Computing, GIS and Archaeology in the UK

Well that’s the first official day of FOSS4G 2007 over and done with. A good time was had by all I believe. We kicked off with the opening sessions- of which the highlight for me was the lightning talks. Just like last year, Schuyler Earle managed to say more thought-provoking and interesting things in fifteen minutes than, well, most other people can. His talk was entitled “Latent Semantic Analysis of the FOSS4G 2007 Conference Programme”, which sounds dull as ditch water but succinctly highlighted the clusters and trends amongst the various talks at this year’s conference, dressed up in high end stats speak. 7-dimensional hyperspheres anyone? Of course Autodesk made their big announcement about the acquisition of Mentor and the planned open sourcing of their projection and transformation tools. I wish that meant more to me, but I don’t know much about it…

Paul Ramsey’s Survey of Open Source GIS was another look at the growing trends and developments in the discipline- I look forward to comparing it to last year’s for an overview of what has been going on. Sometimes at the coal face it’s difficult to see the wider picture after all. Following on the subject of trends was Brady Forrest from O’ Reilly Media, who was looking more specifically at trends in neogeography and the geoweb rather than all facets of geospatial software. Then it was my talk on Portable GIS, which I raced through like a train and kind of forgot to mention thatI haven’t actually got t hosted anywhere yet because the package is so big. That seemed to be reasonably well received- I got nice comments and questions anyhow, which is good enough for me, and now school’s out and I can enjoy the rest of the conference.

This afternoon I saw the sessions on Quantum GIS, OpenStreetmap and GDAL/OGR. Bizarrely, I found out that Nick Black, presenting on OpenStreetMap, worked for Oxford Archaeology North recently as a surveyor. It’s a weird thing in our office that people can work for us out on sites in other parts of the UK, and never visit the main offices! Concentrating on his talk though- I had seen Steve Coast talking about OpenStreetMap in the past and have always been a little ambivalent about their claims of greatness- but clearly it is taking off and gaining a lot more legitimacy. I still don’t get how this data can be reliable though. Not in the sense of whether there are mistakes- but how do you know how complete it is? The answer that Nick came back with was that you don’t know the Ordnance Survey dataset is complete, you just hope it is. But the thing I have a problem with is that the Ordnance Survey do at least have standardised survey practices and bench marks for reliability that should lead to relatively consistent data sets. When you are relying on a group of loosely organised individuals, how do you know that people have walked down every alley, tagged every road as a road and not a street or highway or track or path or motorway? If OpenStreetMap could explain that to me then I would be a big supporter of it. I am already keen on using the data in ArcMap with the new plugin, but I need some measure of reliability.

All of this afternoon’s talks were, on one level, to do with community participation- which seems to be the big theme this year. On a purely personal level, I certainly feel more part of the community as I’ve spent a year actually doing things and talking to people. I got to put faces to quite a few names today, which is always nice- though often the faces are nothing like I expect!

Finally I went on a long walk this evening around the Beacon Hill Park, Ogden Point and Fisherman’s Wharf- what a fantastic place! Photos follow shortly on Flickr, although again I must complain about the woeful lack of Otters and Seals…

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Oh- if you want a copy of my talk (but not the actual portable GIS yet) then you can find it here

Greetings from Victoria, on the day before the official commencement of FOSS4G 2007. I’ve actually been in Victoria since Friday, but William Gibson was right when he said that jetlag is like waiting for your soul to catch up with the rest of your body, as that’s exactly what I’ve felt like.

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So- in brief- the flight from the UK was superb- the weather was clear over Iceland and Greenland so I had fantastic views of both. That was stunning, and even if the rest of the trip was rubbish I would still be happy just with that view. Saturday and Sunday in Victoria were cool, I did the touristy things (Museums, Chinatown, the Harbour), which were all great, and can honestly say I’ve not met such friendly and helpful people anywhere, ever. On our host’s recommendation I visited Ogden Point on Sunday- the view was fantastic but I’m sorely disappointed in the lack of otters or seals frolicking in the inner breakwater as promised. You could tell the other delegates who’d caught up on their blogs by their bags though!

