Open Source Computing and GIS in the UK

I’m off to the big city today, to give a talk at the British Computing Society open source and geospatial specialist groups, on… (I bet you can’t guess)… open source GIS. Details here. If you can make it along, cool, see you there (email the organisers to let them know), otherwise I have put the powerpoint and detailed notes up on the talks section so you can download them. Any errors are entirely my own, and other such disclaimers…

As of a couple of days ago, the UK local chapter of OSGeo is now official, rather than “in formation”. Thanks to the board for passing our proposal. It might not seem much to some people, but to me it feels an awful lot easier to persuade sceptics and doubters that there is an open source GIS “scene” in the UK with an officially recognised chapter. For information, these are our terms of reference:

• To provide a forum for discussion and promotion of Open Source Geospatial Software in the UK, and provide networking opportunities for developers and users
• To help more UK organisations discover the opportunity of open source geospatial tools, and collate business studies of successful transitions
• To raise awareness of the benefits of public access to geodata in the UK by collating links to sources of legitimate free data

In addition we would like to work towards the following:

• A fully-featured open access UK SDI
• Someday hosting the FOSS4G conference in the UK

If you’re interested, do check out the wiki and come to our conference in June!

OK, so this is a slightly delayed New Year post, partly due to the happy fact that I was without an internet connection for most of Christmas. It’s good to go without sometimes!

My love-affair with Mapfish continues with the news that it’s now possible to integrate the google earth browser plugin into your map. I am really keen to try this out, but there is the problem that there’s no google earth browser plugin for linux yet. So it’s going to be a challenge to build this kind of functionality into a map without it being blatantly obvious that it’s not working for a proportion of the audience. I’ll have to ponder this for a while…

In other news- with luck the UK local chapter of OSGeo will get official approval today.  I’ve been quite quiet on the subject of the chapter here on archaeogeek for a while now, but we have been steadily building support and raising the profile of OSGeo in the UK, mainly through attendance at conferences and seminars. Of course if you don’t know about it already we’re also co-organising the first UK Open Source GIS conference, happening on the 22nd of June this year at the University of Nottingham Centre for Geospatial Sciences.  If you’re interested in either the local chapter or the conference, check out the websites, sign up for the mailing list or otherwise make your presence known- the more the merrier!