I have been musing all week over my response to some questions posted originally by James Fee and answered by Paul Ramsey and Jody Garnett.

The question has become one about the value of OSGeo as a brand- well personally I think the marketing aspects are really important. I’ve stood up and talked about open source GIS an awful lot recently, to a diverse range of people, trying to persuade them that it’s a viable choice for their business. Having OSGeo as an over-reaching network is really important, because it negates the common queries about where to go for support and how to tell if a project is sustainable. It’s a way of getting people to buy into the whole open source GIS concept and community, rather than using a particular programme that just happens to be free to download.

I do think that case studies and project support are incredibly valuable too, don’t get me wrong, but if we think OSGeo has a role in gaining new users for open source GIS, particularly in the business sector, then we need the brand and marketing too.

Part of my fabulous new plans for portable gis (which will be revealed soon-ish) involve including a database replication option. This might or might not work on the USB drive, but it needs to be open source, portable, and connect to postgresql at the very least. I have been looking at a couple of options for this, without a vast amount of success, it has to be said.

The packages that I have tried are: Daffodil Replicator, dbreplicator (a fork of daffodil replicator), Symmetric-DS, and db -connector for Funambol. Of these, daffodil and dbreplicator seem like the best bet as they will attempt to do some conflict resolution (eg when the same record is added/altered in both databases). They are also java-based, so should be nicely configurable. Symmetric-DS works well, but doesn’t do conflict resolution, so that kind of rules it out for me. I don’t really know about db-connector for funambol as the documentation that I found was quite out of date and I didn’t get very far with it.

So, daffodil replicator and dbreplicator…

They are quite easy to set up, although the documentation in both cases assumes rather more end-user knowledge than perhaps they should do. Basically you find an appropriate jdbc jar file for your database, grab log4j.jar from somewhere, and tell daffodilreplicator/dbreplicator where to find it, by setting appropriate paths in batch files. Then you start the publication server and set up the details for your “master” database, and then do the same for the subscription server and the “client” database. Both are clever enough to translate between different database types, such as postgresql and mysql, which in some cases would be really handy.

My difficulty with both flavours of the package came when creating the “subscription”, ie telling the client database where to go find the master database. In neither case have I been able to sucessfully set this up, because of various errors. Weirdly, both flavours of the package give me an error in my log file about the first ever subscription that I tried to set up, despite having reinstalled, deleted everything I could find, and started from scratch several times.

The documentation in both cases hasn’t been good enough to resolve my issues, and neither have the forums. Actually, I’m still waiting on dbreplicator, which seems to be a little more active, so I should give them the benefit of the doubt for a couple of days.

I can see a great need for this kind of setup, assuming I can get around these initial teething troubles. So, my question is, has anyone successfully set up any of these packages on windows (sorry, but it needs to be windows at this stage), or does anyone know of any other packages I should try?

If I do manage to get things sorted I’ll post a detailed how-to…

I mentioned a while back the cool competition that the government here in the UK were running, called “Show Us a Better Way“. The idea was that people could submit ideas for mashups with public information. Well, the contest appears to have been a great success- it closed at the end of September and the winners were announced earlier this month (no, my entry didn’t win, sob).

Not unsuprisingly, the winning entries all had a geospatial component to them, but their future is already in doubt due to some over-zealous big-stick-waving from dear old Ordnance Survey. In short, the OS are saying that no data derived from their products can be displayed on Google Maps, due to incompatibilities between their own Contractors license and that of Google. It’s OK though, because they can use OpenSpaces, OS’s own mapping product,  although that is not for high-volume use, and the OS will own any data that you plot on it. As Charles Arthur comments- the OS seem to be operating the opposite of a GPL license- everything they touch, they own.

For those that already don’t think this is all a bit ridiculous and, well, crappy, here’s the rub: the Show Us a Better Way competition was part-funded by the Department for Communities and Local Government, who the (publicly funded OS) have to report to!

