Computing, GIS and Archaeology in the UK

The Call for Papers for the second UK OSGIS conference is now open. This will take place at the University of Nottingham Centre for Geospatial Sciences on the 21st-22nd of June 2010. More information is available at the website. Last year’s conference was a great success, and this year it has been expanded to two days to make more space for workshops.

Contributions are invited (but not limited to) the following topics:

• State of the Art developments in Open Source GIS
• Open Source GIS in Education
• Interoperability and standards – OGC, ISO/TC 211
• Open Source GIS application use cases : Government, Participatory GIS, Location based services, Health, Energy, Water, Climate change etc
• Web processing services o  Open architectures, open content
• Case studies of open source implementations
• Open Source GIS Internationalisation and Localisation
• Using Open Source GIS with proprietary software
• Transition to Open Source GIS
• Open Source GIS business models
• Open Source GIS implementation and deployment case studies
• Sensor Web enablement o  Hands-on workshops on using and developing open source GIS tools

Abstracts should be submitted before the 30th of January, via the Easy Chair conference system here.

I’ve been looking at a couple of “cool things” recently that don’t seem to have picked up much coverage in the blogosphere, so I’m going to do a series of occasional posts on them.  The first is GvSIG Mobile and the Tellus Project.

GvSIG Mobile is a development from Prodevelop in Spain, to create an optimised version of GvSIG for small-screened mobile devices such as smartphones and netbooks. The Tellus project links GvSIG mobile with an embedded mobile database, and allows you to synchronise with a remote database, eg PostgreSQL either on demand or when you choose (eg when you have a data signal), using OpenMobileIS.

What you get is a GIS package, allowing you to add base mapping either from your local device or via WMS, and the ability to edit a vector layer on top using on-board GIS or by drawing on the screen. You can add attribute data, and store it locally, then synchronise with a remote database, with full conflict resolution. All in open source- just install it on your device of choice!

GvSIG Mobile screenshot

We think this is fantastic. In it’s current very simple form, we can see many uses for this as, say, a simple remote issue-recording device. We’re adapting this for use as a full relational on-site recording tool for archaeologists, but it could easily work for environmental staff or anyone trying to record data outdoors, perhaps in areas where there isn’t always a good 3G signal.

This is an ongoing project, but is fully working, so if you’d like more information, then get in touch!

… or there again, there might not!

This is just a heads up for a couple of events/workshops that I’m involved in over the next couple of weeks and months.

Firstly, next Tuesday is the AGI Northern Group Where2.0Now one-day conference, at GeoPlan in Harrogate. If you want to know what this whole “neogeography” thing is, and what it means to you, then be there or be terribly antiquated. There are some great speakers lined up (and me, but beggars can’t be choosers), and it’s looking like a good day. With luck and a fair wind I will have “cool things” to show too…

Secondly, in January 2010 I’m helping on a 2-day workshop at Lancaster University on open source GIS. We did this last year, and it was well received, so it’s getting a reprisal. There’s a flyer here, and you can book here. For UK higher ed or other educational types, it’s pretty cheap if you ask me, and the food’s good too.

Hope you can make it to one or both of these.

I also did a talk last week to local government types, on how open source GIS could be viable within their organisation. The slides are up on slideshare if you’re interested!

I’m excited to announce that the list of papers and workshops for the first UK Open Source GIS conference is now available on the website. With Tyler Mitchell doing the keynote,  and a choice of 25 papers and 4 workshops, it’s going to be a really good day. We’re hoping to finish up with the first AGM of the UK local chapter of OSGeo too, so I hope you’ll join us!