Open Source Computing and GIS in the UK

Once in a while, Oxford Archaeology get called upon to do some really big archaeological projects, like road schemes and airport expansion, that cover huge areas, go on for years, and generate loads of data. We love these, because it’s not very often that you get to look at whole landscapes- how multiple prehistoric villages interact, for example, rather than tantalising snapshots where you have to play “join the dots”.

Not only do we generate loads of data (thousands of artefacts, records, environmental samples, photos etc), but we ask difficult questions of them, based on statistical analysis of finds distribution, travelling salesman algorithms, best-path analysis. I think you can call this “real GIS”, though often people are surprised to hear that archaeologists use GIS at all.

As part of our ongoing “open approach“, and to prove that we put our money where our mouth is, we are now trying to do all of this in open source software rather than using the “standard” proprietary packages.  I’ve blogged previously about how pleased I was with the integration between QGIS and PostgreSQL, and how easy it was to manage large amounts of data without regress to proprietary packages, well  our current large project needs 3D analysis and large amounts of imagery manipulation, and again we’re finding that the open source tools out there do the job splendidly. Furthermore, we have a choice of tools, so if one approach doesn’t quite work the way we expect or want, then we can choose another. Now that can’t be bad, can it?

So, in brief, we’re using Quantum GIS and GvSIG pretty much interchangeably for our desktop GIS. All the vector data is in PostgreSQL. We use the QGIS Grass plugin to get data into a sensible format for 3D display and analysis in Paraview and Visit. We’re mosaicing up aerial photos using GDAL tools, and using Geoserver to publish everything to people who just need read-only access, and a direct connection to PostgreSQL for those that need to edit. We’ve developed a workflow for creating high-quality cartographic output by exporting to Inkscape, and the next step is a project website with links to our database and a nice openlayers map. Simples!

… and… relax!

We’ve just completed a really intense GIS project covering the entirety of the North-West of England- which we’ve been working on since Christmas. This week is the first time I have come up for air since before Christmas, and it’s been really great! I’ve been working on integrating the new free Ordnance Survey data into our nascent SDI, and updating our sites map with new features, and new data from some of our other offices. It might not look like much, but there’s lots of open source goodness in there! My colleague Lucian, who knows much more about PostgreSQL than I do has put in a function that automatically updates this map when a new project is added to our archives database. Next steps- more data integration- with our grey literature server, and sites from our two French offices, and adding the raster mapping from the Ordnance Survey to our SDI.

Anyhow, it’s great to be back in the land of blogging- I hope to do a post soon on how to deal with this great new data now it’s available, and also to recap on the great OKCON 2010 conference that I went to at the weekend!

On Friday and Saturday I attended the inaugural WhereCampEU “un-conference” in London.  The short review: if one comes anywhere near you- go for it! It’s well worth it and I enjoyed every minute.

The slightly longer review: since there were no themes or papers organised beforehand, I guess it was a good opportunity to take the temperature of a certain part of the UK/EU geospatial community. So we got lots and lots of OpenStreetMap papers and iPhone apps! Don’t get me wrong, that’s not a bad thing, but personally, the papers that stood out for me were Steven Feldman’s talk on Business Models and how we are all f*cked without one, and, as always, Bob Barr’s talk on the true cost of “Free” data.  That particular talk was timely, coming just before the deadline for the consultation on freeing Ordnance Survey data.

On business models- Steven gave the talk twice due to popular request (one advantage to the un-conference format), and got remarkably different responses. The gist was whether you could come up with a one-minute elevator pitch on your business, your customers, and your prices. If you can’t do that, then you should be able to. There was quite a split in the audience.  On one hand there were people who are genuinely trying to make a business out of what they do- who have mortgages to pay, employees to pay, and kids to feed, who can see the point in a business model, and on the other hand there were people with well-paid day-jobs and a lucrative sideline in making iPhone apps who couldn’t see the point. That’s an over-generalisation, but I have work to do, so forgive me. I did start musing about doing a 140 character “tweet-pitch” too but maybe that’s just jumping on the bandwagon!

Overall, at the end of the two days I didn’t feel like I’d been at a conference, even though it was just as packed and even more fast-paced than usual. It was just more relaxing and informal, and the lack of corporate salesmen helped too! The venues were fantastic, as was the food, and the evening geo-beer was much appreciated. The team were keen to point out that next year’s “un-conference” (if it happens) should be somewhere else in Europe. At the time there weren’t that many takers, perhaps because there was a UK bias to the attendees, but I’m sure the enthusiasm and positive feedback will percolate around and we’ll get some volunteers.

After that I spent a couple of days being a tourist in London and catching up with old friends. As a test, I did my London navigation with a zoomable paper map, which I can say works very well and is pleasingly analogue (no batteries or data costs). Crikey though- who needs that many Starbucks, Costa and Caffe Neros?

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.