A prize (virtual) from me for the best blog post on GeoCommunity that I have seen so far from.

Thanks very much – not sure whether you have left me with much to write my parting chairman’s piece

Watch out for my slightly dispassionate blurt on my last GeoCommunity as chair over the next few days

Hope I see you there next year and that you will be presenting and georanting

Steven

This is a very good and balanced view of the #geocom event. Well done on becoming next year’s PR lead.

I have been to the event, in its myriad of forms, since 1995, it was a very different beast then but I can still see a few people stuck in the “let’s build a big stand and a bus will come with people who want to buy all my shiny things” – to a degree.

The community/ netwrok/ federation of friends thing worked well this year. It’s always a balance though between sponsorship and subsidy and having some good ‘vendor neutral’ debate. It will be good to see how Peter ter Haar’s (OS) initiatives come to fruition in the next 12 months. Many people want to see a change to derived data issues (be they mythology, real, imagined/ conjured up by barrack-room copyright experts). As Peter said, the oil-tanker is trying to turn around – making the sea choppy won’t help.

The band were awesome too.

Jo

Great write up. I missed quite a few of these so will now go to the website and look up the slide packs for them.

With regards to the BBC, we orignally gave them one raster tile with split levels (this was a result of a test that was carried out in our Cartography department) but because they would still have to vectorise the text and then georefence and give an anchor point, the BBC manually removed the text and hand created the new layer of text which was rotated in the demo you saw. This was a painful and slow process for them.

You could now achieve the same results using OS Vector Map along with Silverlight/Deep Zoom. The data is split into points, lines, polygons and text. So you could WMS or tile the points, lines and polygons as one layer, leaving the text to come in as a WFS. This is just an idea but one that may work.

Randy over at GIS in XML has been doing lots with SIlverlight API and WMS (http://www.cadmaps.com/gisblog/) so might be worth looking at.

Hope that helps and clarifies a few things to your readers

take care

Tim