As a ex-Autodesk employee, I was very interested to watch co-founder of Autodesk Dan Drake describe the development of the first version of AutoCAD on NerdTV, a PBS show hosted by Silicon Valley guru Robert X Cringley and available to download as an mpeg. Other interviews on NerdTV include Tim O’Reilly, Dave Winer and Andy Hertzfeld
At the AGI conference this week Graham Vowles presented a paper on the development of GeoDRM Geographic Digital Rights Managment, and in the debate which followed a consensus seemed to point to the best type of DRM offered only “just enough” protection. Mark’s Sysinternals Blog illustrates how DRM can go too far. Another reason to be an Apple user, rootkits are just evil !!
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
Amazing how tired you can get after just three days… maybe it was the party that did it !
So the end of this years conference got be thinking about how the nature of the annual GI industry conference has changed over the years. This year was I think a little bigger than last year with maybe 300-400 delegates, and a small but busy exhibition of nearly 50 stands.
Once upon a time, in the early 1990’s, when I started attending this conference there were perhaps three times as many attendees and there were two major GIS exhibitions with thousands of visitors.
So what has happened ?
Well the industry as such has matured and I guess those people who need GIS now have adopted the technology and established relationships with data providers, software companies etc. Now of course if your want to find out about new products and services you go online rather than waiting to talk to sales staff at a conference. An often heard quote is that there is “nobody new” at these conferences – well yes that’s true !!
Those people who are adopting GIS for the first time go to vertical shows in retail, health , defence and intelligence etc. – Does this mean that there is no need for a GIS show, in the same way there is no need for a spreadsheet show – No, because GI is still a lot more complex a discipline, with many issues still to resolve.
The AGI conference over the years has shrunk down to a level where now it meets the needs of the industry perfectly, as a forum for the industry to meet with itself, to network and discuss issues of interest to the specialist. The quality of papers this year I thought were exceptional, with excellent discussions taking place in the Q&A sessions I attended.
So long live the AGI conference, it may never need to hire the ExCel conference centre, but it’s not going to end up in a phonebox either.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
Yesterday was the first day at AGI 2005, the UK’s main event for GIS professionals. I must admit I was rather disappointed by the quality of the plenary session, which contrasted with some excellent presentations in the parallel sessions. Both the local Government sessions and in particular for me the session on designing GI systems with usability in mind were excellent.
Both Martin Daly from Cadcorp and Charles Kennelly from ESRI were very open about their efforts to design software with specific users in mind, and our this has developed over time – both made the point that desktop GIS by its very nature is complex. Emma Sutton of EDINA and Lesile Foutain of System Concepts demonstrated the importance of the inclusion of usability design early enough in projects – £1 spent on usability at the beginning of a project is £1000 if spent at the end.
This was really interesting stuff, we are all impressed by the design of devices such as the iPod, but can we ever hope to achieve such a high level of simple task centred design in GIS? How much are we constrained by the conventions of the win32 api ?
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
All Points note the development of a blog by an unnamed USGS employee. The continued disruption to the USGS and the potential of outsourcing large proportions of its activities to commercial operators is clearly causing some concern amongst its staff.
At the end of the day I believe that the collection of national spatial data must be a well funded activity either by central/federal government or by the users of the data purchasing licensed data – it appears that the current plans for the USGS still falls somewhere between the two.
Outsourcing may in the sort term reduce costs, but there is still a more fundamental issue of long term consistent funding – the fact that the most powerful nation on earth does not have modern consistent national mapping is shocking.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.
As requested by Mike, here are the links to download the mp3’s directly rather than use itunes
Future Britain – Richard Scase
The Geospatial Semantic Grid – Jayant Sharma
Disruptive Technologies – Robin Mannings
Hey Dude where’s my database – Andrew Duff
Written and submitted from the Novotel Hotel, York, using the hotels wifi network.
Announced today Yahoo! Maps is a consumer web map service similar to Google with an open API but in addition to the expected AJAX API Yahoo offers a Flash version as well.
On first impressions the cartography is similar to Google using Teleatlas and Navteq data but without imagery.
Of real interest to me is the RSS feed “Traffic API” which uses dynamic data feeds to produce real time applications, indeed RSS seems to be the input format of choice.
The only minor problem – the world consists of North America only !!
Written and submitted from the Welcome Break Services on the M62, using the BT Openzone wifi network. – the glamour of travel !!
The Terrafuture podcasts are now all available on iTunes if you need the individual mp3 links just shout. There seems to be a bug with the artwork on the podcast description at the moment, but I hope to get that sorted in the next 24 hours.
Written and submitted from the Corrus Hotel, Bristol, using the hotels wifi network.
Yesterdays presentation is available here for download, my main point I guess was to point out the shift in thinking needed by Mapping Agencies as we move from the age of document centric cartography to cartography driven from databases.
Written and submitted from the Westin Hotel, Warsaw, using the hotels broadband network.
As promised last month, The guys have done a stella job in putting together a series of podcasts from the TerraFuture event we held at the Ordnance Survey in September. The first podcast is Richard Scase on the changes we can expect in society over the next ten years and how that may impact on the GI industry.
The podcast is available here as a direct mp3 download, or subscribe to the series here in iTunes. Thanks to David and Jenny for putting this together and we’d be interested to hear what you think.
Written and submitted from the Westin Hotel, Warsaw, using the hotels broadband network.