Computing, GIS and Archaeology in the UK

I have been musing all week over my response to some questions posted originally by James Fee and answered by Paul Ramsey and Jody Garnett.

The question has become one about the value of OSGeo as a brand- well personally I think the marketing aspects are really important. I’ve stood up and talked about open source GIS an awful lot recently, to a diverse range of people, trying to persuade them that it’s a viable choice for their business. Having OSGeo as an over-reaching network is really important, because it negates the common queries about where to go for support and how to tell if a project is sustainable. It’s a way of getting people to buy into the whole open source GIS concept and community, rather than using a particular programme that just happens to be free to download.

I do think that case studies and project support are incredibly valuable too, don’t get me wrong, but if we think OSGeo has a role in gaining new users for open source GIS, particularly in the business sector, then we need the brand and marketing too.

Part of my fabulous new plans for portable gis (which will be revealed soon-ish) involve including a database replication option. This might or might not work on the USB drive, but it needs to be open source, portable, and connect to postgresql at the very least. I have been looking at a couple of options for this, without a vast amount of success, it has to be said.

The packages that I have tried are: Daffodil Replicator, dbreplicator (a fork of daffodil replicator), Symmetric-DS, and db -connector for Funambol. Of these, daffodil and dbreplicator seem like the best bet as they will attempt to do some conflict resolution (eg when the same record is added/altered in both databases). They are also java-based, so should be nicely configurable. Symmetric-DS works well, but doesn’t do conflict resolution, so that kind of rules it out for me. I don’t really know about db-connector for funambol as the documentation that I found was quite out of date and I didn’t get very far with it.

So, daffodil replicator and dbreplicator…

They are quite easy to set up, although the documentation in both cases assumes rather more end-user knowledge than perhaps they should do. Basically you find an appropriate jdbc jar file for your database, grab log4j.jar from somewhere, and tell daffodilreplicator/dbreplicator where to find it, by setting appropriate paths in batch files. Then you start the publication server and set up the details for your “master” database, and then do the same for the subscription server and the “client” database. Both are clever enough to translate between different database types, such as postgresql and mysql, which in some cases would be really handy.

My difficulty with both flavours of the package came when creating the “subscription”, ie telling the client database where to go find the master database. In neither case have I been able to sucessfully set this up, because of various errors. Weirdly, both flavours of the package give me an error in my log file about the first ever subscription that I tried to set up, despite having reinstalled, deleted everything I could find, and started from scratch several times.

The documentation in both cases hasn’t been good enough to resolve my issues, and neither have the forums. Actually, I’m still waiting on dbreplicator, which seems to be a little more active, so I should give them the benefit of the doubt for a couple of days.

I can see a great need for this kind of setup, assuming I can get around these initial teething troubles. So, my question is, has anyone successfully set up any of these packages on windows (sorry, but it needs to be windows at this stage), or does anyone know of any other packages I should try?

If I do manage to get things sorted I’ll post a detailed how-to…

I mentioned a while back the cool competition that the government here in the UK were running, called “Show Us a Better Way“. The idea was that people could submit ideas for mashups with public information. Well, the contest appears to have been a great success- it closed at the end of September and the winners were announced earlier this month (no, my entry didn’t win, sob).

Not unsuprisingly, the winning entries all had a geospatial component to them, but their future is already in doubt due to some over-zealous big-stick-waving from dear old Ordnance Survey. In short, the OS are saying that no data derived from their products can be displayed on Google Maps, due to incompatibilities between their own Contractors license and that of Google. It’s OK though, because they can use OpenSpaces, OS’s own mapping product,  although that is not for high-volume use, and the OS will own any data that you plot on it. As Charles Arthur comments- the OS seem to be operating the opposite of a GPL license- everything they touch, they own.

For those that already don’t think this is all a bit ridiculous and, well, crappy, here’s the rub: the Show Us a Better Way competition was part-funded by the Department for Communities and Local Government, who the (publicly funded OS) have to report to!

So, this better way that they are supposed to be showing us, is already mired in complications and ridiculous licensing issues. Looks like we’ll have to crowd-source it then, as long as we promise never to read an atlas or look at another map again, just in case…

… According to Wordle:

(Thanks to Electric Archaeology for the link)

It makes you think actually. The prevalence of words like “posts” might suggest that I am often apologising for breaks in posting, and certainly I know several people called “Chris” that I might concievably mention. I should use the terms “archaeology” and “gis” more, though, and of course this post itself will influence the result in future!