A change of direction for the OS ?

From todays Pre-Budget report, a document that’s main focus is the fiscal stimulation of the UK economy, this nugget of potentially very exciting news… “4.54 Re-use of public sector information from trading funds  The HM Treasury/Shareholder Executive assessment of trading funds has considered the potential for innovation and growth from increasing commercial and other use of public sector information. It will shortly publish some key principles …

Notes from down-under

As the Whitehall farce that is the OS derived data debacle continues, it’s interesting to contrast the flow of public sector information in the UK with that in Australia which I have just experienced first hand at the first Asia Pacific Spatial Innovation Conference. Interestingly for a Geospatial conference there was in addition to the usual technology developments, a …

Mash-up hero !!

This is a great story from the mySociety blog, Michael Houlsby from East Hampshire council has built an API to the councils database to allow users of the fix my street application to post issues directly into the councils own operational database. I can only imagine how hard this was to achieve not from a technical point of view, but from …

Show Us a Better Way, The results show

The finalists in the innovative, Show Us a Better Way: competition have been announced and its great so see how many of them make sure of geospatial information, again evidence I’m sure of the pent-up demand for access to geospatial data in the UK. The finalists are receiving funding to either build working prototypes of continue development of existing systems such as the excellent wheres …

Wikitude : Practical Augmented Reality

Earlier this week I was talking to a group of travel journalists and demonstrated wikitude, one of the hottest applications available for the new Android powered G-1 phone. Wikitude uses the GPS, Digital Compass and camera on the G-1 to deliver one of the first really practical augmented reality applications, excellent for travel and tourism …

The Elephant in the conference room

Last week ESRI held its annual European User group meeting in London, which as usual was a masterpiece in professional conference production. Jack gave an inspirational conference keynote on the first day followed by some great product demos by the team from ESRI UK who were the hosts of the conference this year. This was followed by team from …

The Geoweb and Digital Mapping Conference 2009

Looks like the first conference of next year for me will be a new one, The Geoweb and Digital Mapping Conference 2009 is a new conference for Europe along the lines of Where 2.0 or Location Intelligence, to be held in London, 13-14 January. It’s great to see a conference like this in Europe, as much innovation …