Today was workshop day- and both this morning’s and this afternoon’s sessions were really worthwhile. Paul Ramsey did an Intro to Postgis, which was exactly what I needed (though what I learnt means I need to go back and completely redo our databases…), and this afternoon was a run through on how to connect GRASS to a whole bunch of RDMS, which was also really interesting.

The first OSGEO AGM happened today- which was a chance for a run-down on what has been happening with the organisation over the year. Thinking back to Lausanne last year it’s incredible how far things have come since then. Everything seems so much more mature, organised, and stable. I presented a short breakdown of OSGEO-related UK activities, which doesn’t really amount to much at present in comparison to other countries, but ended with a call to arms for people to get involved, and I extend that to any blog readers.

All in all, this looks like shaping up to be a great conference in a great city!

Thanks to a fortuitous post from James Fee, I made a great leap forward with my portable GIS today, which is handy as my FOSS4G talk is number 10 in the list (2pm on the Tuesday, if you’re interested). I’m not going to give the game away as to exactly what’s on the stick (what would I talk about in September otherwise?) but I am at the stage of trying to streamline the configuration for all the programmes and putting a nice front-end on it.

That’s fun for two reasons:

1. I’ve used it as an excuse to buy a new laptop (is it bad to say that Vista is actually quite nice?)
2. I’ve never done anything with windows batch files before

All fun and games. My poor colleagues are in for a shock next week when I demand that not only do they go out and buy new USB sticks, but they spend their spare time after work testing my masterpiece

This is an idea that seems to come up every so often- what GIS programmes can you run from a USB stick. Well it appears that the list has just got longer. I’m probably the last person to realise it’s possible to do this, but I was really pleased to see that both GRASS and PostgreSQL can now be run from a USB stick, along with QGIS, XAMPP (inc Mapserver, OpenLayers, Tilecache), and FWTools.

Before I go any further, I should state that my aims for creating a portable GIS are not so much having a production GIS setup on a stick, because obviously performance and storage are an issue, but it might be useful for demonstration purposes, and I do feel as if the take up of these opensource tools might be more if they were easier to install and came in one handy package. So what I really want to achieve is a single portable package, probably a zip-file, that can be downloaded and unzipped onto a Window pc (they can learn about the joys of linux once we’ve won them over to the basic concept of opensource). No separate downloads, long installation and configuration processes, just a zip file. I do also like having portable packages on my main computer, as if it breaks it’s a lot easier to reconstruct the setup!

The light-bulb moment for me was when Leif told me that he had seen GRASS working on a USB stick using Msys at the recent CAA conference in Berlin. This intrigued me, so I looked into it and it works quite nicely- as long as you use the same drive letter to mount your USB stick to all the time. I still have to figure out how to figure out the drive letter and change the paths, probably in a batch file. Put simply, you download Mingw and Msys onto the stick, follow the instructions for downloading GRASS, edit the install_grass.bat file to change the drive letters, and off it goes.

PostgreSQL was something I had looked into a while ago, been told it wasn’t possible, and given up on. However, the recent 8.2 release appears to have dropped the requirement for a dedicated non-administrative user to run it. If you download the windows binaries, without the installer, you can set it up whilst logged on as the standard user. When you next run PostgreSQL from a different machine, you just have to use the same username as on your installation pc, regardless of whether that user exists on the pc that you are currently using. Once you have PostgreSQL installed, you can install Postgis into the same directory.

Currently there are a couple of gotchas. Most of these programmes require you to set environment variables, which might not be allowed on the particular pc that you are using, and require some command line experience. I still haven’t quite figured out how to get GRASS to work if I change the drive letter. Also, PostgreSQL does indeed run very slowly on a USB stick. And, I haven’t fully explored this to make sure there isn’t a hidden trap somewhere, or security holes that might be exploited. Having said that, if you want a package that can be unzipped onto a pc with a minimum of fuss then I think it’s almost there.

What’s next? Documentation, as always, and the permission of the various programmers that it’s OK to do this. Oh, and comments please, on what else we might include, or words of wisdom if you’ve already tried it.