Category: GIS

I have been playing with Frappr! the google map mash-up which has really caught peoples imaginations. In some ways it combines mapping with sites like friends reunited or friendster which create and join up online communities.

This is really powerful stuff, it may sound very geeky but finding out there is someone doing the same conversion on their MGB as you in the next town, or looking at the destination of pupils of Downfield Sixth Form of 2000 is really interesting – this makes geographic information really accessible to people – and who knows offers the potential of a mechanism for community data capture projects.

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

For those of you in the UK this may be a little bit of a surprise, GIS Day has always been seen as a ESRI marketing event and therefore has never really gained much momentum in the UK, I think there are just five events in total this year. This is a shame, GIS Day is a great idea, making GIS more accessible to people by holding local events is a brilliant idea, it just needs to be supported by the wider industry.

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

Jessie and Sue featured the terrafuture podcasts on their Very Spatial podcast episode 17.

Jessie and Sue are a pair of academics who produce a weekly show on Geography and GIS technology, and although rather US centric is really worth subscribing to.

This week’s discussion focused on the topic of private or personal data, interesting in that it seemed to demonstrate the different attitudes between the US and Europe, where in the US generally, data needs to be identified as private with the expectation that most data is in the public domain, in Europe the reverse is true, data is assumed to be private with legislation like the data protection act to protect access to personal information.

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

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.