Computing, GIS and Archaeology in the UK

There’s a fantastic article in today’s Guardian (via Computer World Magazine) about the International Intellectual Property Alliance, who say that countries advocating the use of open source software should be put on a “Specialist 301 list” (ie a trading watch list) because open source “weakens the software industry” and “fails to build respect for intellectual property”.  The IIPA is an umbrella group for organisations like the RIAA and the MPAA, who are of course well-known for their open-mindedness and forward thinking.

Go read the articles, I’ll wait…

As well as the obvious lack of understanding of, well, anything, this is all quite bizarre. It implies disapproval of almost the entire internet infrastructure, as well as the big (US) players like Google. It shows a complete lack of understanding about companies (in the US) making a revenue from an open source business model, or even including open source software within their offerings. And how you can claim that the open source licenses somehow harm intellectual property is beyond me.

Oh well, I guess that puts the British Government on the watchlist, as well as the US government, and presumably the IIPA need to put themselves on if they use Apache at all…

This week I have actually been doing some real GIS work for a change, rather than going to meetings, writing bids, writing reports, fixing computer problems and showing other people how to do stuff. I think this is the first time in approx 2 years that I’ve done this, and I was pathetically excited about the prospect at the beginning of the week.

It has also been an opportunity for me to really put my money where my mouth is, regarding using open source GIS, since last time I did some real analysis it was with the Redlands offerings. So, I loaded up PostgreSQL and PostGIS, and Quantum GIS with the Grass plugin and Shapefile to PostGIS Import Tool (SPIT), and wrangled half a million polygons of historic landscape data into submission (ie merged, dissolved, reclassified, cut, pasted and cleaned).

I have a confession to make. It was easy! It was quick! I hardly had to go near the command line (with the exception of creating indices and merging tables in postgis).  OK, I had a few crashes (mainly python errors in windows) and I had to try a couple of different approaches to get my dissolves and merges to work, but I would expect that with any program dealing with large amounts of data.

I’ve been evangelising about open source GIS for a number of years now, but until now I’ve had to take other people’s word on the performance aspect. It’s always nice to get your own personal confirmation about something (albeit in a totally un-scientific, non benchmark sort of way), and even better, to have it exceed expectations.

So, to all you developers out there- thanks!

I’ve always used Google Alerts to let me know when Archaeogeek is mentioned online. It’s very useful for checking that your posts are not used/copied without attribution or permission, for one (this happens on a depressingly regular basis, and it’s just rude).

Recently, however, via Google Alerts I’ve also found out that there are a surprising number of new Archaeogeeks (or close variants) online. Here’s the newest example. It’s not me, though I am interested in tinkering with Arduino! I find this all a little weird. When you build an online persona of some kind, whether deliberately or by accident, you have no control over who else uses your name. Site like Usernamecheck have developed for exactly this reason. As long as the other users are well-behaved it’s not too much of a problem, but what do you do if they start saying things that you don’t agree with? Not only that, but the internet is full of dire warnings about the need to control your personal “brand”, particularly for job-hunting (which I’m not, I hasten to add). How do you tell prospective employers which references are yours and which are not?

This leads me, somewhat circuitously, to a discussion I had the other day about what happens when women get married and have to change their name. In academia, where your publishing record, and hence your job prospects, are closely tied to your name via references, this can be a real problem. I’m not the only person to make the decision to keep my maiden name for work-related business and my married name for social purposes (hopefully Mr Archaeogeek doesn’t mind too much).

I’m reminded of a post I saw a while back about microformats and consolidating your online identity. I think there’s definitely a case here for wider use of this kind of technology to relate the various aspects of your persona together, be that name changes from marriage, or for different types of social networking. It could end up like a paper trail showing the development of both your real life and your online life, with various formats to describe current and past associations. Of course for it to work, it has to be widely used and accepted, but it’s worth thinking about…

The Call for Papers for the second UK OSGIS conference is now open. This will take place at the University of Nottingham Centre for Geospatial Sciences on the 21st-22nd of June 2010. More information is available at the website. Last year’s conference was a great success, and this year it has been expanded to two days to make more space for workshops.

Contributions are invited (but not limited to) the following topics:

• State of the Art developments in Open Source GIS
• Open Source GIS in Education
• Interoperability and standards – OGC, ISO/TC 211
• Open Source GIS application use cases : Government, Participatory GIS, Location based services, Health, Energy, Water, Climate change etc
• Web processing services o  Open architectures, open content
• Case studies of open source implementations
• Open Source GIS Internationalisation and Localisation
• Using Open Source GIS with proprietary software
• Transition to Open Source GIS
• Open Source GIS business models
• Open Source GIS implementation and deployment case studies
• Sensor Web enablement o  Hands-on workshops on using and developing open source GIS tools

Abstracts should be submitted before the 30th of January, via the Easy Chair conference system here.