I had the pleasure on presenting at the AGI North Where2.0now event in Harrogate. It was a great event, but there was much joking from those who travelled from London and Southern England how far we had travelled.

Well now it’s possible to track exactly how far if you should choose too, as a Google Latitude user I can look at my history and see where I have travelled over a period of time.

As you would expect this is a service you need to opt in to, and by default your history will not be kept. But if you chose to store you history is makes a fascinating record of your travels here for example is my trip to Harrogate yesterday.

Tracking and storing you location is nothing new, John McKerrell has been doing so for a couple of years using his mapme.at service.

At the conference yesterday he showed the coolest piece of geo hardware seen since the Garmin GPS45, a location clock powered by mapme.at

If you have ever read any Harry Potter you will be familar with the idea of the Weasley Clock, a magical clock owned by the Weasley family which shows not the time but the location of members of the family and if they are in “Mortal Peril”.

Visit Johns blog to read how he has built a working Weasley clock using a Arduino kit, mapme.at and great imagination.

So cool !!

Written and submitted from my home (51.425N, 0.331W)

On their own the slides may not make much sense, hopefully Mr. Daly will be posting a video soon and I will give an abridged version of this presentation at next weeks where2.0now ? event in Harrogate – places still available !

Written and submitted from my home (51.425N, 0.331W)

This year of course the big news was the arrival of the Neogeographers accommodated in the “Geoweb” track organised by Christopher Osborne. The increased numbers attending GeoCommunity this year (an amazing feat when you consider the economy) are a direct result of the influx “non-professional’ users of Geospatial Information.

As to be expected this was much discussion of the appropriateness of labels, does “neo” or “paleo” really matter, are we not all geographers ? It was pleasing to see that below the surface there is much that is common between the two communities and plenty of opportunity for both old and new users to learn from each other. However there remains a clear distinction between the two communities not in terms of tools used or the number of words on each powerpoint/keynote slide, but in the fundamental approach to using Geospatial information.

The traditional GIS industry remains a technology focused niche characterised by relatively large centralised projects funded by government, while the new users of geospatial technology develop more user focused distributed projects fully exploiting the network effect on the web to create communities.

Perhaps the most useful way to view the neo/paleo debate is to look at the different approaches as two ends of a spectrum rather than two separate communities, both ends result in the creation of products and services that demonstrate the Value of Geography, and both approaches are valid.

I have used this analogy before but I think it works… think of the geospatial industry as a microcosm of the music industry, at one end there are the Operas of Mozart performed by huge choruses of highly trained singers and large well (often government funded) orchestras that perform to small select audiences at a few Opera Houses around the word. The other end, and a relatively recent development, are Rock and Pops bands of mass market appeal, often without formal training producing a music that has the power to impact the lives of hundreds of millions of fans.

It’s all Music !!

To get some sense of the activities and presentations visit http://www.GeoCommunityLive.com, a blogsite put together to host in near real time content from the conference, and the product of heroic contributions made by  a number of “paleo” and “neo” geographers just hours before the conference started.. Pat on the back to John Fagan and Martin Daly !!

GeoCommunity this year was the first conference UK Geospatial conference to feature an active back channel on Twitter, which provided an amusing is not always comprehensive commentary to events..

Key developments from my perspective included the increasing influence of collaborative mapping, very few presentations failed to mention OpenStreetMap (OSM) in one way on another, Ordnance Survey actually paid OSM the ultimate compliment by introducing a competitive product their first for a few years in the form of OS Vector Map Local.

This was the first GeoCommunity following the publishing of the new OS strategy and the OS are clearly focused on Innovation now, in the same way a drowning man is focused of a lifejacket.

By far the most interesting and potentially most significant paper if its recommendations were to be adopted was the paper by Bob Barr and Christopher Roper calling for the creation of public funded “Core Geography” data sets including a single national address database and administrative boundaries.

They suggest the creation of such universally accessible data sets is key to the economic benefit of the UK, and would allow competition in the creation of other data sets including topographic mapping.

With the emergence of UKMap at least part of this is already happening.

Lets hope the advice been given to the UK government on the use of public sector data sets by Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt is influenced by this type of clear thinking.

Congratulations to Steven and the team for organising the conference, what a difference a year makes…

Written and submitted from the Qantas Lounge, Bangkok Airport (13.693N, 100.746E)

Being-Digital is a “conference without PowerPoint’s”, instead there are round-tables of industry experts discussing hot topics and short demos. The focus is much more on debate and discussion; both via traditional questions from the room and via SMS and Twitter feedback (Hashtag is #bde). 