So, this better way that they are supposed to be showing us, is already mired in complications and ridiculous licensing issues. Looks like we’ll have to crowd-source it then, as long as we promise never to read an atlas or look at another map again, just in case…

… According to Wordle:

(Thanks to Electric Archaeology for the link)

It makes you think actually. The prevalence of words like “posts” might suggest that I am often apologising for breaks in posting, and certainly I know several people called “Chris” that I might concievably mention. I should use the terms “archaeology” and “gis” more, though, and of course this post itself will influence the result in future!

I’ve been on holiday in Egypt for the last couple of weeks, hence the lack of posts. Sorry ’bout that, but I needed a total ban on computers, the internet, phones to regain my sanity. And what do you know, but two weeks away really did help!

Regular(ish) posting should return next week, once all the washing and unpacking is done!

A few teaser posts have appeared over the last few days about this new Firefox add-on called “Geode”, which promises to “understand location, enabling enriched, personalized, and localized content”. There has been a slightly muted reaction to this, possibly due to the fact that it’s supposed to be available today and yet there’s no sign of it in the labs. Some people think these features are now common-place and therefore not that exciting at all.

I disagree! Though with such a small amount of actual information about the add-on, it seems like it will make it easier for the common user (eg not the geospatial or computer geek) to ask questions like “find curry houses near me” or “give me directions to the cinema”. Imagine, if it was integrated with Ubiquity, how straightforward that would be? This comes closest to an unobtrusive location app for the desktop in the same way that we (well some of us anyway) now expect from our phone or ipod.

Being unable to attend FOSS4G this year, I freed up lots of space in my schedule to read the daily reports that would surely come streaming from my RSS reader. I’m still waiting. In previous years, there were a lot of posts about the conference, often posted during the conference itself. What was different about this year?

OK, so we know that Paul Ramsey was awarded the Sol Katz award (though why he should be surprised by that, I don’t know), and that Chris Schmidt posted a video of Schulyer’s lightning talk (actually Chris did put a few posts up), but other than that there has been very little posting. Not fair guys! Those of us that couldn’t go want to know what the big stories were! What were the trends? What was it like playing with the proprietary guys?

Here’s the google docs version of the talk I gave at the AGI Geocommunity 2008 conference. It’s more of a general discussion on the preconceptions and limiting factors in the uptake of open source GIS in the UK rather than a run down of what’s available.

Note that I’m hoping to put up a page with pdfs of all of my GIS-related talks pretty soon, so pop back for the downloadable version with notes…

All Points Blog pointed me at the direction of a piece on the mess of mapping and postcode data in Northern Ireland, which got me thinking a bit about this rush to rely on location-based services and always-on connections to “the cloud/interweb”.

At first glance, the situation in Ireland (National Mapping agency has copyright on maps, Post Office has copyright on property location) sounds very familiar. However, Ireland doesn’t have postcodes yet, so things are a not so cut and dried- in this day and age, if you had to go to an awful lot of trouble to implement a system for locating properties, would you invent the postcode system or something else?

What worries me though, is this assumption that the best solution is a technological one. Apparently LBS are the way forward, so much so that your Gran will know her position (in lat/long or a local coordinate system? not sure) the same way that she now knows her address. If she doesn’t remember it, then she can go to her mobile device or google maps and find it out. Clearly this writer is very lucky that he lives in an ultra-connected area with great GPS/phone signal, never has a powercut and has an entire family/social network of technologically adept people who won’t bat an eyelid at this.

It is only in the last 50 years that power of some kind has been laid on to every house in the UK, after many decades of trying. I think it’s dangerous to assume that ubiquitous computing will reach all areas and all social classes in a few years, and it’s also dangerous to assume that everyone will jump into it whole-heartedly to such an extent that you could rely on it totally for critical infrastructure like postal services.

