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.

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!

Not wanting to miss out on the whole discussion about data formats, I was surprised to see people give up their control of their data quite so easily, as this comment and following post seem to suggest that we should. Imagine if we ceded so much control to the other people that sell us products. Software companies are only glorified shopkeepers, in the same way that people who sell us televisions and cars are. However (if we have any sense) we don’t allow car salesmen to dictate where we drive, or television salesmen to dictate what we watch. We have allowed software vendors to lull us into believing that they are allowed to dictate what we do with our data. Sorry, but no. That’s what the open approach is all about- remaining in control of our data. At the risk of seeming overly dramatic, anything else is apathy.

The deadline for submitting a paper to the UK Open Source GIS conference approaches on the 15th March so get your abstracts in.  We now have a flier for you to print out and show your friends/boss/colleagues/relatives/pets. Tell the world, and even if you don’t fancy presenting, make a date for your diaries of the 22nd June 2009!

I started off this week with the intention of resurrecting and upgrading a demo openlayers map of all our sites, that had been stuck in a sorry corner of our corporate website being neglected. This tied in with moving the map to a different server, upgrading all the components, and generally giving it a shave and a haircut (it is male, that’s for certain). For those people interested in our wms and wfs data- these will be online again soon, I promise.

While I now have a site up again, pretty much ready to go bar the shouting, I’ve had an interesting time playing with some new toys in the process, so here’s a quick run-down:

• Mapfish and GeoadminSuite: A funky framework for widgetising openlayers. Geoadminsuite connects mapserver, openlayers and mapfish to manage data and create really nice mapfish applications. Way cool. Progress so far- it’s all up and running, though GeoadminSuite had teething troubles that have hopefully been sorted in the latest svn release.
• Openlayers: OK, so I’m just catching up with the latest release after ducking out for a while to do “real work”, but I have to say I like the new(er) features. It was nice to be able to do popups without needing to re-write the code for every version of every flavour of browser. That’s not openlayers’ fault of course, just issues with “standards” for things like DOM, which I don’t claim to understand.
• Openstreetmap WMS data from Wheregroup: Comes in free and paid-for flavours though details on pricing and terms of service for the commercial version were sketchy on a first skim of the website. This could be really handy to use as background mapping data for web maps, although there are issues of completeness (as always) and it probably needs running through our own mapserver to sort out the styling. This is definitely a goer- I just need to figure out which of the 50 or so layers they publish are really necessary and at what scale. And some kind of completeness metric, so we know how reliable the data is for a given area…
• Openstreetmap shapefiles from Cloudmade: A reduced dataset for the UK, with less layers. This might be a better option for us to use as we can control the styling better at the source. As a cheat, I’m going to load it all up in Quantum GIS, style it there, and use the mapserver export plugin to quickly build my map file.
• Mapnik: One of my colleagues would very much like us to create our own openstreetmap wms server, and use mapnik. I’d love to, as the cartography is really good, but after diving into it today, I have to say I think I need some hand holding before I can actually make it serve maps. We’ll see…

Also rans:

• Ordnance Survey have changed the licensing for their OpenSpace product: You still need a license to use their data, but you can download the development kit from sourceforge. The license has also been changed to have more “clarity” in terms of the ownership of derived data. It would be churlish to suggest that this has anything to do with the “Show Us a Better Way” mess up, wouldn’t it? The problem is, you still need to pay for the background data, so we’re back up to points 2 and 3 above…
• Amazon launches public datasets: This, in my limited experience, seems to be a duplication of ideas that are already out there. That’s fine when it’s software, and you want to stomp all over your rivals, but wouldn’t it have been nice for them to give their support to an existing data repository?

Things to play with next:

• Openaerialmap: Also has a wms service…