Computing, GIS and Archaeology in the UK

I’ve been out at a couple of Association for Geographic Information (AGI) events over the last couple of weeks- organised by their Northern Group. Their main function is to organised events in the North of England (hence the name), but the outgoing chairman Rollo, has been really pushing for events with a national attendance and relevance. I spoke briefly at both events, and my talks can be found on slideshare and on my talks page here.

The first event, a couple of weeks ago now, was Where2Now- a lively scamper through some leading edge ideas, mainly about geographic location for the masses rather than technical GIS per se (yes, I’m trying to avoid using the word NeoGeography, but that’s what I’m talking about). There were speakers from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, OpenStreetMap, Geovation, Ordnance Survey- in fact if you attended the Geoweb stream at the main AGI conference you’ll have a good idea who spoke! I did a short talk on the impact of “open” (access/source/data) as a disruptive technology (as far as I’m concerned this neo/mashup/open era wouldn’t be here without it), and attempted to demo a couple of deeply cool new toys that we’re working with at the moment- mapchat and gvsigmobile, both of which I think have the potential to be incredibly useful and really big. Unfortunately my laptop had stage fright and refused to speak to the monitor, so I couldn’t do a live demo of gvsigmobile as I wanted to.

Perhaps my favourite talk of the day was John McKerrell, talking about mapme.at, with his geo-clock (if you’ve read Harry Potter, remember the Weasley’s clock, with hands for each member of the family pointing to where they are at any given moment). Luckily John hasn’t found a need for a “mortal peril” setting yet! Mapme.at is great- it’s one of those ideas which can only work with the ubiquitous nature of geolocation these days, in phones, and with all the geo-location apis that you can use. Basically it’s a way of mapping where you are, and of plotting your location history, using feeds from twitter, email, google latitude, fire eagle etc.  Someone asked what it could be used for, but I think that’s missing the point somewhat- John has provided the basic idea,  and it’s up to the user to figure out what to do with it!

Again, the #geocom twitter stream going on in the background provided an interesting counter-point to the talks, although it’s increasingly worrying as a speaker not knowing if there’s a discussion about how rubbish you are going on while you’re giving the talk!

The second event I attended last week was a World GIS Day event at the Grammar School in Leeds. This followed on from the incredibly successful closing presentation at the main AGI conference, in which kids from the school, and a couple of their teachers discussed the way in which GIS is used throughout the whole school. The event last week was a chance for professional GIS users to talk a little about the way in which they use GIS, and also to see in more detail how GIS is used in the school. We also attended part of a sixth-form geography lesson, which was really interesting (not the least for the looks of abject trauma on all the attendee’s faces at sitting in a class room again after many years).

With my “open” hat on, I was quite uneasy about the way in which ESRI is synonymous with GIS in that environment, but to be fair it’s because they have worked extremely hard to provide the material for the teachers, which isn’t yet available anywhere else. My other concern was that teaching GIS seemed to be more about teaching which buttons to press to get a particular result, rather than teaching the theory and asking the kids how to figure it out *in that particular software package*. My “open source” side is frustrated that they are producing a generation of kids who will think ESRI is the only GIS to use, and when they are in  a position to influence the use of GIS themselves, within organisations,  or other schools, that’s the route they will choose. However, where in a school curriculum is the chance to give kids a choice, and how can open source provide them with that? Things to think about…

Just as we are settling down with the transition to open source, it would seem that a lot of other people are at least considering their options along the same lines, for whatever reason. This thread on the osgeo_discuss list, started off as a question about the value of open source to individual’s careers, but rapidly morphed into a discussion about replacing the ESRI packages. This seems to have lead to a general consensus about the areas where the open source packages do well and do badly.

The consensus seems to be that the open source packages are great for the behind-the-scenes and/or web-based work, assuming a relatively technically literate user, but that cartographic capabilities are sadly lacking at the moment. Furthermore, if you’re looking for one single replacement, then you’re out of luck- but you can assemble a toolkit that will get you all the capabilities you need, in a modular fashion. This does require a change in mindset- but it’s a lot more flexible and hopefully more powerful.

I hope that this recent upswell of interest and consensus about where the open source packages need improvement will help focus development in those areas. This does seem to be happening: this page is about plans for a cartographic library that can be shared amongst different packages. Sign up to show your support!

PS- if you’re in the UK you can still come along to our first UK OSGeo meetup at Stansted tomorrow (Thursday 1st) at 4.30. It’s free to attend, there will be some talks to start with (better finish writing mine), then we’ll sit down and try and figure out what we want a UK local chapter to do. There will be tea, coffee and biscuits too, so what are you waiting for!

It would appear that ESRI (UK) were as surprised as we were when they received notification of ESRI (US)’s decision to tighten up the license agreements, and they are negotiating on behalf of all of us educational charities/associate sites to get us a little more leeway. It has to be said that the email we received from them, which I based my blog post on, contained nothing about this whatsoever, and basically told us we had till the end of March to pack our metaphorical bags, but we are grateful to them for their efforts.

However, the point still stands. By using closed source software, we are all subject to the whims of software vendors, who can change the license agreement to stop people using their products whenever they feel like it.  So it has never happened to you? I’d have said the same thing before 4pm yesterday…

UPDATE: We’ve had some more feedback about this from ESRI UK- see my other post for details (though don’t get too excited because nothing *really* changes)

So, our move to open source gets a boost today, from an unexpected quarter. In what can only be described as a noble act of self-sacrifice, ESRI have told us that as an educational charity we are no longer allowed to have an educational discount for using their software and, not only that, our license codes will cease to work at the end of this month. So, we have 3 weeks, with the Easter holidays in the middle, to extricate ourselves and our ongoing projects from ArcGIS and into something else or find the many thousands of pounds to buy the full licenses for all of our staff.

I should explain something about the nature of “commercial” archaeological units in the UK, to those that don’t know much about them. We are usually not affiliated with universities, so we are not educational establishments as such, although we are an educational charity. We exist to fulfil a legal remit to study the archaeology of an area before it is developed. We also undertake educational projects on behalf of English Heritage, the government’s body in charge of cultural heritage. The whole reason we exist is to further the archaeological and historical understanding about the country we live in.

Previously, my biggest gripe has been that we can’t get academic discounts for data, unlike our colleagues in universities or local government. Despite the fact that our job is a legal requirement, we have to pay through the nose for the mapping that we need to do it. Getting hold of geological data, or anything that might allow us to look deeper into the area we’re studying is often out of the question. But at least we had the software to work with.

I can’t figure out what ESRI hope to achieve by this. It clearly affects many other educational charities apart from ourselves, across many different industries. Do they think that we all have secret pots of cash hidden under our desks and that we’re just going to throw up our hands and go “fair cop guv, we’ll pay the full cost now, here’s 7,000 pounds per user”? Do they seriously think that 3 weeks is enough time to get the money or rebuild all of our work in other packages?

Well ESRI, in case it’s not clear, we’re not going to buy your full versions. It’s unlikely that we will ever use your software again, and you’ve made it much easier for us to openly campaign for open source solutions throughout our own industry and other related sectors, and anywhere else where people are concerned about getting screwed over by software vendors.

So, we have to part company. It was nice knowing you for a while, but you’ve changed and I just don’t think we’re compatible any more. Now, where’s QGIS…