OK, day two of the AGI conference. This started with three more excellent keynotes, from Charlie Pattinson of the Environment Agency, Charles Kenelly of ESRI and Stuart Haynes of the Defence Geographic Centre.

Charlie’s post was about flood risk management in a changing world. This begs a question posed initially by Steve Feldman in his opening speech as conference chair- are we shaping the world or being shaped by it? This is highlighted by the fact that people used to talk about flood defence, now we talk about management. it’s no longer possible to defend against floods, only mitigate the risk they cause. The 2007 Pitt review had some recommendations to make about GIS, amongst other things- though I find it quite odd that it takes a massive flood and an expensive review to tell them that they need to establish better methods of sharing data between organisations. We (in the UK) also have three separate initiatives all about sharing information in government- Inspire, the Athens Initiative, and the Location Strategy. Surely it would be better just to get on with it? I digress, however- it was a sobering and interesting talk that warned about complacency- most flooding last year was caused by the drainage system being overwhelmed, not by surface water. I certainly felt guilty as I always assumed I’d be fine living half way up a hill!

Charles Kennelly from ESRI UK talked about “GIS beyond barriers”. Most barriers to traditional GIS have now gone, but there are new barriers instead. These are things like the user interface, data sharing, and an understanding of data confidence and quality. Furthermore, GIS has become much more familiar to people, but is still seen as an addendum to most business processes rather than an integral part, and it must become more integrated to achieve it’s full potential.  As an example of how GIS should be integrated, Charles showed a case study from the Foresty Commission, which hid all the maps behind an outlook-like interface so as not to scare the accountants.

I was most impressed with the work of the Defense Geographic Centre, who provide all the mapping for the UK military operations in Afghanistan, for example. The rapid turn-around that they need, and the constant need to adapt to changing requests from “the theatre” were astounding. One example particularly struck me, about the need to provide detailed off-road contour information, classified into what was safe to drive on and what was not, because it is no longer safe to drive on the roads. Again, this shows that we as GIS specialists are being shaped by the world as much as we are shaping it.

So, to the controversial paper of the day. Mark Bishop of Mapinfo did a paper on “The Hype of Web 2.0″, which won best paper. It was possibly the least geographically-related, and a number of people have expressed suprise as to why it won. I liked it, but did feel that he glossed over some things that are actually fairly important in what we do. For a start, metadata and tagging are apparently one and the same and were invented by Tim O’Reilly. I totally disagree with this- they are really the antithesis of each other (but can be used together very well). Metadata is about data veracity and quality, and should (if done properly) be totally reliable. Tagging is about loose, flexible aggregations of data, and tells you nothing about how reliable your data is, or whether it’s fit for purpose.

I did agree with the way in which Mark applied the Web 2.0 paradigm to mapping. Priorities should be interoperability and useability, and only then additional features. Colleagues/customers and clients all have different expectations of mapping now because they have been exposed to the Google Effect. It’s important that we recognise that. I also like the notion of participation as opposed to publishing.

The final talk that I attended was from Nick Black, talking about Cloudmade and Openstreetmap. His thoughts on the changing business model that free data provides were really interesting- basically the value (monetary?) is pushed further up the train to the third-party applications and devices. He also made the very good point that maps are only useful if they are reliable. Now, to me that chimes slightly awkwardly with the openstreetmap approach (you don’t have a measure of completeness) but when I spoke to Nick afterwards he said the Cloudmade were looking at that sort of thing, which is very interesting indeed. He also pointed out that Cloudmade also have shapefile downloads of openstreetmap data, so I guess I’ll have to amend my post on that from a couple of days ago…

I missed most of the “Big Debate” in the afternoon so I can’t really add to the analysis that has been written elsewhere on the subject, although I can see where they are coming from. Any reservations that people have had though, have been related to general attitudes rather than to the conference itself,  so I guess the Debate has worked on one level because people have gone away to talk about it. Maybe next year attitudes will have changed!