Computing, GIS and Archaeology in the UK

One of the things that I wanted to do with my portable GIS was to include a menu on the USB stick to tie everything together and provide easy access to the configuration files. The first option I looked at was PStart, but that’s not open source and has quite a limited license. Luckily (again) a saviour has come along, in the shape of Tim Fehlman’s USB Drive Menu. This started off as freeware but he has now made it Open Source so it’s ideal.

It’s built using AutoIT, which I hadn’t paid much attention to, until now, but it was remarkably easy to understand and use, even if I am a bit of a voodoo programmer as one of my colleagues calls it

So now I have a working menu, apart from the fact that I have to find out what sort of license Tim wants to use and how he wants to be credited. We’re getting there…

I’ve decided that I’m going to re-integrate the Archaeogeek tumblog into the main blog. Reasoning- I don’t have enough time at the moment to properly integrate the two blogs, and I would imagine that more people subscribe to the main blog rather than the tumblog.

I’ll have a “tip day” once a week (don’t know which day yet) and all the tips posts will be tagged so they should be relatively easy to find. None of them will be rocket science- they’re just things I find really handy.

If you haven’t got enough feeds cluttering up your reader, then bloglines have an archaeology category, with the feeds exportable as an opml file. Most of the feeds are UK-related but there’s sure to be something in there that you’ve not seen before.

The Ordnance Survey’s shortsighted license agreement has put paid to the fantastic 3D Virtual model of London that the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at UCL has spent six years researching and creating. The full story of the negotiations can be found in this Guardian Article, but briefly speaking the Ordnance Survey’s refusal to change the terms of their license has meant that the data cannot be made freely available on the web, although it can be used by the London Boroughs.

The sticking point is that Google want to negotiate a fixed fee for the use of the data, rather than a pay-per-transaction policy, which is how services like Streetmap and Multimap license the data. The Ordnance Survey say that this would “wreck the level playing field for other partners”.

This seems wrong on a number of levels. Firstly, they are allowing the data to be used only by the people (ie the London Boroughs) that can afford to pay commercial rates, and disallowing the people (ie the rest of us) who can’t afford it. Secondly, by refusing to be flexible and working with organisations like Google, who are, let’s face it, pretty big in the world of mapping at the moment, they are missing the chance to become involved in this upsurge of interest in mapping and neogeography. They are missing the boat and, much as I hate to agree with this comment, in grave danger of becoming irrelevant (but not for the reasons that he suggests, IMHO).

Can you imagine how great it would be if you could have Ordnance Survey mapping in your google application?

The worst thing is, this opens the door for Microsoft, who are busy creating their own 3D models of cities using their own data. So the Ordnance Survey freeze out local innovation and research and let the biggest behemoth of them all claim the prize. How’s that for your “level playing field” then?