05.000 What's going on with Open Cage on opencage? We. As you may know, one use case of our service is vehicle tracking and one of our customers for some time now we've returned kind of speed limit data. So if you. We have an optional parameter called road info whereby, you know, the standard geocoding is we return the address of a point if you send us coordinates. But if you, if you set road info, the road info mode, then we return information about the road. So you could imagine if someone's tracking a truck on a highway, they're not interested in what address it's passing at that moment on the highway. They're more interested on the details of this road that they're on, including for example, the speed limit. And until now we've kind of done very basic speed limit type information about. But this customer, they wanted us to go deeper on this. And thankfully the global Opus re map community of course has gone into insane pedantic detail on this. So I spent several days going deep on speed limit data and you would be a bit shocked at how many different variations of speed limits there are. For example, speed limits based on the time of the day, on the day of the week, on time of year, type of vehicle. Then you also have kind of variable speed limit, potentially a variable. Speed limits would set dynamically based on the conditions. Like of course, if it's raining or if it's high traffic or you know, where there'll be kind of an electronic sign that. So there's a lot of different ways to define speed limits. And OpenKitch now returns all those brilliant. 65 00:18:05.000 --> 00:18:18.000 I thought you were going to go off in a slightly different direction there and talk about the different ways that different OpenStreetMap communities mapped speed limits. 66 00:18:18.000 --> 00:19:08.000 No, they're quite consistent actually. I will say this. One of the complaints about OpenStreetMap in the past was that the pro and the con of OpenStreetMap is people can tag anything in any way they want. However, there has been a lot of work over the, I think, the last 10 years to really get better at standardizing things. Also, the editors, I mean, most people are editing via one of the standard editing tools and they kind of define a standard and they've become, I think, much better in their usability of how you input the data and thus helping people not make silly mistakes or unintended errors. Nevertheless, of course, there is still some diversity, just because the world is a very diverse place and people do things in all kinds of weird different ways 67 00:19:08.000 --> 00:19:26.000 all around the world, as I discovered when I tried. I had this idea to make a map of allotments. All right, I can't quite. I don't know what prompted it, but I think it was probably doing a bit of work in the garden with my wife. 68 00:19:26.000 --> 00:19:33.000 You should explain what an allotment is, because that, for example, is a British term. No one in America refers to an allotment. 69 00:19:33.000 --> 00:20:48.000 An allotment is a public space where you can get a plot, a section of this space to grow vegetables or fruit or whatever you want to grow on it. So they're like. For people who live in urban areas where you don't have much garden space and you can't really grow vegetables and fruit in any volume, allotments are the answer and they're enormously popular in the uk. Their waiting list to get allotments. And I thought it would be interesting. I was looking on Open street map and saw an allotment and it made me think, oh, that would be an interesting thing to map. And I wonder if there are differences between different countries. And of course, this was a rabbit hole that I had to disappear down for a week because the first thing was I had to find a solution to actually extracting all the allotment data from OpenStreetMap. I won't go into all the complications, but overpass is not friendly to people like me. 70 00:20:48.000 --> 00:20:57.000 Overpass is very powerful, but it's difficult to wield correctly. 71 00:20:57.000 --> 00:21:46.000 But eventually, with help from the kind people in the OpenStraight map community who I connect with on Mastodon and stuff, I found a solution, or somebody found a solution and said, just click here and you'll get what you want. But the reason I was going into this is that. So I thought, now I've got a data set of all the. All the things that are tagged land use allotment in OpenStreetMap. Right? And I assumed, you know, I mean, presumably the term allotment comes from the original English OpenStreetMappers because they would have mapped some of these things and tagged them as allotments and it spread around the world. The allotments were allotments. 72 00:21:46.000 --> 00:21:53.000 There are a lot of tags that are very British. Yes. And with British spellings, for example, neighborhood and stuff. 73 00:21:53.000 --> 00:22:03.000 But it's not fair that they use our language, they use our tags and then they apply them to completely different things. 74 00:22:03.000 --> 00:22:06.000 Yeah, I'll let people know, Steven. 75 00:22:06.000 --> 00:23:18.000 Anyway, and I was really fortunate because I built this day. I got this data set and I started playing around with it and mapping it and. And Andy Allen, I saw him at the last year mob and I happened to be chatting about this. Oh. He said, oh, allotments. Right. And the different understandings that people have of allotments. In the uk, it's a plot of land, it's about, I don't know, a quarter of an acre, a half an acre that you have to grow vegetables on. It's quite small as you move east. Oh. And in the uk, if you're lucky, you've got enough space to put a garden shed on your allotment to store some tools and things, and then the vandals can break into it and steal your tools. As you move further east in Europe, the allotments get bigger and some of them are big enough that they put up large sheds and people go and stay there for the weekend and work their allotment at the weekend and sleep in these large sheds. And it's a sort of summer. Not a summer home, but on the way. 76 00:23:18.000 --> 00:23:20.000 Dacha. 