This level of interaction is important and in not uncommon in broader web conferences especially those accross the pond, but it’s less common in the UK.

Hopefully the reinvigorated AGI GeoCommunity conference with its new Geoweb stream, will bring some of this different approach to the world of GI conferences.

Written and submitted from Teddington Swimming pool, using my home 3 UMTS modem.

Yes,this is a Twitter message from AGI conference organisers announcing a stream at the conference addressing the issues and potential of the Geoweb, mobile applications, mash ups etc. 

Its great to see the AGI making use of Twitter, as it is a mechanism to communicate with a whole new generation of GI developers and users.

This is a great opportunity for both communities to learn from each other, and I hope is a reflection of the AGI actually moving to represent the wider community of Geographic Information users, rather than just a fan club for it’s largest corporate sponsor.

See you in Birmingham !!

I felt is was like the last meeting of Association of Empire Telegraph Operators, bemoaning the fact that these new wireless equipment operators could not write Morse code as quickly.

I tried to be a little more upbeat in my comments, I really do believe that this is a time of great opportunity for the GIS industry, GI professionals are the gate keepers of huge amounts of useful geospatial information and knowledge which people are desperate to get access to, but need help to do so… if every there was a grand challenge for an industry that is it.

But no, there was to be no happy ending, at the very end of the conference as Adena has pointed out, the members of the AGI decided to award the prize for the best paper of the conference to Mark Bishop of MapInfo, and his paper “The Hype of Web 2.0″..

Like her I just don’t understand it, OK so the term is rather overused by now, but we have as a community benefited hugely from the technology and business shift that was Web 2.0, do we really want to go back to the GIS business of the late 1990′s.. well I guess maybe the AGI membership does…

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

Me I’m prediciting as with everybody else, some sort of sub-notebook device related more to the iphone than a macbook, with a docking station for power, keyboard etc.. lots of talk about the iPhone SDK and more media coming to iTunes/Apple TV.

I like the bingo idea, perhaps I will put one together for this years AGI conference in the UK, anyone like to suggest the key phases beyond “Master-Map of the Nation” ?

Written and Submitted from the Google Office, London.

This is a great idea, let’s hope that enough people in the new world of users of GI find such organisations still relevant.. this years AGI event went some way to breaking down the boundaries between the two ages of geography , lets hope the paleo-geograpahers are ready for the guys in jeans for there is much to learn !!

Written and submitted from the Googleplex , Mountain View.

The GI industry in the UK is now well beyond the stage in its maturity where there is a need for a big conference and exhibition to attract new users – today if you need GIS, you are already a user.

So this years conference was really an opportunity for the industry to meet and discuss issues and developments, and to help develop a sense of community.

This year the recurring theme seemed to be the impact of Neogeography (Andrew Turner has a lot to answer for !!) on the traditional GIS industry or Paleogeography as I called it in my keynote.

I think, there is still someway to go for the GIS industry to fully come to terms with the potential that a neogeography approach to providing solutions to users has, and there is still a large amount of scepticism, but I was really pleased to see a programme which contained a number of “neogeo” presentations.

Of particular note for me, Ian Holt and John Abbott of Widr gave two excellent practical demonstrations of building mashups using location aware API’s, Ed Freyfogle of Nestoria was impressive as ever and Nick Black opened many peoples eyes in the audience to OpenStreetMap, many of whom it would appear had not come across it before.

Nick introduced Cloud Made a new project in collaboration with Steve Coast to offer commercial support to organisations wanting to use OpenStreetMap data – Cloud Made is only just getting off the ground, but think Redhat and Linux.

There really are two ages of geography at the moment, the established GIS industry is great at serving the needs of organisations for which geospatial data really is core and for creating core large scale geospatial data. This will not change fundamentally, although there are important lessons in particular around simplicity of tools and licensing models that can be picked up from neogeography !

On the other hand Neogeography offers a better approach to communicate and engage with communities of users who need to use geography to put whatever data they are interested in, in context. This is potentially everybody !!

Vanessa Lawrence in her presentation confirmed that the OS will be releasing the OpenSpace API before Christmas!! I have a couple of bottles of Champagne I promised the team once upon a time, that I can put back on the ice !

