Computing, GIS and Archaeology in the UK

I’ve been on holiday in Egypt for the last couple of weeks, hence the lack of posts. Sorry ’bout that, but I needed a total ban on computers, the internet, phones to regain my sanity. And what do you know, but two weeks away really did help!

Regular(ish) posting should return next week, once all the washing and unpacking is done!

A few teaser posts have appeared over the last few days about this new Firefox add-on called “Geode”, which promises to “understand location, enabling enriched, personalized, and localized content”. There has been a slightly muted reaction to this, possibly due to the fact that it’s supposed to be available today and yet there’s no sign of it in the labs. Some people think these features are now common-place and therefore not that exciting at all.

I disagree! Though with such a small amount of actual information about the add-on, it seems like it will make it easier for the common user (eg not the geospatial or computer geek) to ask questions like “find curry houses near me” or “give me directions to the cinema”. Imagine, if it was integrated with Ubiquity, how straightforward that would be? This comes closest to an unobtrusive location app for the desktop in the same way that we (well some of us anyway) now expect from our phone or ipod.

Being unable to attend FOSS4G this year, I freed up lots of space in my schedule to read the daily reports that would surely come streaming from my RSS reader. I’m still waiting. In previous years, there were a lot of posts about the conference, often posted during the conference itself. What was different about this year?

OK, so we know that Paul Ramsey was awarded the Sol Katz award (though why he should be surprised by that, I don’t know), and that Chris Schmidt posted a video of Schulyer’s lightning talk (actually Chris did put a few posts up), but other than that there has been very little posting. Not fair guys! Those of us that couldn’t go want to know what the big stories were! What were the trends? What was it like playing with the proprietary guys?

Here’s the google docs version of the talk I gave at the AGI Geocommunity 2008 conference. It’s more of a general discussion on the preconceptions and limiting factors in the uptake of open source GIS in the UK rather than a run down of what’s available.

Note that I’m hoping to put up a page with pdfs of all of my GIS-related talks pretty soon, so pop back for the downloadable version with notes…