Computing, GIS and Archaeology in the UK

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…

OK, day two of the AGI conference. This started with three more excellent keynotes, from Charlie Pattinson of the Environment Agency, Charles Kenelly of ESRI and Stuart Haynes of the Defence Geographic Centre.

Charlie’s post was about flood risk management in a changing world. This begs a question posed initially by Steve Feldman in his opening speech as conference chair- are we shaping the world or being shaped by it? This is highlighted by the fact that people used to talk about flood defence, now we talk about management. it’s no longer possible to defend against floods, only mitigate the risk they cause. The 2007 Pitt review had some recommendations to make about GIS, amongst other things- though I find it quite odd that it takes a massive flood and an expensive review to tell them that they need to establish better methods of sharing data between organisations. We (in the UK) also have three separate initiatives all about sharing information in government- Inspire, the Athens Initiative, and the Location Strategy. Surely it would be better just to get on with it? I digress, however- it was a sobering and interesting talk that warned about complacency- most flooding last year was caused by the drainage system being overwhelmed, not by surface water. I certainly felt guilty as I always assumed I’d be fine living half way up a hill!

Charles Kennelly from ESRI UK talked about “GIS beyond barriers”. Most barriers to traditional GIS have now gone, but there are new barriers instead. These are things like the user interface, data sharing, and an understanding of data confidence and quality. Furthermore, GIS has become much more familiar to people, but is still seen as an addendum to most business processes rather than an integral part, and it must become more integrated to achieve it’s full potential.  As an example of how GIS should be integrated, Charles showed a case study from the Foresty Commission, which hid all the maps behind an outlook-like interface so as not to scare the accountants.

I was most impressed with the work of the Defense Geographic Centre, who provide all the mapping for the UK military operations in Afghanistan, for example. The rapid turn-around that they need, and the constant need to adapt to changing requests from “the theatre” were astounding. One example particularly struck me, about the need to provide detailed off-road contour information, classified into what was safe to drive on and what was not, because it is no longer safe to drive on the roads. Again, this shows that we as GIS specialists are being shaped by the world as much as we are shaping it.

So, to the controversial paper of the day. Mark Bishop of Mapinfo did a paper on “The Hype of Web 2.0″, which won best paper. It was possibly the least geographically-related, and a number of people have expressed suprise as to why it won. I liked it, but did feel that he glossed over some things that are actually fairly important in what we do. For a start, metadata and tagging are apparently one and the same and were invented by Tim O’Reilly. I totally disagree with this- they are really the antithesis of each other (but can be used together very well). Metadata is about data veracity and quality, and should (if done properly) be totally reliable. Tagging is about loose, flexible aggregations of data, and tells you nothing about how reliable your data is, or whether it’s fit for purpose.

I did agree with the way in which Mark applied the Web 2.0 paradigm to mapping. Priorities should be interoperability and useability, and only then additional features. Colleagues/customers and clients all have different expectations of mapping now because they have been exposed to the Google Effect. It’s important that we recognise that. I also like the notion of participation as opposed to publishing.

The final talk that I attended was from Nick Black, talking about Cloudmade and Openstreetmap. His thoughts on the changing business model that free data provides were really interesting- basically the value (monetary?) is pushed further up the train to the third-party applications and devices. He also made the very good point that maps are only useful if they are reliable. Now, to me that chimes slightly awkwardly with the openstreetmap approach (you don’t have a measure of completeness) but when I spoke to Nick afterwards he said the Cloudmade were looking at that sort of thing, which is very interesting indeed. He also pointed out that Cloudmade also have shapefile downloads of openstreetmap data, so I guess I’ll have to amend my post on that from a couple of days ago…

I missed most of the “Big Debate” in the afternoon so I can’t really add to the analysis that has been written elsewhere on the subject, although I can see where they are coming from. Any reservations that people have had though, have been related to general attitudes rather than to the conference itself,  so I guess the Debate has worked on one level because people have gone away to talk about it. Maybe next year attitudes will have changed!