In many ways this year the conference also seemed to represent to some extent a handover to a more relaxed and down to earth view of the industry, no better demonstrated than by the soon to be infamous AGI party, partly captured on my camera phone !

GIS professionals dressed up as village people… that would never have worked 15 years ago in Birmingham !!

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

I was really pleased to see the WIDR guys at the event last night, some bright guys who used to work for me while I was at Ordnance Survey, who have developed a location determination platform, with an open API, based on wifi hotspots. Not a new idea I know, but the API element is really interesting as it offers the potential for developers to easily add location awareness to their own web based applications.

What would begin to close the gap between the two diverging GI communities, would be if these guys could develop they ideas during the day rather than in their spare time, and bring the benefit directly back to their organisation. The 20% time that Google engineers can use to develop their own ideas is well known, and really is a powerful tool for developing new products and services – would we ever see anything like that in Government ?

No.. I guess not.. but then the next generation of customers of Government services, as David Rhind so brilliantly called them yesterday the “myTube” generation have vastly different expectations of dealing with organisations based on experiences with eBay, Amazon, Facebook, Google etc all of which recognise the importance of innovation in keeping their customers happy.

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

I sure this change in direction for he conference is a good move, however I’m not sure which of the groups represented on the poster is me.. guess I need a hard hat !

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

In contrast to these international shows you will not find any GIS vendors a World of Geomatics, for many years the GIS software and data interests were served by the large GIS shows in Birmingham in the late 80′s early 1990′s and more recently by the AGI annual conference and exhibition. In the last decade these shows have struggled to compete with the internet as educational resources and this year there will be no vendor neutral GIS exhibition in the UK !!

I have never really understood this, why do experts in the fields of manipulating Geographical Information in the UK exist in almost parallel universes – Answers on a postcard if you have any thoughts (OK by email but I have always wanted to write that !!) – Maybe there is a future opportunity here ?

I think I understand why the surveying shows have remained successful, it is to do with professionalism and the recognition of the value of “industry best practice”, something which has been recognised only recently by GIS professionals.

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

“No but, Yeh but, No but, like there is this spatial data – no shutup..”

I am looking forward to next weeks Terra future research event at the Ordnance Survey, at which Tim Berners-Lee is to provide his insight into the place geospatial data has in the web of the future.

There are still a few spaces left, so if you would like to attend email the conference office.

I’m sure a wider industry insight is vital, the UK GI industry needs to accept that the future development of geographic information will not be decided inside the confines of the current inward looking industry of today or for that matter any government generated strategy.

The use of GI is already pervasive… it has become so almost despite the attempts of the last 20 years of industry strategies, instead technological developments like the web developed by Berners-Lee have provided tools to connect users to geospatial data and is now allowing them to become data creators themselves – now that is really exciting !!!

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

I do sense a little bit of a wobble, but -

Of course the reality is that all the “new” exciting vendors Google, Microsoft, Yahoo etc are all reliant on the data produced by the primary data providers, who in turn need to use the tools and models created by the boring old vendors. This has become know as the “heavy lifting” part of the industry, it may not be glamourous and may be missed by the mainstream press but it represents the vast majority of activity undertaken using geographic information.

So thank you Google, Yahoo and Microsoft for doing what the GIS industry should have done, in making Geographic Information more accessible with simple, well designed tools – the rockets of the Geographic information, but the “professional” industry needs to now work even harder in providing the fuel !!!

Written and submitted from Starbucks, Upper Street , London, using the t-mobile wifi network.

Less than a week to go the the UK’s main GIS Show and full marks to the AGI, for putting together what I think is one of the most interesting conference agenda’s in years.. If this years range of topics and speakers is not enough to get “bums on seats”, it is hard to see what else the conference organisers could have done to produce a conference to meet the needs of the GI industry in the UK.

But there is the challenge.. the UK industry is mature and dominated by a small number of large vendors, the OS and ESRI(UK) really stand out, and most users are fully aware of what is going on in the industry from the web and personal contacts – yes the industry really is that small in the UK. The AGI also represents a wide range of opinions and interests, so its often difficult to see a clear direction in its activities.

The AGI should be commended for inviting the “new” players this year, in the form of Google and Microsoft, but there is also something of a “organisation gap” as many of innovators who are very active in the UK, the likes of Steve Coast and Mikel Maron, are not traditional GIS people so it is good to see the “non-GIS” approach to using GI represented by Tom Steinberg of mySociety.

