Maps, Open Data and the Call for Cleaner Air

Screenshot of the Clean Air Merton Map of Air Quality results across Merton, London.

Those of you who know me personally, know that I've suffered with allergic rhinitis (that's hay fever triggered by more than just pollen) since I was a child. After a hiatus from symptoms in my teens and early twenties, a spell working in fashion retail in Knightsbridge with our store doors open all day and the relentless stop-start traffic outside caused my allergic rhinitis to return with a vengeance and it has never yet relented. This summer, during the heatwave week when NOx levels were exceptionally high in London I suffered, what I now know was an asthma attack. I had a worse one a few weeks later and ended up in hospital in the urgent care unit hardly able to breathe. Both attacks probably triggered by air pollution. This isn't trivial. That second asthma attack was very frightening indeed. I read someone describing an asthma attack as feeling like you're drowning in air. That pretty much sums it up.

Reading around the topic of asthma and pollution, I discovered that my local area is a hotspot for pollution and registered twice the legal levels of NOx in recent tests. It's a busy main road, there's a roundabout and lots of traffic lights and there's a lot of traffic that stops and starts causing much of the pollution. There are roads just like that all over London and up and down the country. I knew that parts of London had problems with air pollution, but I didn't realise how close to home it is. Air pollution is an issue which respects no boundaries.

As a result, I'm all for having cleaner air to breathe and luckily for me there are people already working towards this in my local area from several different community groups. They've teamed up and shared their air quality results with those of the council and mapped them on Google Maps. It makes for interesting reading. You'll need to be looking at Wimbledon, Mitcham and Morden to see the results. The black markers are over the legal NOx levels, the yellow markers are not far off the legal levels and the blue markers (there are only 2 of them across the borough) are well below the legal levels.

That's pretty depressing. The area where I live has lots of green space. I live within walking distance of Figge's Marsh, Mitcham Common, Ravensbury Park, Morden Hall Park, Tooting Common and Beddington Park. Yet still we're suffering. The picture will be similar up and down the country.

Mitcham Cricket Green Community & Heritage has lots of action points to improve air quality in Merton and one hopes that both normal citizens as well as those in authority in local government and business take note and take action.

The good news is that this data is  open data and therefore public which means anyone can see it and contribute to it. A big thank you to the contributors and administrators. This is important work and necessary to help us understand the impact we are having on our own environment. If we know what we're dealing with, we can find solutions. Let's all work towards having cleaner air to breathe.

Day 6/30 NaBloPoMo

Location Based Services - are they all missing the point?

I recently attended MoMo London's recent event on location based services. It was a great event, with speakers from Google Gears, Yahoo! Fireeagle, Skyhook Wireless (who were our generous sponsors and fantastic hosts), W3C, Locatrix, Rummble and Buddyping. We also had a fair number of MoMo folks in from chapters from other countries (USA, Spain, Sweden, Estonia, Germany and Australia) plus 200 or so of our London members so it was a very good crowd. And lots of people wrote nice things about the event too which is great as it means as organisers (I'm one of the London organisers), we're doing something right.

And all the companies are doing interesting and clever things with location on mobile. However, I can't help thinking that many of the LBS initiatives are missing the point, or at least the initiatives discussed on the night seemed to missing the point as they all seem to be focussed around mobile social networking and mapping allowing me to find my buddies or things to do close by, unless I missed something.

If I see another googlemaps mashup with virtual map pins on it, I think I'll scream! How many of these maps do we need to see? And why do we need to see a map most of the time anyway? It's pretty enough, but usually pretty unnecessary. And what has physical location got to do with it. Twitter has no location API, yet it's actually very effective for letting me connect with people who are local to me (and to organise meeting up via tweet-outs such as 'I'm in Soho this afternoon, anyone want to hook up for coffee) as well as helping me have relationships with friends and colleagues further away. There are no maps involved. No location look-ups.

Don't get me wrong, I love googlemaps - especially on my mobile. It's incredibly useful and means I don't have to carry a London AtoZ with me any more and it means I get less lost when travelling in cities I'm not familiar with. But the mapping element isn't the be-all and end-all when it comes to location. In fact, it's barely even the start.

You see, it's all about context. And it's all about the customer being lazy (there's a limit to how many UGC sites I can contribute to and a limit to how many times I can add the same information/review/postcode/picture/whatever to multiple sites and I'm a pretty avid contributor to these things. And anyway, how is the location, per se, relevant. If I want to know where the nearest McDonald's is I can usually see it on whatever High Street I'm standing on anyway or I could ask somebody. And when I've tried using recommendation sites for finding out the best late night restaurant or club in London's West End, I've found them pretty useless on my mobile and have resorted, successfully, to using Texperts instead.

So what do I mean about context. Context is understanding that it's not that I'm on Oxford Street, London W1. But that it's Saturday afternoon, Oxford Street is a busy shopping street, I don't work near there so the chances are I'm probably out shopping. An advertiser of the latest thing in trainers is interested in targeting shoppers who are in the shopping frame of mind and in or near a shopping location, and maybe even that their propensity to buy trainers is medium to high, not the actual postcode. No amount of map pins is going to solve that problem. And being able to reach 1000 people on Oxford Street is no where near as attractive as targeting 1m UK shoppers while they're out shopping across the UK. If you're a big brand, and let's face it, it's the big brands who have the big advertising budgets, you want national coverage which can complement what you're doing on TV, radio and outdoor.

What I'm not seeing are intelligent ways of collating and managing this information to make it relevant, interesting or useful for the customer, or making it easy to buy the media and reach for the advertiser or media buying agency.

Unless there's someone out there already doing this... in which case, I'd love to know about it!