Day one of the AGI Geocommunity 2008 conference began with the Keynote Speeches from Sean Phelan of Multimap, Vanessa Lawrence of the Ordnance Survey, and Geoff Zeiss of Autodesk. Sean Phelan had some really interesting insights based on his experience of founding multimap and surviving the dot-com boom, through to the recent acquisition by microsoft. He coined possibly the stand-out quote of the conference: “We are the last generation who will ever know what it means to be lost” , referring to the rising ubiquity of location-based technology and GPS. What I liked most about Sean’s talk was the bigger picture outlook exploring the rise and take-up of new ideas and technology, and his predictions for the next few years. Reassuringly, he thought that there was still a place for big and small companies, and that no single company would lead.

Vanessa Lawrence also used a good term (new to me)- the idea of the “Prosumer”, someone who takes ownership of data and interacts with it rather than simply consuming. This is not a new idea (in fact it’s quite Web 2.0) but it’s nice to have a term for it! Most interestingly, Vanessa talked about a new Ordnance Survey service for delivering mapping data by WMS. While we have been an age waiting for this to actually happen, and we don’t know what the licensing/pricing model will be like, it’s still great news.

Geoff Zeiss of Autodesk, as always gave a very thought-provoking talk, with lots of very striking visuals, about building for a sustainable future. This focussed on how new GIS tools, particularly 3D can help in this process.

Tim Warr, also of multimap, tried to fire us all up right from the start with the provocative idea that web-mapping had killed traditional GIS. Except in the end he said that it hadn’t, so no fight there then! Tim made the point that since 90% of GIS users only use 10% of the functionality of GIS, why not just give them the 10%. This is what Google have done, and it obviously works really well- for low-level GIS use by consumers. He went on to show some very nice web-based mapping, computing travel times, but really that only moves the functionality from 10-11%, and you have to build a new application for every extra bit of usage. For s atart that doesn’t seem like good use of code or time, why not build something more flexible? Tim said that coding was the skills area to focus on now, but really I think that devalues traditional GIS.

In the afternoon I went to a series of lectures on various business-oriented aspects of GIS, or rather managing GIS. I have to admit that most of it went right over my head, but there was some useful information on how to market GIS projects from Steve Calder of PA Consulting and Keith Wishart from ESRI, and on how the procurement process works from both sides by Tony Boobier, ex of Mapinfo.

Finally, in the last session I went to Graeme Gould’s talk on using postgresql in the Grand Union Housing Group, which was really useful for tips on what we might do at Oxford Archaeology, and then I got to give my talk on Open Source GIS in the UK, which seemed to go OK really! I’ll put it up online when I get a chance…

The evening entertainment, in the form of an 80s disco complete with bucking bronco and scaletrix, was clearly designed to be deeply symbolic and reflective of the state of the economy and competition in the market place, or so it seemed as tiredness and alcohol kicked in. Whatever it meant, a good time was had by all!

I’m just back from the AGi Geocommunity 2008 conference in Stratford-upon-Avon. A very enjoyable time was had by all I think! I would have posted from the conference itself, but the hotel wifi wasn’t keen on playing with my linux laptop.

I’ll talk more in other posts about the actual presentations, but this is just some of my general thoughts about the conference.

My overall thought was that the AGI got it right with this event. I went into it with some reservations, partly because I was talking about open source at a conference full of software vendors, and partly  because I am pretty new to the AGI and didn’t know what to expect.

From talking to people throughout the event, as well as the entertainment that they put on, I really did feel that they were trying to get a sense of community, breaking down barriers between vendors and users. I also felt that if open source gis software is to become more widely used, it needs to engage with that community on a professional level, rather than scratch around on the edges, or out and out refusing to come to the party.

I got to chat with a lot of people from proprietary software companies, and from the Ordnance Survey, all of whom were actually really interested in engaging with open source, and open access to data.  Again, more on the specifics later. It was suggested at one point that the concepts of open standards and open source are totally separate, and therefore to make the open source case better it is important not to mix the two, and I have been thinking about this ever since. From the perspective of Oxford Archaeology’s desire to adopt an “open ethos”, the two concepts are inextricably linked, but I do see that in some cases this might not be true. The standards people might not always want to be linked with open source because they need to engage with the proprietary people too. Something to think about as we continue to promote open source GIS within the UK.

On that note, I spoke to a few people about the idea of setting up a special interest group (SIG) for open source software within the AGI, and about arranging an OSGeo/AGI SIG conference within the UK next year some time. Both these points will need some expansion so I’ll leave it at that for now…