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…

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

The Ordnance Survey’s shortsighted license agreement has put paid to the fantastic 3D Virtual model of London that the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at UCL has spent six years researching and creating. The full story of the negotiations can be found in this Guardian Article, but briefly speaking the Ordnance Survey’s refusal to change the terms of their license has meant that the data cannot be made freely available on the web, although it can be used by the London Boroughs.

The sticking point is that Google want to negotiate a fixed fee for the use of the data, rather than a pay-per-transaction policy, which is how services like Streetmap and Multimap license the data. The Ordnance Survey say that this would “wreck the level playing field for other partners”.

This seems wrong on a number of levels. Firstly, they are allowing the data to be used only by the people (ie the London Boroughs) that can afford to pay commercial rates, and disallowing the people (ie the rest of us) who can’t afford it. Secondly, by refusing to be flexible and working with organisations like Google, who are, let’s face it, pretty big in the world of mapping at the moment, they are missing the chance to become involved in this upsurge of interest in mapping and neogeography. They are missing the boat and, much as I hate to agree with this comment, in grave danger of becoming irrelevant (but not for the reasons that he suggests, IMHO).

Can you imagine how great it would be if you could have Ordnance Survey mapping in your google application?

The worst thing is, this opens the door for Microsoft, who are busy creating their own 3D models of cities using their own data. So the Ordnance Survey freeze out local innovation and research and let the biggest behemoth of them all claim the prize. How’s that for your “level playing field” then?

I’m in Southampton for the 2007 Computing Applications in Archaeology UK Chapter Conference. This is always a really interesting and often inspiring get together with a mix of commercial archaeologists such as myself and academic archaeologists (they normally have the best presentations).

There’s wifi available in my lovely salubrious Travelodge room, so I’ll aim to post some feedback on the first day’s talks tomorrow evening.
This post is also exciting for me, because I’m experimenting with the Geopress plugin for WordPress. I first heard about it a few weeks ago but on my train journey today I read Andrew Turner’s great O’Reilly Shortcut book on Neogeography and that convinced me to give it a go…

I have to say that I really enjoyed Andrew’s book. He manages to cover the spectrum of “Neogeography” from the very basic intro to some reasonably high-end ideas such as microformats in a consistently easy and pleasant style. I learnt a lot from it, and there were certainly a few things I’m going to try (Geopress is the first).

Anyhow, here goes with the map:

Back from Switzerland after the FOSS4G conference, and a weekend in Geneva. Whew! Geneva would perhaps have been more enjoyable if our hotel wasn’t on a street having an all-weekend party, complete with blaring music (Pink Floyd and Reggae mix one night, Slipknot or similar the next). Anyhow, we got about- went out to CERN and visited the United Nations, and even took in a little archaeology at St Peter’s Cathedral.

The end sessions of FOSS4G have been pretty well commented on elsewhere, and I don’t have much to add, except that I want to add my congratulations to Markus Neteler from GRASS for winning the Sol Katz award and to say that the whole conference was extremely interesting, inspiring and enjoyable.

I came across some great examples of what we perhaps have to call Neogeography today- from the beautiful and a little scary Information Aesthetics. They are all examples of using maps to display statistical information, and prove what all Geomatics-types know, which is that maps are a very effective way of getting statistical information across with maximum impact, and they can be visually attractive too.

Breathing Earth

Real Time Geographical Radio

Topix Forum Activity Map I particularly like this one as it has some similarities with the MapChat application that I blogged about from FOSS4G last week.