Emma Sutton, EDINA Geoservices Support Leader previews the changes coming up in Digimap.

We’ve heard all sorts of wonderful things that people have been doing with the data that we offer. What I’m going to tell you a bit about now is what we’re doing to give it to you faster, more accessibly and so on and so on. I think Tom gave me a title of ‘What EDINA is working on next’ – which seemed a little blunt, so I’ve gone with ‘progress is impossible without change’ and for those who know the rest of that quote - those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. I’m sure my colleagues will tell you that I am very good at changing my mind but I’ll leave it to you to decide whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

So, while it looks as though things have not changed very much on the outside - this is a bit of a spot the difference slide – while this hasn’t changed very much on the outside, of course at the backend we’ve been working quite hard with lots of fine tuning of engines underneath the bonnets and so on. What we’ve done here is replace Laser-Scan software – which is now 1Spatial – to use Cadcorp stuff. The last procurement exercise we did was in 1999, and while the Laser-Scan software was very useful of its day, its time had run its course and we were struggling a little bit. We now have new stuff from Cadcorp, the reengineering of the back end is now complete. Tim I’m sure will tell you he’s relieved not to be starting things during peak periods every 2 or 3 days, and the Cadcorp stuff will now in fact restart itself without us noticing, which is wonderful.

Those of you who are end users of Digimap will notice that we’ve had some fairly significant improvements in efficiency, capacity, stability and performance – it stays up for longer and it stays up on and on and on, which is wonderful. You’ll also notice we have a new mapping client called ‘Roam’. For those who haven’t seen it, I’m sure there are several of my colleagues who would be prepared to give you a demonstration at the back of the room at some point. Most of you I think will have seen it.

So, part two of the reengineering goes on to concentrate on our other applications. This is ‘Roam’ if you haven’t already seen it. That’s what it looks like. We have these new slippy maps - so you can pick the map up, drag it around and put it where you want it, which is quite useful considering what we’ve come from with the old classic service. I couldn’t resist this I’m afraid – we did ask for some feedback and I will be the first person to say that getting feedback from end users is a bit like pulling teeth. I couldn’t resist showing you some of these quotations that we’ve had from people who say ‘It’s wonderful, I love it, what an improvement’. It’s very rewarding for us to hear things like this. It’s also very helpful when we hear the negative stuff, but it’s good to pat ourselves on the back every so often. The best one I think here is- “I really like this feature, it’s very easy and very useful especially just before an assignment deadline”. How often have we heard that one?

So, onto phase 2 of our reengineering. We are now turning our attention to our other clients to Historic Digimap, and the geology and the marine services as well. Lots of people have already asked me this morning about Historic Digimap and how we’re going to improve the interface that’s there at the moment. For those of you who know the historic data, you’ll know that it’s extremely complicated. There are bits of counties that have been mapped twice, there are bits of blankness where some county forgot to map one bit, there are dates all over the place – it’s a challenge, it really is. We now decided to split this into a download service and a mapping service. So we have the Historic Download service – which I’ll show you a screenshot of in a minute. Ancient Roam is a working title, and I don’t take any credit for it, do I Tim? And actually it might fly, we don’t know – tell us what you think. That will provide all the currently available historical maps, plus the town plans which we are grateful to Landmark to for providing those. It will work in much the same way as the existing Roam client, so with all the slippy maps and so on. We’ll try and run the two in parallel so that nobody gets a really sharp shock when they suddenly turn up to the service and find that it all looks different. We know the site reps like to have a bit of time to adjust their teaching materials and their help pages and so on.

Here’s a quick idea of what the download service will look like – you’ll get to choose your individual time period first, then you get a map with some tiles on it, and you can select the tiles there – and eventually you’ll get a list of what you’re going to download. The tile names and so on are a bit complicated so we’ve added some extra information like the county and useful stuff to it which will allow you to be able to make a decision about which bits you want and which bits you don’t want.

So Ancient Roam – Ancient Roam’s quite good isn’t it? As a name? It’s catchy – nobody’s going to forget it. It’s got the Roam style zoom in and out and the slippy maps as I said. We tried to simplify the temporal navigation. I must stress actually – these are just screenshots – these are tentative images of what it might look like, because we don’t yet have anything to show you. As Peter says – ‘this is future present’. We’re working on it. We have a timeline on there which will tell you what maps are available in each decade and will also tell you which decade you’re looking at at the moment. Thanks to Chris Fleet at the National Library of Scotland we have lots more meta data for the Scottish maps, so we’ll include the survey data map which is something we’ve had a lot of requests for, and also we’ll see the Ordnance Survey town plans in here – these are large scale things covering around… no I can’t tell you the number of settlements- but they’re settlements of population around 4,000 – anything over and above 4,000. Large scale 1 to 500, 1 to 528, right through to one to two and a half thousand I think – there’s a lot of information there.

Moving onto Marine Digimap - we believe this is going to be the first academic online coastal zone mapping application. So you’ll be able to control the thematic layers in the same way that you can with the Ordnance Survey data – this will be using SeaZone’s HydroSpatial data. We haven’t done much with this yet because it’s another interesting challenge with huge complications to it, but the potential for providing something that is really useful is enormous. Again, it will have the slippy maps – you’ll start to see the picture here – we’re intending this for autumn this year to release, so watch this space.

Last but not least, the geology data doesn’t get left out. We have another working title here – ‘Rock and Roam’. That was Addy’s idea *laughs* – aiming for late spring this year. Again it will have the slippy maps and you will be able to resize the window and so on. We’re aiming to keep the interrogation of the rock lexicon in there – so you’ll still be able to click on the features and establish what a particular rock type it is. Again, it’s very complicated data – it’s 3D – for those of you who are geologists it maybe means more to you than most – but we’re aiming to teach people how to use this stuff and to some extent we may have to simplify things a bit.