77 00:23:20.000 --> 00:23:44.000 No, when you get into Russia, you get dashas, which are colossal, you know, hundreds of acres. Right. And in fact, you see this amazing pattern where the size of an allotment rapidly goes up as you head east. Anyway, so they're not really allotments in English, but yeah, 78 00:23:44.000 --> 00:23:52.000 it's funny because to my knowledge, this concept doesn't really exist in the US nearly as much, because people just have a house with a yard. 79 00:23:52.000 --> 00:23:54.000 Yeah. Yes. 80 00:23:54.000 --> 00:24:01.000 I have seen it in some bigger cities, but it's a very niche thing. It's not a commonly done thing. 81 00:24:01.000 --> 00:24:07.000 When I downloaded the data set, there was this amazing void in North America. 82 00:24:07.000 --> 00:24:10.000 Yeah. People just have. 83 00:24:10.000 --> 00:24:16.000 When I built the map, I only mapped Europe and Asia. 84 00:24:16.000 --> 00:24:19.000 Gotcha. 85 00:24:19.000 --> 00:24:20.000 Yeah. 86 00:24:19.000 --> 00:24:53.000 Well, that's cool. Yeah. I mean, this is the challenge of OpenStreetMap, because the world is a very diverse place. Actually, it's one of our biggest challenges at OpenCage that we struggle with is software developers. Typically, we're often dealing with software developers who are using geocoding in their project but they may not have a, you know, extensive geospatial background in any way, shape or form. And one of the biggest challenges we have to overcome is people just assume the entire world works the same way as their home country. 87 00:24:53.000 --> 00:24:55.000 Yeah. 88 00:24:55.000 --> 00:25:11.000 And they operate, they design their software to, with those assumptions. And of course that's completely, completely wrong, particularly around things like postcodes and things like that or what type of administrative hierarchy places have and things like that. 89 00:25:11.000 --> 00:25:16.000 But even the simple things like 90 00:25:16.000 --> 00:25:17.000 in 91 00:25:17.000 --> 00:26:01.000 a lot of Europe we have a pattern which runs typically house, building number, street, maybe neighborhood, maybe city, zip code of some sort. And that's a fairly common pattern in a lot of European countries, certainly in the uk. But you go to other parts of the world and there's nothing like that. You know, you get, you get house numbers at the end, you get streets that are, you know, in North America, all those 14th Street, 17th street, which confused the geocoder because it thinks it's number 14 at street and things like that. 92 00:26:01.000 --> 00:26:46.000 Yes. Well, and then we have actually last week or so, maybe two weeks ago, I don't remember, we discovered a customer complained that we were doing a poor job of geocoding in the city of Edmonton, Canada. And there they also have numbered streets, but they don't use any kind of moderate. They don't say second street, they say two streets. So you have addresses that are just like 1, 2, 32 street. And of course it's difficult to parse that because you don't know 1, 2, 3, space 2. Is that a house number and a road name or is that a house number and an apartment number or is that. So it's a bit of a nightmare. Anyway, that's the joy of geo. 93 00:26:46.000 --> 00:27:03.000 Yeah. And in fact that's sort of the general principle, isn't it? That we try, we try and apply global. We try and apply our standards from our local market to a global situation. Which is just not possible. 94 00:27:03.000 --> 00:27:04.000 Exactly. 95 00:27:04.000 --> 00:27:11.000 Yeah. But it keeps it interesting. 96 00:27:11.000 --> 00:27:30.000 I mean, one of the things I most enjoy about my job is of learning about different parts of the world, despite sitting at my desk in Berlin. But you kind of go on a little virtual journey all around the world every day, learning different things. So on that cheery note, Stephen, maybe we should wrap up and wish everyone a good summer. 97 00:27:30.000 --> 00:27:32.000 Have a great summer. 98 00:27:32.000 --> 00:27:51.000 Have a great summer. Obviously the podcast will continue. We have a lot of episodes coming up and actually we've been recording quite a few so that we can take a bit of a break in August. Hope everyone has a good break and comes back recharged and we got a full lineup of events in the autumn Maker. 99 00:27:51.000 --> 00:28:03.000 Make a promise to yourself to come to a geomob in London, in Fredericton, in Berlin, in Dublin, and probably Barcelona, Lisbon and a whole load of other places. 100 00:28:03.000 --> 00:28:08.000 I'm sure. I'm sure we will get some more on the calendar, hopefully by the time this episode even goes live. 101 00:28:08.000 --> 00:28:09.000 Have a great summer. 102 00:28:09.000 --> 00:28:52.000 Have a great summer everyone. Bye Bye. Thanks for joining us today on the GeoMob podcast. We hope you enjoyed the discussion. You can get the show notes over on the website, which is@thegeomob.com and while you're there, you can sign up for our monthly newsletter and find links to our accounts on Mastodon and LinkedIn. So you can stay up to date on all our upcoming events. We hope to see you at an event soon.