Archive for September, 2010

AGI Geocommunity Day One

Posted September 30, 2010 * Comments(2)

Yesterday was the first official day of AGI Geocommunity 2010 (second for those that attended the W3G unconference the day before).

A lot has happened in the UK Geospatial Industry since last year- when one of my highlights was Ed Parsons talking about the ludicrous situation of data ownership in the Ordnance Survey. Now, we have lots of free data to play with, and indeed one of the over-riding themes yesterday was how we use this data properly. The poor old Asborometer was highlighted not once but twice as an example of what we shouldn't be doing.

Recession has clearly focussed people's minds- there was a lot less worrying about "palaeo" and "neo" in the sessions I went to, and a lot more worrying about raising our game and increasing the profile of GIS across the public sector and in business. We all know how useful GIS is, and how it can improve efficiency and save costs, but we have to convince others of that fact too. We do, however, need to focus on solutions to problems rather than the technology itself.

Of the keynote speeches my personal favourite was from Andy Hudson-Smith of CASA, maker of Talesofthings and MapTube. Anyone who's mantra is still "wouldn't it be great if…" amongst all the doom and gloom and budget cuts is alright with me.

Steven Feldman's paper on Cocktails on the Titanic presented open, free, and the cloud as the proverbial icebergs that traditional GIS vendors need to steer round or crash into. Personally I'd prefer a life-raft analogy, but it was good to hear open source and data being highlighted in this way.

Lunch time saw an informal get together of OSGeo:UK, developments around which are worthy of a blog post on their own asap!

Matthew Perrin of Envitia presented a great paper on the use of open source software and open standards at the Welsh Assembly Government. This is an example of open source and proprietary solutions working well together- it doesn't have to be an all or nothing approach.

Gary Gale talked about silos of geodata being collected by, for example, foursquare, facebook and gowalla, in an entertaining talk about the four horsemen of the geocalypse. There are attempts to create global, open, databases of places- like Geonames, so perhaps what we now need to see is the big players rallying around these existing efforts rather than re-inventing the wheel…

I talked about the opportunities that have grown from the transition to open source at Oxford Archaeology- slides and my paper will appear on slideshare asap. The usual questions about "risk" and "costs" came up- so I think there's room for a blog post on those points fairly soon too!

The last session I attended was a panel on the AGI's Foresight study that I contributed to last year. The discussion did dwell a little on issues of open data and transparency- reinforcing my feeling that this is the key point people are concerned about this year.

Roll on day two…

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Thoughts on Spatialite

Posted September 20, 2010 * Comments(2)

Spurred on by some great talks at FOSS4G, and also by a bit of cynicism elsewhere in the geospatial blogosphere, I finally got around to having a play with Spatialite at the weekend. There have been posts elsewhere about it working really well, so all I’ll say here is “it works for me as well”. I’m not really trying to tout it as a shapefile replacement, but a useful tool in a particular use case as an alternative to the ESRI personal geodatabase.

The use case I’m thinking of is the rather prosaic issue of file management. We are moving over to the KnowledgeTree Content Management System for file management, which works well for single files, like Documents, Spreadsheets, etc, but is pretty useless for multi-part files (for want of a better term) like CAD or GIS data. I can’t speak for CAD, but the average GIS scenario is going to need at least one project file, plus shapefiles with at least three parts to them, and usually rasters with at least two parts to them. Logically, file-based geodatabases work well in this scenario, providing you with a single file to hold your geospatial data. With Rasterlite support becoming more common, perhaps with Spatialite we can have our rasters nicely packaged up as well as our vectors. Getting data in and out is easy, and can be automated using scripts so easily that even I can do it.

So- why are we not doing using PostgreSQL for all of this? Well, in an ideal world we’d have big and powerful enough servers and network bandwidth to cope with the myriad GIS work we do.  Some of the GIS work is quite ephemeral, so we don’t want to go to the trouble of setting up new databases/virtual machines every time someone needs to use GIS for a project. Spatialite seems ideal for this, and I look forward to exploring it further over the coming weeks.