For the AGI however success will not come from positive comments, the “Bums of seats” is an important element here, as the conference and exhibition has become the major revenue stream for the AGI.

So.. if you have not decided on attending yet, its not too late – remember if you don’t go this year there might not be a conference or even an AGI next year !!

Written and submitted from the Bruntsfield Hotel, Edinburgh, using my Vodafone 3G network card.

The day started with Martin Daly of Cadcorp debunking some of the myths of open source software, including

- Open source does not mean free !!
- Open source means I can get access to the source code, different to “freeware”
- Open source developers are not cola fuelled communists operating from their bedrooms, but mostly professional programmers employed by commercial companies to contribute to open source projects.
- In many ways open source licensing is as complex as commercial closed source licensing !!

There also seemed to be some confusion or a least frequent use of the terms “open standards” and “open source” in the same sentence. Open Standards are all about delivering interoperability between applications developed by different organisations (think AA batteries – always the same size, voltage etc) – such applications may be “open source” but may also be closed source.

Likewise some open Source applications may be proprietary in nature, offering a private way of transferring data across a network for example.

Of particular interest to me was the business case for selecting ‘Open Source” solutions rather than the more traditional “Closed source” Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) route.

From the user perspective this seems clear, lower initial capital outlay in terms of licensing although the overall Total Cost of Ownership may not be that different with potentially higher internal and external (if available) support costs.
A very unscientific poll of the people at the workshop actually using “Open Source” did seem to be made of largely academic and research users – who are perhaps capital poor but geek rich and are therefore able to work through the maze of compiling using the right code library versions etc.
It was notable that local and central government were poorly represented, it this because the issue of ongoing support is more of an issue – I’m really not sure ?

From the application developer perspective the motivation to go “Open Source” is less clear, the “many eyes” argument of a wide and skilled developer resource looking at your code was one of the arguments put forward, and although this makes sense for the small dispersed development team, I’m not sure this is so much the case for a company like Autodesk.

I have a lot of time for Autodesk and Mapguide in particular, the new open source version demoed by Giulio Pagan looks great, but it is interesting Autodesk chose to experiment with open source with MapGuide rather than Inventor or even AutoCAD ?

It appears that there is little focus of Open Source GIS client development, while MapServer and PostGIS offer a real alternative to closed source software like ArcIMS, there is no open source ArcView or MapInfo, tools like uDig are moving in the right direction but GIS open source does appear to be server centric at the moment.

And yes I do run OpenSource myself, I have MapServer running on my Powerbook !!

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

The use of Open-Source software has become increasingly prevalent in many areas of information technology. For example, the majority of web sites run on open-source web server software e.g. Apache, Tomcat etc; operating systems such as Linux, BSD etc. have an increasing share of the market; open source web browsers are also increasing in popularity e.g. Firefox, Galeon etc. This event aims to investigate what the benefits and pitfalls of Open-Source are for the GIS community. Speakers will describe the impact of open-source software in various sectors and illustrate these with examples from both the research and commercial GIS communities.

Address
British Antarctic Survey, High Cross, Madingley Road, Cambridge, CB3 0ET

Programme
10.00 Registration & Coffee

10.30 Welcome – BAS
10.35 Introduction to Open Source in GIS – Martin Daly
11.00 Open Source GIS Server Systems – Norman Barker, Research Systems Inc.

11.30 Coffee Break

11.45 An introduction to MapGuide Open Source , Giulio Pagan, Autodesk Consulting
12.15 Census Interaction Data Service – Oliver Duke-Williams, Leeds University
12.45 ICEDS: using open source software to serve data and maps of the globe at full resolution – Jeremy Morley, University College London

13.15 Lunch

13.45 Developing an OGC Compliant Web Mapping and Download User Interface for the Satellite Image Data Service hosted at MIMAS – Gail Millin, Manchester University
14:15 MIDAS – Marine Information System based on OGC-compliant Open Source Software – Wyn Cudlip, QinetiQ

14.45 Coffee Break

15.15 CADDIE Crime and Disorder Mapping Application, Robin Brooke, Infotech
15.45 Q&A Session – Chair, Ed Parsons

16.10 Tour of BAS Facilities
17.00 Depart

AGI Member Price: £60+VAT = £70.50
AGI Non Member Price: £90+VAT = £105.75

To register visit the AGI website here