OK maybe not, but the development of OpenStreetMap as told by its founding father, Steve Coast is going to be a great read. A truly game changing event in the mapping industry, the project has always attracted strong characters as contributors and in as much as it’s possible to say leaders. The story of how …
A common topic of discussion when the topic of Volunteered Geographic Information ( hate the term but it’s was academics use) is motivation. Why expend your precious time adding a missing road to OpenStreetMap or Google Map Maker, why add a review of a Hotel to TripAdvisor ? Clearly there is the desire to fill in the …
One of my earliest memories as a child was flying, then still a little glamorous, to Belfast to see my mothers family. This I guess was in the mid 1970’s and was the first time I visited Heathrow’s Terminal 1. Early this month I visited the terminal for the last time, most airlines have already moved …
OK not Mars but the Airbus Defence and Space factory in Stevenage, where for testing rovers they have build a “Mars Yard”. The about of effort that goes into space engineering I still find astonishing, the yard is lit using lights that match the spectrum of light on the surface of Mars and the sand matches …
Having spent the last few days in the tourist hotspot of Florence, it’s clear that the mobile gadget of the year is the selfie stick, a telescopic stick with a mount for your smartphone to take the perfect selfie beyond arms length. It’s seems that you have not visited somewhere or taken part in any activity …
This weekend I have had the pleasure of taking part in the European GIS Education Symposium at University College Cork. I organised a workshop on Scrappy GIS, using simple web mapping tools in this case Google Maps Engine Lite to teach the concepts of GIS, without needing a GIS ! The tutorial is online here and …
The University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) is hosting a specialist meeting on Spatial Search, the call for papers ends on September 20th and proposals are requested on three topics.. Computational: What are the current computing challenges in spatial search? What are the limits of spatial indexing? Geospatial: What kinds of spatial search are …
Last month I had the pleasure of presenting the 50th anniversary lecture of The Society of Cartographers in London. My slides are below.. The slides I must admit are not much use of their own, but you might get some idea of the narrative of my talk. My key message I think was to highlight a paradox, …
Read more “SoC 50th Anniversary talk: Potential and propaganda”
Did a short package with Dutch TV yesterday in Amsterdam talking about the differences between the maps of the great Dutch cartographers of the 17th Century and modern Google Maps. In some ways there are surprising similarities, both in effect are all about discovery, earlier discoveries of new lands to exploit have been replaced by …
I was able to make a flying visit to the State of the Map US conference yesterday in Washington DC. As usual it had the higher than average GIS conference energy levels, but it felt really different to previous events to me.. Firstly the conference was a step up in terms of the professionalism of …
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