This will lead me nicely into a bit of prospecting I think. What we would like to do – and we’ve done some work on this with City University already – is to make more of the use of legends, keys. The new mapping service for the geology Digimap will have a My Maps section in it as we have for Roam, where you can bookmark individual maps. We’re also intending to add links to the JIDI Image Collection, which many of you may know has been kicking around for a while but not been visible yet. On the visualisation front, we’ve done some work with City University already on different visualisations for legends, and I’ve shamelessly pinched this picture from the project report that they gave to us earlier…late last year. There are many different ways you can portray information and one of the complexities of the geology is to get the 3D version. So we’ve got some ideas and City University should take the credit for this – ideas on how to display the information so that is means a bit more. Here’s another one, where you can see on the left hand side, the area of each proctype is represented as a square rather than being – not randomly, clearly – distributed across the UK.

More legend ideas – Lasma takes the credit for these mock ups of some other potential ideas we have. We have a proposal in with JISC at the moment to develop our legends a bit more – we think there’s a lot more you can do with it – a legend should be able to tell you a lot more about the map than just being a big list of what the symbols mean. The idea we have here is that you could be able to drag symbols from the map onto an interrogation panel that would tell you more about the features. The next one will give you even some photographs maybe. This is all hypothetical, but we think it’s a great idea. It would allow the user to understand much more about what’s going on in the map – get more information about it – we could think about providing some sort of statistics – ‘Here is the map, how many windmills have I got on this map?’. It will give you a count, it might give you maybe a sum of the area of a particular land cover type – there are lots of options there.

Everybody’s going mobile now. JISC also have an alternative access stream at the moment and we’ve put in for some funding for this. This is Ben – who unfortunately is not here today – I thought he was going to be and therefore I put the picture in to try and make him wriggle a bit – but he’s not here to see it, which is a shame. Ben is our mobile man about town visiting Nottingham here. The idea of this project is that we look at providing access to things like Digimap on a mobile device. At the moment of course our interfaces are all designed for a computer screen, which is more sizeable than a mobile. And the screen estate on a mobile of course is much more limited. We’ve got various options in terms of which platform we go for – whether it’s an iphone or whether we use android and so on. And of course the objective is to build a working demonstration version which some of you may have seen on one of the laptops at the back of the room. Addy is keeping the blog going if you’re interested in mobile access to maps then it’s worth having a read of that. This is a picture of an OS MasterMap map on an iphone emulator – so we are getting somewhere with that slowly.

We also have some more emerging markets. Now not many people will have seen this yet because we haven’t pushed it out there. JISC – Lorraine Estelle at JISC collections and JISC collections for schools – George Martin there, and Ordnance Survey and ourselves have been working to try and push out a version of Digimap into the school sector. OS are very keen that schools should have access to their maps – which is obviously a good thing, for us it’s a good thing to prepare our future customers – you know all these students who suddenly get to university and go ‘Oh, I know what Digimap is – we had that at school’. We get lots of people who graduate come back to us saying ‘Can I have it now?’ ‘No, sorry…’. We’re hoping it will start the other way around this time. This is the online mapping interface we’re proposing to use for schools – it’s fairly straight forward. It doesn’t have the layer selection that our HE service has but then, you know, for 5 year olds…well I don’t know, I don’t know many 5 year olds maybe they would manage that fine.

Not only do we have new services and so on, we also have to pay attention to our support infrastructure. John drew attention to the role the map librarians played in the development of Digimap so far, and I have to say upfront that we can’t live without people like them – the local support is invaluable. But, as the new generation of students coming through are increasingly web savvy – they want things here and now, they want it at 3 in the morning before their assignment is due and so on…I don’t fancy working through the night myself. So maybe we should be turning to things like Web 2 and wikis and blogs and twitter and all the rest of it for help in pushing out the help pages that we have. There’s a lot of information in there, and we’re increasingly finding that people don’t go looking for it – they don’t search for it, they don’t know it’s there, it doesn’t print off, they can’t read it on their iphone. So we need to make some amendments to that. We need to keep up really – so we’re looking at that on the horizon and making some changes there in the next 12 months or so.

I have to also acknowledge that although Digimap has been around for 10 years, there’s an awful lot of good work and extra services and so on that have come as a result of Digimap. Today may be about Digimap itself, but there are also things that wouldn’t have happened without it being there. Go-Geo!, Share-Geo and Unlock are three of the things that came to mind when I wrote this. There are many people here who could tell you a lot more about those services than I can, but so far they are going from strength to strength.

Couldn’t do this without a quick look back. And again I’ve put this picture up for Barbara’s benefit – and that’s Barbara in the middle there – but unfortunately she can’t be with us today. And I found this screenshot of how Digimap Classic – what we used to know as Digimap Lite – used to look. I also couldn’t go without showing some real 21st century technology –I had a text message this morning saying read your email before you start, and what do I find in my email but a message from David in New Zealand who would like me to read this out. But unfortunately I don’t have a printer in here so I’ve had to write it out by hand *laughs* and read it to you. David says: “I’m sorry I can’t be at the 10th birthday today- Digimap has come a long way in 10 years and continues to be a hugely valuable resource for researchers and students in UK academia. Geospatial information is increasingly pervasive – people expect to be able to access such information easily and quickly through alternative routes e.g mobile devices, and have access to a greater variety of quality geospatial data. This will be a challenge for JISC and EDINA giving the current economic climate and increasing competition. I’m sure all will rise to the challenges as we rose to those we encountered in the past. Good luck with the day, and I hope we are able to celebrate 20 years of Digimap in 10 years time.” Nice to have the last word I suppose - he always wants the last word.