Categories
GIS Technology

Lessons learned

Last week we hosted at the Ordnance Survey a group from Lantmäteriet the Swedish Mapping Agency who were interested in our programme to develop a new geospatial data management system.

I guess we should not be too surprised, but not only are the problems we are trying to solve very similar but the approach to solving them including the technology choices in terms of ESRI and Oracle are also very much aligned. We were happy to share our experiences and some of the painful lessons learnt over the past couple of years, experiences which we need to be shared as anyone thinking of delivering such a programme would face the same challenges.

The OS business model is not to offer consultancy to other organisations, and at the same time we still need to complete our programme successful so we are not an “open house”, however over the next year or so look for a series of presentations from the OS on our experiences in building real enterprise GIS systems.

Written and submitted from the Holiday Inn Express Southampton, using my Vodafone 3G network card.

Categories
GIS

UK Open Source GIS meeting

Following on from last weeks weekends meeting to create the Open Source Geospatial Foundation open source GIS is flavour of the month.
There is still quite a lot of confusion in the industry as to what “open source’ GIS means – does open source mean free ? for example.

To help discuss and clarify some of these issues the AGI Technical Special Interest Group is running a one day workshop on Open Source GIS at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge on 27th April

For more details visit the AGI event webpage.

Categories
GIS

The funniest man in GIS?

Simon Doyle, ex-Ordnance Survey man and this years chair of the AGI, clearly has hidden talents as demonstrated in his latest column in GEO:connexion magazine. Although the humour may not translate very well to international readers, there is an important point here about the inability of the GIS industry to deliver solutions that actually make a real difference to “normal people”

And sadly yes I am a regular viewer of the BBC’s Casualty – that’s what happens when you have kids 🙂

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