FOSS4G final round-up

Posted September 14, 2010 * Comments(0)

Slightly delayed round-up on the last day of FOSS4G (I was on holiday!), and some thoughts on the conference as a whole…

In the morning I attended a tutorial on GeoNode, which I’m very excited about. It’s a new project from the OpenGeo team that links together Geoserver, GeoNetwork, and Django. The aim is to make it easier for people to work with geospatial data and metadata, providing a content-management-system AND social network approach. This might sound weird, but I can think of lots of ways in which it might make the use and discovery of geospatial data more easy and interesting. We’ll see!

There was a lot of interest in the “alternatives to PostGIS” stream of talks, especially around CouchDB and SpatiaLite. Perhaps at some point we’ll need to have a database shoot-out to go with the WMS server one! When we have more packages supporting SpatiaLite and RasterLite, I foresee a great future for them- even if it’s just as a data transfer format, or for facilitating the storage of spatial data in a CMS.

Then we were on to OpenLayers-related talks- I particularly enjoyed Andreas Hocevar’s talk on performance configurations- and talking to other people who saw it there were some light-bulb moments!

Then on to the final Keynotes from Raj Singh and Tyler Mitchell, and notices- congratulations to Helena Mitasova for winning this year’s Sol Katz award!

So, on to final thoughts. It’s interesting to come back to FOSS4G after a 2 year gap while it’s been in unaffordable (for me) parts of the world, but also because the world is a very different place financially to how it was in 2007. In between 2007 and now, my conferences have been limited to mainstream UK GIS such as the AGI, and to OSGIS. I was surprised at how much self-confidence and excitement there was this year- in contrast to the slight introspection that I often see at the AGI (no one was worrying about whether they were Neo or Palaeo in any of the talks I went to). There was as much professionalism, research, development, and business strategy as at any other conference, but with the added excitement that came from people simply doing things they really enjoy. Many thanks to the conference organisers, and here’s to Denver next year!

FOSS4G 2010 day 2 or 3

Posted September 9, 2010 * Comments(1)
The second day of the conference was great as always, book-ended by an
interesting keynote from Michael Gould of ESRI and the now infamous
WMS shoot-out, complete with glitter vest and song, so I’m told!
Michael Gould’s speech on fostering greater collaboration between open
developers and ESRI has been widley reported on, but personally I
think he made an incorrect assumption early on, and missed the point.
He assumed that everyone is doing what they do to make money, and this
is probably the one conference where that is simply not true. People
work with, and use, open source software for many other reasons
besides money (although that helps) and lowering the financial
barriers to entry in EDN isn’t a massive incentive in this
environment. There was much talk of “open”, but with a very limited
definition of that term.

Ironically this was followed by Ivan Sanchez and his talk on game
theory and its application in software development- in which he
“proved” that the only way to “win” is to share, and then Helena
Mitasova’s keynote on open source software in academia.

Proprietary software is often thought of as “necessary” for a career
in “industry” and of course pretty much free to academic institutions,
so tends to dominate. However increasingly students need more choice,
even if it’s just so they can install a copy of the software on their
laptop.  Helena listed a number of institutions teaching open source
GIS, sometimes alongside proprietary GIS but called out for more
collaboration in preparing modules in areas other than desktop GIS.
More information is available on the OSGeo wiki.

I divided the afternoon between Postgis and Inspire- related talks,
and learnt a lot, particularly about Inspire. Open source
implementations are starting to be developed, which the UK could learn
from and contribute to.

Finally an honourable mention to the OpenStreetMap map-in-a-box
project (it’s law that there has to be at least one OSM talk). This
takes the pain out of deploying your own instance of OSM data and
keeping it up to date. Sounds fun, and I’ll be keeping an eye on it.

The Gala Dinner was a triumph- good food, wine and conversation. Many
late arrivals and bleary eyes this morning!

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